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Psychologists: Internet Trolls Are Narcissistic, Psychopathic, and Sadistic


Chris A

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Interesting topic. Is there a longer article?

This reminds me of what I do for a living, the biggest part of which is handling transactions. I can always tell when a litigator is pretending to be a transactional guy because we end up in a pissing match over a bunch of things that do not matter. Fighting for the sake of fighting, which is very tiresome.

Then again, I made this all about me so I guess that means that I am narcissistic. I better work on that...

Making a living outta being in pissing matches…cool.

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  • 4 months later...

From the article:

2.1.1. Participants and procedure

[study 1] We recruited 418 participants (42.4% female; M age = 29.2%, SD = 11.0) from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk website (http://www.mturk.com).

Edited by Chris A
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Interesting topic. Is there a longer article?

This reminds me of what I do for a living, the biggest part of which is handling transactions. I can always tell when a litigator is pretending to be a transactional guy because we end up in a pissing match over a bunch of things that do not matter. Fighting for the sake of fighting, which is very tiresome.

Then again, I made this all about me so I guess that means that I am narcissistic. I better work on that...

Making a living outta being in pissing matches…cool.

I would be the litigator who pretends to be a transactional guy. Trust me, it gets old making a living outta being in pissing matches.

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418 participants.... :facepalm:

anyone who thinks they can accurately extrapolate a trend based on a sample size that small is themselves narcissistic.

:lol:

How many do you think need to be in the sample size? There are at least three groups represented in the article. (N=1215 from the first line of the article.) Perhaps thousands? Most of what I see is in the realm of less than 100 participants for psych studies, especially of this type of subject (personality disorders).

I think that the three authors are grad or doctoral students, so it may not be narcissism that's driving them.

BTW: Are you having any issues downloading the article?

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I believe that many research students pick subjects that can be proven using deterministic means, other than statistics, in order to assure victory for their efforts, but they cloak their results with box-and-whisker plots to give it an air of doubt. In this particular instance, it seems to me that that may be the case.

Edited by Chris A
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418 participants.... :facepalm:

anyone who thinks they can accurately extrapolate a trend based on a sample size that small is themselves narcissistic.

:lol:

How many do you think need to be in the sample size? There are at least three groups represented in the article. (N=1215 from the first line of the article.) Perhaps thousands? Most of what I see is in the realm of less than 100 participants for psych studies, especially of this type of subject (personality disorders).

I think that the three authors are grad or doctoral students, so it may not be narcissism that's driving them.

BTW: Are you having any issues downloading the article?

Your post reminded me of the NPR April fools joke this year where they posted an article title that stated, "Why doesn't America read anymore?"

http://www.npr.org/2014/04/01/297690717/why-doesnt-america-read-anymore

They then sat back and watched the onslaught of internet comments such as "Shut up NPR, we read all the time." However, I believe that the amazing thing is how many commented very strongly on the article from only reading the headline, when there was no actual article. The late night talk show hosts do a similar stunt with 'made up topics' from time to time by interviewing random people on the street.

I just quickly scanned the study (as I have competing priorities right now) and the study does seem to be missing the overall randomness of a statistically valid sample; however, I do find it interesting as it seems to be correlating individual personality assessment survey questions (that most likely have established validity) to survey questions of the participant’s Internet commenting style and behavior. I believe that we can find various forms of behavior/psychological assessments (personality) in many facets of life. I believe that most colleges give students access to some type of ‘personality assessment / job satisfaction’ survey and many potential employers put job applicants through a 'behaviour assessment' too.

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Wonder if the research design considered the confounding variables introduced by website moderators and/or owners? Was this prospective, retrospective or contemporaneous? There are a lot of contentious issues these days and lots of websites catering to contentious crowds and not exactly without bias. Extrapolating behavioral labels based upon - whatever - has much to digest.

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