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Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

unherd.com

71–80 of 233 posts

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#71

Trolls create anger and conflict and conflict drives engagement. But that is as nothing compared to the engagement you get from public spectacles of righteous indignation. Social media breeds a special sort narcissistic positive feedback loop and it turns out a very small amount of validation is all that is required to set people off. But trolls usually know they're trolls. On the other hand take for example Twitter…

To say it succinctly...

Psychopaths like psychopaths.

https://www.psypost.org/2018/10/study-psychopaths-are-attrac...

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#72
post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I like your point, but I think you take it too far here: > if there are never any negative indicators that you are the problem, rather than everyone else… there is a mathematically insignificant chance you will ever realize something might be wrong A lot of my self-improvement has come not because of explicit negative feedback, but through paying attention to people and reflecting on who I want to be in the world. Th…

What you may not realize is, some people literally don't know how to do that, or that it's even something anyone would ever do. If you dropped into an alien culture, you'd need to learn a new raft of different signals all over again.

A lot of the bad in the world comes from leaving people unequipped of certain basic "soft skills". It's not the same thing as mental illness, but it has similar effects.

And, for some reason, people become seemingly completely unwilling to learn-by-example any new-to-them soft skills, once they reach adulthood.

Or perhaps "lifelong learning of soft skills" is itself a soft skill that people aren't being taught.

-----

Anecdote: I was diagnosed/treated for ADHD as an adult, whereupon the "social soft skills" part of my brain suddenly started working like it never did through my childhood.

I went from thinking I was on the autistic spectrum, to noticing all sorts of new patterns while observing social interactions. I quickly realized that my capacity for social-skill learning had never been missing; but rather, the learning itself had just sort of been "paused", for lack of "voltage" in the right brain areas.

I did / am still doing a lot of delayed soft-skill learning as an adult. And it's really starkly obvious how much other people with me in the same situations, aren't deriving the same learning I do from those situations — even when those people are sorely lacking in the relevant social skill, but aren't otherwise socially unskilled. It seems like they just aren't bothering to look at the situation under the right "lens" to see the pattern, even though it's a "lens" they clearly possess.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#73
An even larger number proportion is people being assholes because they can…just like offline bad behavior.

Mental illness reduces culpability.

Attributing most bad behavior to mental illness excuses it. It treats Twitter trolls as if they have no agenda.

But Twitter is what we celebrated in the Arab Spring. An effective propaganda platform. That’s how trolls use it…to promote ideologies. That’s why the article leads with LGBT hotness; to define the victim perpetrator roles.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#75
post #25

I"m glad to see this point made: > I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them. One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happen…

Yes, there's a feedback loop, same as with alcoholism. It's nice and good to consider alcoholism a disease, but there's a point where the not yet completely dependent person should say "It's not even 4 o'clock yet and there's no social reason, what am I doing with this can of beer?"

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#76
post #25

I"m glad to see this point made: > I’m not saying that all online bad behaviour is because of mental health issues or personality disorders: lots of people are just dickheads, and there’s no need to pathologise them. One of the important lessons I took away from a milestone book on abuse, "Why Does He Do That?" is that people really want to excuse harmful behaviors as illness. When often, repeated bad behavior happen…

I’d like to second “Why Does He Do That?”. Pointing out that abusive husbands often only break their wives’ stuff was a real eye opener for me in examining other people who harm others or lash out and then claim that they weren’t in control. If they don’t ever harm their own things or lash out at themselves then they’re not as out of control as they claim…

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#77

[flagged]

Just because you can't identify what's going wrong to make someone's car have unresponsive steering (the etiology), doesn't mean you can't precisely identify the car as having unresponsive steering (the symptoms.)

Psychology is just fine at recognizing symptoms (and complexes of symptoms that go together, a.k.a. "syndromes") — and also very good at treating symptoms/syndromes, such that they go away.

Often, an understanding of the etiology isn't involved, but also isn't needed, because it's the symptoms/syndrome that are the problem, and the underlying pathology is otherwise benign. There're very few psychological diseases that have an organic origin, where treating the symptoms but not the disease will lead to the disease progressing and killing you. And those diseases get treated carefully and separately, with workflows that get you referred on any sign of such diseases to a neurologist.

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#78
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So I search google for "undherd Richard Dawkins", first link: https://unherd.com/2021/04/why-the-atheists-turned-on-richar... "Why the atheists turned on Dawkins - They care more about social justice than whether or not God exists" Written by: Ben Sixsmith is an English writer living in Poland. He has written for Quillette, Areo, The Catholic Herald....

Yet at the same time, there is this [0] posted by a higher-ranking staff member. That you have found an article written by a contributor who has also written for a Catholic publication does not served as proof of your claim in the GP that UnHerd was founded to push “extremist Christian propaganda” – the whole point of UnHerd is that it draws on writers from a range of ideological outlooks. And FWIW, the idea mentione…

> the whole point of UnHerd is that it is includes people from a range of ideological outlooks.

You keep saying that. Let's like at some random headlines from their "contributors" page:

> Ideology should not trump children’s health (anti-trans)

> France’s mega-mosque problem

> The emptiness of ‘British values’

> The death of American patriotism

> The problem with male feminists

> Universities have destroyed feminism

> Can Labour be saved from the hard Left?

> Labour isn’t working

> Why liberals are scared of football

> Is Labour dead?

> America attracts the wrong immigrants

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#79
post #15

I don't buy it. I think there is simple statistical/neurological explanation. Part 1: We are exposed to much more information and interaction that we have evolved for. Our brains have very biased/impractical approach to understanding the world: if you hear about something happening many times in large number then it automatically gives large weight to it and treats it as normal/prevalent/dangerous etc. This is also w…

This is an interesting idea, feel free to ignore this comment :)

Re: Disproportionate amount of bad online behaviour stems from psychological issues

#80
Interesting discussion, but on second thought I’m not sure what to make of it. Personality is a continuum and personality disorders are not clearly defined illnesses, like the flu or Parkinson’s. They are just areas of the continuum that are deemed troublesome for the person or their surroundings. One of the diagnostic criteria for BPD is “Inappropriate, intense anger or difficulty controlling anger”. So saying that people with BPD are overrepresented among people who display anger online is a bit like saying red cars are overrepresented among red objects. Yes they are, by definition.
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