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Part of what makes online comments so wild is the disconnect between the commenter’s identity and what they are saying, a phenomenon that the psychologist John Suler memorably termed the “online disinhibition effect.”
The theory is that the moment you shed your identity the usual constraints on your behavior go, too—or, to reiterate a 1993 Peter Steiner cartoon, on the Internet, nobody knows you’re not a dog.
When Arthur Santana, a communications professor at the University of Houston, analyzed nine hundred randomly chosen comments on articles about immigration, half from newspapers that allowed anonymous postings, such as the Los Angeles Times and the Houston Chronicle, and half from ones that didn’t, including USA Today and the Wall Street Journal, he discovered that anonymity made a perceptible difference: 53% percent of anonymous commenters were uncivil, as opposed to 29% percent of registered, non-anonymous commenters. Therefore, Santana concluded that anonymity encourages incivility.
However, as Maria Konnikova, the author of Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, pointed out, anonymity has also been shown to encourage participation.
"By promoting a greater sense of community identity, users don’t have to worry about standing out individually. Anonymity can also boost a certain kind of creative thinking and lead to improvements in problem-solving," Konnikova wrote, pointing out a study by psychologists Ina Blau and Avner Caspi, who analyzed student learning and found that, while face-to-face interactions tended to provide greater satisfaction, in anonymous settings participation and risk-taking flourished.
As psychologists Marco Yzer and Brian Southwell said, new communication technologies do not fundamentally alter the theoretical bounds of human interaction; such interaction continues to be governed by basic human tendencies.
"Whether online, on the phone, by telegraph, or in person, we are governed by the same basic principles," Konnikova added. "The medium may change, but people do not. The question instead is whether the outliers, the trolls and the flamers, will hold outsized influence—and the answer seems to be that, even protected by the shade of anonymity, a dog will often make himself known with a stray, accidental bark. Then, hopefully, he will be treated accordingly." Plus, various subreddits have proven time and time again that even anonymous forums can self-regulate quite efficiently, so maybe it's not all bad after all.
