OT: NYTimes article on netiquette & flaming

[J Patrick Draine]

In case you don't read the NYTImes, you might find this article from
yeasterday's paper interesting:
ESSAY
Flame First, Think Later: New Clues to E-Mail Misbehavior
By DANIEL GOLEMAN
Published: February 20, 2007
Jett Lucas, a 14-year-old friend, tells me the kids in his middle
school send one other a steady stream of instant messages through the
day. But there's a problem."Kids will say things to each other in
their messages that are too embarrassing to say in person," Jett tells
me. "Then when they actually meet up, they are too shy to bring up
what they said in the message. It makes things tense."
Jett's complaint seems to be part of a larger pattern plaguing the
world of virtual communications, a problem recognized since the
earliest days of the Internet: flaming, or sending a message that is
taken as offensive, embarrassing or downright rude.
The hallmark of the flame is precisely what Jett lamented: thoughts
expressed while sitting alone at the keyboard would be put more
diplomatically — or go unmentioned — face to face.
Flaming has a technical name, the "online disinhibition effect," which
psychologists apply to the many ways people behave with less restraint
in cyberspace.
In a 2004 article in the journal CyberPsychology & Behavior, John
Suler, a psychologist at Rider University in Lawrenceville, N.J.,
suggested that several psychological factors lead to online
disinhibition: the anonymity of a Web pseudonym; invisibility to
others; the time lag between sending an e-mail message and getting
feedback; the exaggerated sense of self from being alone; and the lack
of any online authority figure. Dr. Suler notes that disinhibition can
be either benign — when a shy person feels free to open up online — or
toxic, as in flaming.
The emerging field of social neuroscience, the study of what goes on
in the brains and bodies of two interacting people, offers clues into
the neural mechanics behind flaming.
This work points to a design flaw inherent in the interface between
the brain's social circuitry and the online world. In face-to-face
interaction, the brain reads a continual cascade of emotional signs
and social cues, instantaneously using them to guide our next move so
that the encounter goes well. Much of this social guidance occurs in
circuitry centered on the orbitofrontal cortex, a center for empathy.
This cortex uses that social scan to help make sure that what we do
next will keep the interaction on track.
Research by Jennifer Beer, a psychologist at the University of
California, Davis, finds that this face-to-face guidance system
inhibits impulses for actions that would upset the other person or
otherwise throw the interaction off. Neurological patients with a
damaged orbitofrontal cortex lose the ability to modulate the
amygdala, a source of unruly impulses; like small children, they
commit mortifying social gaffes like kissing a complete stranger,
blithely unaware that they are doing anything untoward.
Socially artful responses emerge largely in the neural chatter between
the orbitofrontal cortex and emotional centers like the amygdala that
generate impulsivity. But the cortex needs social information — a
change in tone of voice, say — to know how to select and channel our
impulses. And in e-mail there are no channels for voice, facial
expression or other cues from the person who will receive what we say.
True, there are those cute, if somewhat lame, emoticons that cleverly
arrange punctuation marks to signify an emotion. The e-mail equivalent
of a mood ring, they surely lack the neural impact of an actual smile
or frown. Without the raised eyebrow that signals irony, say, or the
tone of voice that signals delight, the orbitofrontal cortex has
little to go on. Lacking real-time cues, we can easily misread the
printed words in an e-mail message, taking them the wrong way.
And if we are typing while agitated, the absence of information on how
the other person is responding makes the prefrontal circuitry for
discretion more likely to fail. Our emotional impulses disinhibited,
we type some infelicitous message and hit "send" before a more sober
second thought leads us to hit "discard." We flame.
Flaming can be induced in some people with alarming ease. Consider an
experiment, reported in 2002 in The Journal of Language and Social
Psychology, in which pairs of college students — strangers — were put
in separate booths to get to know each other better by exchanging
messages in a simulated online chat room.
While coming and going into the lab, the students were well behaved.
But the experimenter was stunned to see the messages many of the
students sent. About 20 percent of the e-mail conversations
immediately became outrageously lewd or simply rude.
And now, the online equivalent of road rage has joined the list of
Internet dangers. Last October, in what The Times of London described
as "Britain's first 'Web rage' attack," a 47-year-old Londoner was
convicted of assault on a man with whom he had traded insults in a
chat room. He and a friend tracked down the man and attacked him with
a pickax handle and a knife.
One proposed solution to flaming is replacing typed messages with
video. The assumption is that getting a message along with its
emotional nuances might help us dampen the impulse to flame.
All this reminds me of a poster on the wall of classrooms I once
visited in New Haven public schools. The poster, part of a program in
social development that has lowered rates of violence in schools
there, shows a stoplight. It says that when students feel upset, they
should remember that the red light means to stop, calm down and think
before they act. The yellow light prompts them to weigh a range of
responses, and their consequences. The green light urges them to try
the best response.
Not a bad idea. Until the day e-mail comes in video form, I may just
paste one of those stoplights next to my monitor.
Daniel Goleman is the author of "Social Intelligence: The New Science
of Human Relationships."