It may make him sound sociopathic and manipulative, but I don't think this makes him either of those things. All social experiments have a manipulative component in them because you want to see how people react to some kind of external influence. This doesn't mean Zed is a manipulative person, though.
Sociopathic and manipulative people are subtle and subversive. They don't tip their hand and they hide their true intentions. I'm not that familiar with Zed's work but nothing I've read suggests he's sociopathic or manipulative. If I had to put a label on him I'd pick impulsive and stubborn.
In my opinion this was a pretty innocent experiment. Juvenile? You bet. But that's not the point, really. In this case I think you're disappointed about the experiment because the results turned out be uninteresting/mundane, not because you really think the experiment was evil.
Suppose Zed would've discovered (accidentally) that his rants against Reddit go unnoticed if he puts them in the 3rd paragraph of an article but result in rabid attacks if he leads with them. Why? Hypothesis: people who make it to the 3rd paragraph of an article are less likely to draw knee-jerk conclusions.
In this case I'm pretty sure we would all applauded the experiment and make a mental note that whenever we have to discuss something controversial to add a bunch of fluff as introduction to avoid a backlash.
This is probably way out there, and I'm probably giving Zed too much credit, but I think it's conceivable the experiment would've returned some interesting insight. Since no harm was done, I think that means this specific kind of trolling has to be a net positive.
Sociopathic and manipulative people are subtle and subversive. They don't tip their hand and they hide their true intentions. I'm not that familiar with Zed's work but nothing I've read suggests he's sociopathic or manipulative. If I had to put a label on him I'd pick impulsive and stubborn.
In my opinion this was a pretty innocent experiment. Juvenile? You bet. But that's not the point, really. In this case I think you're disappointed about the experiment because the results turned out be uninteresting/mundane, not because you really think the experiment was evil.
Suppose Zed would've discovered (accidentally) that his rants against Reddit go unnoticed if he puts them in the 3rd paragraph of an article but result in rabid attacks if he leads with them. Why? Hypothesis: people who make it to the 3rd paragraph of an article are less likely to draw knee-jerk conclusions.
In this case I'm pretty sure we would all applauded the experiment and make a mental note that whenever we have to discuss something controversial to add a bunch of fluff as introduction to avoid a backlash.
This is probably way out there, and I'm probably giving Zed too much credit, but I think it's conceivable the experiment would've returned some interesting insight. Since no harm was done, I think that means this specific kind of trolling has to be a net positive.