Researchers Uncover What Makes People Seem So Aggressive Online
The cause of online aggression isn’t what you think it is
“The world is awaiting your apology or for you to swallow a cyanide pill. Either or we’ll take it,” read the tweet, fired off by a rightfully angry Jaxton Wheeler.
It was 2017, the Trump Administration was in the first year of its term, COVID-19 hadn’t yet reared its ugly head, and times seemed simpler.
But the internet was still ugly.
Jaxton Wheeler is a cis man who identifies as pansexual and works in the adult film industry. The woman he was attacking, August Aimes, had just tweeted forty-six words that would signal the end of her life.
Whichever (lady) performer is replacing me tomorrow for @EroticaXNews, you’re shooting with a guy who has shot gay porn, just to let cha know. BS is all I can say… Do agents really not care about who they’re representing?… I do my homework for my body.
The tweet refers to a “crossover” in the adult film industry, where some actors “cross over” between cis-heterosexual pornography and trans or gay male pornography. Curiously, the divide includes lesbian sex in the “cis-heterosexual” category, which defies the usual ontological boundaries we employ to define such things.
Rather than being centered around sexuality, the idea of “crossover” actors is centered around perceived risk.
69% of new HIV cases in the US are among gay and bisexual men, per the CDC.
23% are among heterosexual men and women.
The key word here is perceived. Adult film stars like August Ames must undergo regular STI testing to perform with major companies. This is how the industry keeps itself free from many STIs like HIV.
This renders Ames’ fear of working with people who “crossover” totally moot—not to mention quite homophobic. A gay man tested for STIs and a straight man tested for STIs both present functionally the same risk to potential sex partners.
A few days later, August Ames committed suicide as Jaxton Wheeler had asked her to do. It wasn’t until after a lengthy Twitter dogpile from thousands of people, many of whom echoed Jaxton’s sentiment.
While most of us would agree that the statement was homophobic, we would also agree that being driven to suicide shouldn’t be the punishment for saying something stupid on the internet.
While Ames’ tweet was as earnest as it was homophobic, we have to wonder how serious Wheeler was when he fired off his reply. We also can’t help but wonder if Wheeler would’ve said the same thing had the two been sitting across from one another in a room.
It’s a question you’ve probably wondered countless times: are people more aggressive on the internet? Does hiding behind the World Wide Web bring out the worst in people?
It’s the kind of conflict that’s so commonplace it’s hardly worth mentioning. The usual sort of internet spat escalates quickly and typically fizzles out just as quickly.
Occasionally, disagreements such as these lead to a Twitter pile-on, where countless accounts gang up on one poor individual who said the wrong thing—like the one that ended Ames’ life.
There’s a terrifying element of group psychology involved in the process. It speaks to our innermost fears of persecution and ostracism by our peers.
Humanity has a long, unbroken history of scapegoating people. The history of crucified scapegoats spans the entirety of human history, as René Girard so eloquently described in his writings.
And the internet is a playground for group hostility.
The Mismatch Hypothesis
It should come as no surprise to anyone that people usually seem more aggressive online than in person. Behind a monitor and the anonymity of throwaway accounts, keyboard warriors and text jockeys lash one another in digital pandemonium without the fear of physical reprisal.
This armor of digital invincibility isn’t something we evolved to cope with.
They say that absolute power corrupts, and it’s true for most people. You’ll never see someone as ugly as when they look down on someone else and can attack them with zero consequences.
What I’ve just described is called the Mismatch Hypothesis. It says that human psychology was shaped by millions of years of evolution for in-person encounters, not discussions behind the internet's firewall.
This creates a “mismatch” between someone’s psychology and the environment they find themselves in.
A 2021 study published in the American Political Science Review sought to put this theory to the test. The results were surprising.
Researchers assumed that, per the theory, online environments changed people’s psychology and behavior. They also tested whether the internet biased people’s perceptions and whether the internet tended to group people together who were more likely to be hostile online.
They reviewed eight studies that totaled 8,434 people, including surveys and behavioral experiments.
What they found was disturbing. Not because people were more hostile online than offline, but because they weren’t. The researchers concluded that the main difference between online hostility and in-person hostility is that it’s more public on the internet.
The people who are hostile online tend to be hostile offline, too.
All the internet does is facilitate connections and provide exposure. One can’t help but think of the phrase that was echoed countless times over the past decade, that racism isn’t getting worse, it’s getting filmed. According to these study results, this is true of all online hostility.
This speaks to an ugly yet pervasive truth about human nature, that, instantly, any one of us is perfectly capable of becoming a monster under the right conditions. They say you never know someone until you’ve lived with them, or until you’ve seen them angry, or until you’ve seen them at their most vulnerable.
But the truth is, you never really know someone until you’ve seen what they would do given absolute power to do what they want, without the slightest possibility of reprisal.
Given all the money and power in the world, some people would choose to end poverty; others would choose to end the lives of a substantial number of other humans—sometimes to the tune of millions or even billions of people.
Saints and Nazis are both human beings, and that should terrify all of us.
As we move further into a world with greater and more powerful technologies at our fingertips, the question of security and management comes to the forefront. We can’t help but wonder: if someone under the sway of a destructive ideology with an AR-15 can stroll into a supermarket and kill a dozen people instantly, what will tomorrow’s aggressors look like with even more sophisticated technologies?
And what can we do to tame the dark side of human nature, so we can create a more peaceful world with fewer incidents of senseless destruction and death?
How can we create more animal rescue and homelessness activists and fewer mass shooters?
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Some books that I highly recommend checking out:
Wild Connection: What Animal Courtship and Mating Teaches Us about Human Relationships by Jennifer L. Verdolin
The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley
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