Why Are We So Mean Online? The Online Disinhibition Effect and What To Do About It
I Know You Are But What Am I?
We’ve all seen it happen. A seemingly peaceful online chat turns into an abusive row. Or a measured blog post spurs an avalanche of mean, nasty comments. Maybe you know one of the perpetrators: those seemingly nice people who are mean and aggressive online. Maybe you’ve been the object of an angry online post.
We’ve probably all done it, to some extent, said something meaner online than we would say to someone in person, written a crueler review, hurled a worse insult than we’d say face to face, human to human. That’s because of what’s known as the online disinhibition effect, where people “act out more frequently or intensely than they would in person”.
The term “online disinhibition effect” describes the tendency for generally nice people to engage in meaner and more aggressive behavior online. Psychologist John Suler coined the term “toxic disinhibition,” to describe online behaviors, including:
using rude and threatening language
making mean comments
flaming (acting out to damage another's or one's own image)
trolling (malicious online behavior, intended to aggravate, annoy or disrupt others)
Online disinhibition, online hatred, and toxic disinhibition have become increasingly common since John Suler first observed the phenomenon in 2004.
Zones of Freeform Hate
Countless studies show we are meaner, nastier, angrier, more aggressive, and express more hatred online than IRL (in real life). British psychoanalyst Josh Cohen, author of All the Rage: Why Anger Drives the World, believes anger “feels like the defining color and tone of our daily social and political lives.”
It’s bad in the real world, and it’s worse online. Cohen views X, formerly known as Twitter, and many other social media outlets as forums of intense anger and online hatred. Cohen says, “[t]he trolling, shaming and piling on show it as a zone of freeform hate.”
Anonymous Versus Face to Face
A segment on the Netflix show “Brainchild” illustrates the toxic online disinhibition effect, which is enhanced by anonymity, lack of eye contact, and invisibility. Two groups of volunteers were asked to rate a singer’s video performance. Half were told they might have to read their comments aloud to the singer. Group 1 gave ratings of 4 and 5 and made civil, even kind comments in discussing the singer:
“She could sing. It’s just that she didn’t know how to—”
“I’m gonna be nice. I’m gonna give her a 4.”
The second group was assured their comments would remain anonymous. They rated her a 2. In discussing the singer, they made fun of her and laughed at her, saying:
“You should seek professional help.”
“You just suck. You sound like garbage.”
How the raters described and rated the singer depended on whether they thought they were anonymous. When (surprise!) Group 2 has to read their feedback to the singer, they are gentler in person. Two of them say, “I’m sorry.” One says, “You could be really good,” and later admits, “I wanted to be nice.”
So why don’t we? Want to be nice when we’re online?
Factors Contributing to Online Disinhibition and Meanness
It’s a perfect storm. We’re angry, the world seems crueler, harsher than it used to. Online, anger manifests as aggression, relatively unheeded and unchecked and spread exponentially, instantly. Outrage culture is:
“our collective tendency to react, often with intense negativity, to developments around us”
What’s worse, this online meanness is confirmed, exacerbated, and amplified by other angry people as well as bots, algorithms, and the AI behind social media and other online vehicles. AI software whose job it is to make these forums more popular — not more polite. The meek may be blessed, but in what’s known as “the confrontation effect”, the angry and outraged are the key to “sticky,” popular, profitable social media platforms.
No one is free from anger, and there’s a lot of it around. Most of us agree with Aristotle that anybody can become angry. Freud believed anger is an instinct, wrapped inside our DNA, and civilization an attempt to contain our aggressive drives by imposing societal rules. In Freudian terms, then, the online world has fewer rules, fewer constraining elements, like school, face-to-face interactions, community, and family, to keep anger at bay, to manage and maintain peaceful coexistence. In fact, the converse is true: the online world and its norms and algorithms encourage anger, hatred, and conflict.
No one gets physically harmed online. Which is not to say that online words or actions aren’t emotionally painful or abusive. Quite the contrary; online bullying has led to physical violence, hate crimes, and suicides. The online world isn’t safe, but it’s usually safe for the anonymous, invisible person saying the mean things. The victims may suffer, but generally no overt harm comes to the “keyboard warriors” spewing vile and malice.
Anger abounds.
Anger Zones, Biases, and Erosion of Social Trust
The internet, social media, and AI haven’t been around for long, so the keyboard warrior, toxic online dishinhibition effect, outrage culture, and social media algorithms are a fairly recent phenomenon that we’re still trying to figure out. However, some theories have explored the reasons toxic online disinhibition occurs.
First, we feel more comfortable venting, talking about controversial subjects, or just being mean, online. So, we do it. To be fair, feeling less guarded online can create the opposite effect as well. People can be much kinder on the internet, more compassionate, and more likely to open up about intimate struggles and thoughts. This is known as “benign online disinhibition.”
Online activity is generally instant and often anonymous. We don’t think long and hard about what we’re going to say, as we might in real life, talking to someone we know.
All of this is exacerbated by a bunch of biases. For example, most of us think the world was a kinder, nicer place at some point in the past, which plays into our outrage. It’s an illusion, or psychological bias, but this belief is prevalent and persistent.
