

Trolls Just Want to Have Fun [pdf] - jcr
http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/02/trolls-just-want-to-have-fun.pdf

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gwern
Abstract:

"In two online studies (total N = 1215), respondents completed personality
inventories and a survey of their Internet commenting styles. Overall, strong
positive associations emerged among online commenting frequency, trolling
enjoyment, and troll identity, pointing to a common construct underlying the
measures. Both studies revealed similar patterns of relations between trolling
and the Dark Tetrad of personality: trolling correlated positively with
sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, using both enjoyment ratings and
identity scores. Of all personality measures, sadism showed the most robust
associations with trolling and, importantly, the relationship was specific to
trolling behavior. Enjoyment of other online activities, such as chatting and
debating, was unrelated to sadism. Thus cyber-trolling appears to be an
Internet manifestation of everyday sadism."

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jcr
In spite of the somewhat whimsical title, it's an interesting paper, and the
lead author has published a fair amount.

[http://buckels.psycstudies.com/about-
me/publications/](http://buckels.psycstudies.com/about-me/publications/)

Maybe this is a better link to the paper?:
[https://pdf.yt/d/XgRRo4fT7qzp9bic](https://pdf.yt/d/XgRRo4fT7qzp9bic)

