Cyber-disinhibition - Do (young) people who flame repeatedly tend to become friendless in real life too?

from personal experience i am actually angrier with people face to face than on the Internet. There is no point getting that angry on the Internet, because the physical attack that often results from real life confrontation isn’t possible, so there is no satisfactory or natural conclusion, merely frustration.

@mammal – But what about people – unlike you – who do get angry on the Internet? What consequences does their behavior have?

@mattbrowne all anger has a consequence, usually negative, it has a nasty habit of clouding people’s judgement, and an even nastier habit of spreading like wildfire, it is very contagious, and anti-social. But the point is surely, what is causing such anger?

Emotional immaturity has no age specific boundary lines.

High emotionality and reactivity is ‘normal’ for an under developed psyche in many younger people.

Whats worse by far is the ‘adult’ that has no control over their aggressive egoic impulses.

Yes, certainly not the path of ‘how to win friends and influence people.’

Most of these situations are the result of poor self esteem which equals extreme hyper-sensitivity to anything perceived as a criticism and lends itself to angry outbursts to protect a fragile ego.

As always, once you see a ‘pattern’ of behavior in another it then becomes OUR choice to engage or not engage.

Trying to reason with the highly defended is an exercise in futility.

@Coloma i get pretty angry and i don’t think it has much to do with low self esteem, or egocentric behaviour, it comes about by interacting with people who do seem to exhibit egocentric behaviour. You can’t just bracket all anger as some kind of immature tantrum.

Goleman points out that there is a difference between pre-web people and digital natives. The first group had a chance to learn how to use the inhibition brain systems that keep our more unruly urges in check. So there might be a higher risk for young people.

This university professor says that it is the computer itself that causes what he calls “regression” into flaming behavior.

” But what lures us into this regression?

The simplest answer is, the computer itself. In this pseudo-physicality, men easily get into mine-is-bigger- than-yours games. My hard disk, my chip, my screen is bigger or faster or newer or more powerful.(Kantrowitz 1994, Turkle 1984). In psychoanalytic terms, men’s fantasies about computers are “phallic.” In this context, “flaming” is a bit like giving other drivers the finger from inside a car.”

@mammal

No one is perfectly immune to an angry moment.
Many things factor in.
Stress, health, rest, the body/mind connection.

But, getting your panties in a wad over others egocentric attitudes IS still EGO. lol

Not everyone that experiences a moment of anger has low self esteem, but…the more fragile ones ego is, the more ‘need’ to defend.
To be ‘right’, protect one’s shaky sense of self that believes it needs it’s perceptions to be agreed with rather than simply acknowledging it would be nice, but not necessary.

A truly healthy psyche is at peace with others perceptions even if it recognizes them to be askew. It feels no need to argue or defend.

If there is truth in anothers perceptions it is embraced open mindedly, if not, it is dismissed, without defense, as not true, and therefore, harmless.

The desire to make another ‘wrong’ so one can be ‘right’ is indicative of an ego that still needs to be broken.

Few of us will attain this perfect ‘enlightenment’ but…self awareness is where it all begins.

It all comes down to the mantra of ’ what do you really want? to be right or to be HAPPY! ’

If one chooses ‘right’ over happy, yep, they are setting themsleves up for a lonely existence, but hey, you’re RIGHT!

Maybe this is where…” It’s lonely at the top” comes from.haha

That makes little sense to me.

I may be a bad example here as my face-to-face social skills are inhibited by some cerebral wiring issues, but I feel that the computer is nothing more than a loud mouth capable of speaking to large groups of people in diverse geographical locations. In that respect, it really isn’t much different from a telephone to me, except for the number of listeners.

Personally, I speak what I think whether online or off. I swear at and demean people face-to-face as well, if I feel it’s warranted. I will flame people to their face. I never really had much in the way of inhibitions and that was true before the internet hit the mainstream.

What I can’t help but wonder here is whether there is a link to the rising rates in Autism amongst our youth. I mean, not all Autistic people are trapped inside their own head; there are quite a few (especially the milder cases and (especially) Aspies) online, and there are plenty of young people online who have perfectly normal inhibitory systems for their age, so I have to wonder.

Also, people are generally less concerned with the feelings of others period; there is an increasing loss of empathy in our society across all age groups, even those who didn’t grow up with and/or don’t currently use computers.

I don’t think it’s a cyber-issue.

No. Flames of a feather flock together.

you have to have someone giggling over your should while you type the shit

That’s a whole lot of big vocabulary and funny sounding phrases – where is the evidence to back up claims such as these about these brain circuits and impulse controls. Sounds like a lot of big air, to me.

We’d have to ask the mods about the people who get kicked out for flaming. Do they tend to be younger? Does the same thing happen to them in real life?

It’s a nearly impossible thesis to verify, I think. How would you gather the data to test it?

The only way to discuss this is theoretically, throwing together some knowledge about human psychology, human brain architecture, and the way people interact on the internet.

I don’t know who flamers are. The mods do such a good job here that I have almost never seen any flamers. Usually they didn’t bother me anyway, because I know that people who call each other names aren’t serious people.

If people have poor social skills online, does that mean they’ll have poor social skills in real life? I wouldn’t be surprised. Probably people exhibit similar behavior no matter what medium they are using. If people are going to be immature, that’s the way they’ll be until they learn otherwise.

@wundayatta Most of the people I know are like me in that the only difference between their online persona and their actual personality is the medium of communication. They are just as weird, arrogant, immature, misanthropic, or what-have-you either way.

Perhaps I am the exception that proves the rule. I am so even-keeled nice online, But in real life I’m the boss from hell. The only friends I have are the ones shackled to my bedpost. I’ve been living in the sticks because I’ve been thrown out of so many cities, it ain’t funny. My (former) neighbors have put a price on my head. A price in the six figures.

But here, I’m as mild mannered and boring as a person could be. So let that be a lesson to you! ;-)

@Simone_De_Beauvoir – Edge is about the edge. It’s about ideas, speculation, controversies and so forth. Killing it with powerful vocabulary like ‘lot of big air’ means killing scientific thinking and discourse altogether. No offense, but you’re sounding like Bishop Samuel Wilberforce mocking evolution during the famous Huxley-Wilberforce debate in 1860.

To me it’s perfectly legitimate to ask ‘what if’ questions and speculate without having to point to hundreds of studies right from the start. That’s the realm of solid hypotheses and widely accepted theories. Darwin and Einstein had to wait many years for this, which doesn’t mean that all ideas survive the tests.

Goleman’s thesis is rooted in recent research, see this 2007 article for example

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/20/health/psychology/20essa.html?ref=technology

The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into the neural mechanics behind flaming. This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between the brain’s social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy. This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do next will keep the interaction on track.

Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger, blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.

@mattbrowne There is nothing wrong with this emerging field and by saying that it’s just emerging and there is no reason to make leaping claims, I am being a skeptic rather than some religious nut scared of his own shadow and humanity. I am being a scientist and I’ve looked into some of the research around this issue and many of the researchers are grasping at straws. I would rather wait a bit before accepting these conclusions, but thanks for going overboard and making it seem like I am ‘killing’ progress.

I dunno – brain science is so new… That some part of the brain responds to faces seems obvious, how much of it responds and what other stimuli are present is what we should be examining before we start saying xyz brain is wired differently. I think beyond pattern recognition in the brain and how that connects to reality, which has roots going all the way back to testing that was done (disturbingly) on humans in the 30s and 40s, a lot of the new brain science needs to be vetted very harshly.