The Psychopathology of online haters
Because seriously, even science says you are
As you may have noticed if you have been trough any of the other previous articles of the Pills of Psy, you may have noticed that I love studies about online behavior and personality. And today, we are talking about one of those. Fresh of review, today I have been reading “Are Online Haters Psychopaths ? Psychological Predictors of Online Hating Behavior”, a great paper by Sorokowski and colleagues.
What is online hatred?
In the first section of the article, we are introduced to online hatred, which is nowadays a very hot topic. Several researchers investigated the problem of internet mediated hate, and especially it’s relationship with emotion regulation, suicidal cases, and, as the authors pointed out, even in relationship with the assassination of public figures. They even referenced an article that I personally love from Bay and colleagues, that explains how online hate led to the cancellation or flops at the box offices of Hollywood movies (spoiler: it’s about Star Wars).
Online hating is a special form of hate speech. While the latter is, in fact, the expression of a disparaging opinion about a very specific group, online hate may be derogatory without referencing to any group, or without undermining the social position of the target individual(s).
“How can such a loser earn so much money!?” (An example of hate comment presented in the article)
But who are online haters?
Previous works reported the existence of gender differences in online behavior, and especially in online hate. And while multiple attempts have been made to identify a correlation between different psychological traits and online hate behavior, a clear profile of the online hater is still not available.
In this current work, the authors tried to investigate the psychological profile of online haters, and especially whether their behavior is associated with particular traits of the Dark Triad, life satisfaction, frustration, or enviousness.
Olympic games and online hate
The present study focuses on the 2018’s Olympic games. The authors investigated the online behavior of Polish participants, especially in relationship with the comments they left on social media under news of the games.
“She discredits our country and does it for taxpayers’ money, give me my money back!,” (An example of hate comment presented in the article)
Participants (N = 94) when then divided into haters (N = 46) and non-haters (N = 48) , and their scores on the different scales were analyzed accordingly.
Are online haters psychopaths?
If you made it so far, it’s time to know whether online haters are really psychopaths. What the authors discovered is a relationship between online hate behavior and high scores on the Psychopathy scale on the Dark Triad scale. As written in the article, this is not surprising, given that the Psychopathy trait is associated with thrill-seeking behavior and impulsivity. The latter especially may be the trigger toward expressing negative, insulting attitudes toward the others. Additionally, a weak positive correlation has been found between hating comments and enviousness, but the latter was not found to be associated with any trait of the Dark Triad.
Online hate was instead not associated with Macchiavellianism or Narcissism, which were instead found to be correlated with cyber-bullism and trolling behaviors. Moreover, in this study no correlation were found between frustration levels, life’s satisfaction and hating comment, while similar correlations were present in previous studies.
To sum up, are online hater psychopaths? Yes, the current study reveals a relationship between online hating behavior and psychopathology traits, with the given limitations in terms of participants (only a small group of Polish individuals) and context (only comments on the Olympic games).
I hope you liked this article. If you did, please leave us a clap, while if you have any comments let us know below the article. Thank you for reading it so far, and we can’t wait to see you again for the next Pills of Psy.
Reference
Sorokowski, P., Kowal, M., & Oleszkiewicz, A. (2020). Are online haters psychopaths? Psychological predictors of online hating behavior. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 553.
