I have been asking myself this question for a while now and I thought that writing a blog on this would give me the perfect opportunity to address it (after a lot of research of course). First, let me give a definition of what an Internet troll actually is. According to Jiwon Shin, Ph.D., of the Teachers College of Columbia University, “A troll is a person who interrupts communications on the Internet, and (is) often seen as problematic or even (as) criminals.” Of course, there are many different kinds of trolls. There are trolls all over the web and are most commonly found on Wikipedia, social media sites like Facebook, and a wide variety of comment sections and chat rooms. So what is the common personality of the Internet troll? How do we perceive them? What are their motives? I am going to try to answer these questions in a review of recent studies. When researches try to answer these questions, they try to find any kind of correlation between trolls and what is known as “the Dark Tetrad of personality”: sadism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism, the last of which is characterized by deception and dishonesty (Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhaus).

In a 2010 observational study of trolls, Pnina Shachaf and Noriko Hara, both of the School of Library and Information Science Of Indiana University, Bloomington, interviewed an amount of only 8 Wikipedia system operators (sysops) with undisclosed names and asked them how they perceived trolls to be after showing them the cases of 11 different Wikipedia trolls. Being system operators, the people in charge of kicking out trolls, the sysops were in regular and often times adversary contact with them. After conducting the interviews, Shachaf and Hara found themes of attention seeking, boredom, opposition to authority, gratification, revenge, and a sadistic longing to mentally harm Internet communities and their users. These were the most popular motivations the sysops attributed to trolling, but instead of being actual evidence, they are indicators of social science theories. Of all these motivations, boredom was the most popular answer among the interviewees. The 8 sysops generally found trolls to fit under the category of the Dark Tetrad.

What many studies like the previous one don’t include is a gender-based analysis of the troll. Aware of this, Professors Pnina Fichman, Ph.D., and Madelyn Rose Sanfilippo of the School of Informatics and Computing at the Bloomington campus of the University of Indiana decided to research this specific topic. In their paper, they state that the main reason for this is because females have represented a small minority of Internet trolls and female-driven cases of trolling have been considerably less severe. They cite Susan C. Herring, another Professor of Information Science and Linguistics at Indiana University, Bloomington, who theorized the reason for this to be in the sexual disposition toward conflict. Trolls thrive on creating conflict and females tend to avoid it, she says.

Part of a list of hypotheses tested in their gender-based study of trolls, Fichman and Sanfilippo predicted that male and female trolls are perceived differently. The two professors tested this hypothesis by presenting three different scenarios to the 100 participants of their study. The participants, 75% female, 23% male, and 2% identifying as other, represented a wide variety of degree majors and academic statuses. The scenarios were of trolls operating on Wikipedia, Yahoo! Answers, and the online gaming site League of Legends. For each question, every participant was given a variation of the troll’s name. The names were Emily, Todd, and AbcD. The participants were then asked to assume the motivations of trolls unaware of the significance of the names. According to the results of the study in the “Hypothesis 3” section of the chart below, participants “perceived Todd and AbcD to be motivated by malevolence, humor, and instigation at a higher frequency than Emily, who was perceived to be comparatively more ideological”, thus supporting the hypothesis that trolls are perceived differently in accordance with gender (Fichman and Sanfilippo).

Now I am going to get to the matter of the actual motives behind trolling, at least according to the trolls. Erin E. Buckles and Paul D. Trapnell from the Psychology Department of Winnipeg University along with Delroy L. Paulhaus from the University of British Columbia created a questionnaire for trolls themselves with a main focus on the correlation between the Dark Tetrad and trolling (Buckels, Trapnell, and Paulhaus). 418 participants were recruited and based off of the answers to a question in which the participants were asked to choose their favorite commenting hobby if any at all, 5.8% of the participants were trolls. The remaining multiple-choice questions assessed the Dark Tetrad qualities of the participants and the results were staggering. The chart below displays the results and almost certainly proves that Internet trolls are prone to the negative character traits of the Dark Tetrad.

These data support the common conception that Internet trolls are generally more sadistic, narcissistic, and psychopathic than the average person. There are noticeable shortcomings to all these studies, though. With this being a social sciences topic, I was only able to find observational studies, which are more prone to confounding variables than experiments. Factors like race and upbringing were not accounted for in these studies. There is a possibility that this could have led to false positives in all the studies. Chance could have also caused false positives. In the first experiment mentioned, there were only 8 participants as opposed to the other two having at least 100 participants. This means that the results of the first study are particularly at risk of being a collective fluke.