Social psychologist Adam Mastroianni, author of “The Illusion of Moral Decline” conducted a study that shows just about everyone thinks the world became a worse place around 20 years after they were born. (With an added uptick in “bad” according to parents, right around the time their kids were born).
Disconnection has increased, bringing with it a corresponding decline of social trust. We’re seeing widespread loneliness and the erosion of community life, which the Covid pandemic worsened. Fewer people know their neighbors and more people feel a lack of connection to community organizations. So, we’re just asking for trouble in going online, Freud would doubtless say, where we can let our anger instinct loose, without civilization and norms to restrain us.
Technological “Progress” Exacerbates the Problem
Technology makes it worse. From commerce to conversation, our online lives are shaped by AI, algorithms, and machine learning. Ranking algorithms like the ones that power Facebook, TikTok, and other social media platforms prioritize engagement, and, to that end, show us posts that are controversial.
Similarly, affinity analysis shows us products we’ll like or posts that will engage (or enrage) us. These algorithms manipulate online forums and seek not to make things more peaceful (bo-ring) but more volatile (cha-ching). There are bots whose purpose is to incite anger. Bully bots, whose online purpose is to inflame online chatboards, to fuel the fires of nastiness and dissent. (Think bots are not so prevalent? Think again. According to Security magazine, Bots accounted for 47.4% of all internet traffic in 2022.)
Worlds Apart video from Heineken shows how people with opposing views can find common ground.
Finding A Better Way
Yeah, I’m looking at you, tech. You’re like the drunk in the bar, who spurs the guy to take a swing, muttering, “he said something about your mother.” Whether you are specifically designed to do it or not, you bots and AI-based manipulators — you stir things up, you fuel the aggressors.
But hang on, what about those people who calm other people down? That gentle man or woman in the bar who cools flaring tempers, the person who invites combatants to communicate, talk it out, respect each other? Maybe that’s all of us, the online onlookers, with our rectitude on mute. Maybe we need to get more involved to get discussions back on track — more civil, more kind. Common ground can unite people, and there’s a lot of common ground, isn’t there?
Maybe we all need to act online as if we are in person, with a few groundrules, to find that common ground. Heineken made a series of ads about it, their “Worlds Apart” series, pitting, for example, climate change deniers against environmental activists. The ads ask: Is there more that unites us than divides us? And the answer seems to be: yes. With a few tricks and ground-rules, people in real life, even people on opposite sides of a debate, manage to have civil, often meaningful, conversations.
Guardrails, Guides and Personal Growth
There’s Power In The Pause
Maybe we need to think first, take a minute, before we spew online. Like Thomas Jefferson who suggests counting to ten (or is it a hundred?) before saying something nasty. A lot of managers and life/business coaches suggest we write that nasty email to our boss, friend, partner, but read it over first, sit on it, leave it in the outbox overnight, or send it to ourselves and read it as if it’s directed at us, before we hit send.
Maybe we should do the same thing online. Count to a hundred, call a friend, send the post to yourself to review, or jot it down in a journal first.
Better Laws and Regulations
Could better AI be a guardrail, or act like that wise couples’ therapist, keeping people in-line with a benevolent comment, and possibly even warning people they’ll get kicked out (and kicking them out)? Yes, theoretically.
Policies and laws can help. For example, both the US and UK have recently joined together to create laws and policies to keep children safe online, while the EU has introduced rules to prevent the spread of disinformation and fake news. We can make laws to regulate AI — and police the Internet better.
Of course, it’s always dicey to implement guardrails retroactively, but it’s a whole lot better than doing nothing. We can be proactive — we can go deeper, build better software and create better laws and awareness.
Friendly AI Could Help
“Friendly AI” builds programs that are compatible with human values, to benefit humanity and do no harm. In other words, we train the machines to make us play nice. All of the above may make social media vehicles less “exciting” and potentially less popular. But is that a bad thing?
What if we hunt the bots that fuel the flames of anger – and silence them? What if we go with “Friendly AI” and retrain the systems that manage our online discussions to impose anti-aggression guardrails?
Sure, there may be less traffic on that social media site, but the posts will be nicer, less aggressive, more like things people say in real life, maybe even better versions of our raging offline selves. Of course, we’ll have to convince the builders, big tech and social media outfits. For the most part, the companies that build the online arenas where we communicate and vent are built for profit, not peace.
Use Your Anger
Finally, we can understand, even use, our anger. Treat the cause, not the symptom, by going deeper than online or offline — by going within. Les Carter, psychologist and author of the bestseller The Anger Trap: Free Yourself From the Frustrations that Sabotage Your Life, sees anger as a complex emotion and angry people as “hurting, fragile people” who “wish to preserve personal worth, perceived needs, and heartfelt convictions.”
If we understand our anger, Carter preaches, we can make sense of it, approach it constructively, and use it to understand ourselves. Once we do that, we’ll be more in control — and less prone to aggressive outbursts online or offline.
Josh Cohen also believes anger can be used for good, but warns it ain’t easy. If anger is to foster love or spur growth, according to Cohen, we need to embrace rather than deny our own vulnerability and self-doubt.
Can we learn not only to live with anger but to use it for some good? Can we make rage usable? Let’s hope so.
