What drives a person to attack others, to act like a troll on social media?Why are there people with this negative and painful disposition who find their raison d’etion on the Internet?There are people who know that their comments are direct attacks, but who still write them down because they find it fun to do so.
A research team from the Faculty of Health Sciences and Psychology at the Australian University of Mount Helen conducted a study that analyzed the personality traits of this type of user: the troll on social media.
- Scientists looked for special social characteristics and abilities in men and women with this behavior and found that the trolls in the study scored much higher than others in two important traits: psychopathy and empathy.
- Cognitive.
- Let’s see what these two troll tracks say next.
Psychopathy is an antisocial personality disorder. The term is no longer used in the clinical environment and is beginning to be replaced by ‘sociopathy’.
The origin of this personality disorder is not yet clear, it seems to have a genetic component that could be expressed due to a lack of environmental affection in childhood Assumptions related to certain brain alterations of the frontal lobe, caused by malformations, diseases or the head. trauma, they are also developing.
Dr. Robert Hare has conducted research in the field of psychopathy for more than three decades and has brought together a number of common characteristics that define people with psychopathy.
They are people who tend to get bored, need a constant stimulus and do not have the ability to set long-term goals, are manipulative and want to feel empowered and have control over others, they have many narcissistic traits.
They have a severe lack of impulse control and react with anger. They have trouble adapting to social and moral norms, although many cases show a false social adaptation with a very superficial personal charm.
They consider them of great value. Inflicting pain on others gives pleasure, it is a disorder that occurs in both men and women, although statistically it is more common in men, who also seem to lack empathy, but not quite. Now we’ll see why.
Emotional empathy and cognitive empathy are related but distinct cognitive processes, involve the activation of different brain areas, there are psychometric tests that measure each type of empathy, such as the Basic Empathy Scale (BES), which are very effective at evaluating the type of empathy. and levels of empathy in individuals.
In turn, emotional empathy is divided into
Both affect the amygdala, the emotional center of the brain. There’s talk of “warm” empathy. The troll on social media completely lacks this kind of empathy.
There is also a “cold” empathy, known as cognitive empathy, which is not as popular. This is the kind of empathy that social media trolls have at high levels. Cognitive empathy (sometimes called perspective) is the person’s ability to know how the other person feels, but without the emotional component.
In other words, the person does not feel the suffering of others, on the contrary, it is through this kind of empathy that the social media troll is able to predict and recognize the emotional suffering of his victims, and uses it to cause as much suffering as possible. It affects two regions of the brain, the prefrontal cortex and the posterior parietal cortex, both involved in reasoning and decision-making.
These two traits, combined in the same person, constitute explosive potential, the truth is that the social media troll is a person full of poison, poison that must be introduced into others, sustained in anonymity so as not to drown. on several occasions, it succeeds.
Other similar studies have concluded that certain topics especially attract the social media troll, who in many cases do not even read posts or do so by reinterpreting their content in the sense that they are interested.
There are still no studies that tell us how to stop this phenomenon, although not responding to its attacks seems to be the best way to prevent its undesirable behavior from becoming stronger.