Andy, are you a sociopath?
from 1215 participants only 5.6 percent admitted that Internet trolling was their favorite activity;
although they possess rather negative traits, trolls are extroverts;
they truly enjoy making others upset and see it as a form of entertainment;
The researchers were looking for particular traits including social skills, psychopathy, sadism, and two types of empathy: affective and cognitive. Having high cognitive empathy simply means they can understand others’ emotions. Having high affective empathy means a person can experience, internalize, and respond to those emotions. The “trolls” in the study scored higher than average on two traits: psychopathy and cognitive empathy.
So even though “trolls” exhibit one kind of empathy, coupling it with psychopathy ultimately makes them nasty, the researchers suggested. Psychopathy, which includes a lack of care for others’ feelings, was measured using a scale where participants were asked to agree or disagree with a set of statements such as, “payback needs to be quick and nasty.”
High levels of cognitive empathy make these people adept at recognizing what will upset someone, and knowing when they’ve pushed the right buttons. The lack of affective empathy allows trolls not to experience or internalize the emotional experience of their victims.
“Results indicate that when high on trait psychopathy, trolls employ an empathic strategy of predicting and recognising the emotional suffering of their victims, while abstaining from the experience of these negative emotions,” the researchers wrote. They added that because psychopathy is associated with thrill-seeking and impulsivity, it’s possible that “creating mayhem online is a central motivator to troll.” They also found that trolls were likely to be high in sadism—the will to hurt others—and were more likely to be male.
In previous research, people who display psychopathic traits have shown a similar empathy imbalance: a lack affective empathy but normal levels of cognitive empathy.
Exploring the link between psychopathy, high cognitive empathy, and trolling could help deepen our understanding of the personality types that gravitate towards that behavior, and potentially help to stop them.
Another study showed that Internet trolls tend to have unusually high expectations of what it means to be successful. The standard is so high that trolls themselves fail to achieve it. When they see someone who is successful despite being below this standard, they tend to resent them and feel tempted to bully them (2013).
In all cases, their ultimate goal is to confuse and upset others. The more emotional and upset you get, the happier they become. This is the reason why the best way of dealing with trolls is to ignore them.
