Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (00:08):
Hello, and welcome to this episode of Psych Attack. I'm Dr. Jasmine B MacDonald in this first part of my catch up with Dr. Evita March, we discuss evolutionary explanations of online behaviors like trolling. I hope you're going well and have settled in with a warm cup of tea.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (00:28):
Welcome Evita. Thank you for coming and chatting with me today.

Dr Evita March (00:31):
Thanks for having me, Jasmine.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (00:33):
I note that you are a self-professed bibliophile

Dr Evita March (00:36):
.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (00:36):
and I thought that might be a nice place for us to start. What do you enjoy reading?

Dr Evita March (00:41):
So I've been in a book club for while now, and it's come to my attention that I enjoy reading anything so I . And it's because when we have these conversations about the books, I'm not overly critical, like as long as it's got a bit of a story, I can sink my teeth into and it's not terribly written. I enjoy reading most things and I feel like I'm always the one that's, you know, I give it seven stars. So , so it, I think that I, I actually enjoy reading a wide range of topics and I'm not overly critical. So I'm probably the best audience you can find if you want to have like a pilot reader or maybe I'm bad. I don't know. As a bibliophile, look, I have loved reading. I have very vivid memories of me sneaking books into class and reading under the desk and getting trouble from the teacher because I wasn't actually paying attention to the class. I was reading the book under the desk.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (01:45):
That is amazing. Um, alright. So before we start talking about your area of interest and expertise, which combines evolutionary psych and cyber psychology, why study psychology? How did you get into that?

Dr Evita March (01:59):
Accidentally is a good answer. I originally went to university to study arts and drama. Actually I did a, a, um, career test, one of those ones that everybody has to do later in school and I was told I should be a drama therapist, and I didn't really know what that meant, but I just liked that the word drama was in there cause I quite liked acting and just presenting. And then I went to, uh, the university of Queensland and I did an introductory to psychology course. We had one in each semester. So we had a first semester intro that was a bit more focused on cognitive psychology and biology and I liked it, but it was really in the second semester when we started covering more social psychology and in particular, the topic of essay was why do women experience depression more than men?

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (02:51):
Mm,

Dr Evita March (02:52):
I really enjoyed the topic. I really enjoyed the research process. I just started to gravitate towards doing more and more psychology topics. So it was a bit of an accidental find, I suppose I did not at all go to university intent on being, um, or studying psychology.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (03:11):
Interesting. How did you find yourself going into, you know, further study, like honours and into a PhD?

Dr Evita March (03:18):
So in the third year of my degree, there was an elective you could take, which was focused on interpersonal relationships and one of the topics was on sex differences in mate preferences. And when I was reading that, I just became really interested in an evolutionary perspective of psychology at the time. I also had always a bit of an interest in gender roles and social prescriptions of how men and women should behave. And so I just started, I guess, to have this real fascination with both distal and proximal manifestations of behavior, I realized that was really jargony the way I just said that I started to have . I started to have a real fascination with how our ancestral past could influence the way that we behave today. And I think at the core though, at the core of everything, my interest was in interpersonal relationships

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (04:18):
Right? The description you've given there has already hinted at this, but could you talk a little bit about what an evolutionary perspective is?

Dr Evita March (04:28):
So an evolutionary perspective, if I'm gonna really break it down, we look to our patterns of our ancestral past of ways that they perhaps behaved, interacted. We look at our ancestral part, asked to make sense of our contemporary modern behavior. I should note that for me, both evolutionary perspectives and contemporary culture work interchangeably in that one cannot exist without the other. They're not distinct separate phenomena that we have to consider both how to temporary culture influences our behavior and how it works in interaction with our behavioral patterns from the past.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (05:07):
mm-hmm

Dr Evita March (05:08):
We can use evolutionary perspectives as a framework of understanding a range of modern behavior ranging from even how we're attracted to one another, how we agress towards one another, or even the way that we use and apply makeup.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (05:24):
Interesting. How does that work with makeup?

Dr Evita March (05:26):
So we can look at how we emphasize features or characteristics that could be appealing to, um, mate. I actually have a colleague at Fed Uni [Federation University] who does some work into intrasexual competitiveness and using makeup. So particularly this area of research is focused more on how women use makeup. So using makeup to emphasize characteristics that are appealing to a mate, but appealing based on women's facial features. So emphasizing your eyes using white eyeliner on the inside of your eyelids to make your eyes look bigger because bright eyes is a character or is an indication of, uh, good health or contouring to sharpen your cheek bones and make your face look, uh, symmetrical because symmetry is also a good indicator of genetic fitness. There's a really interesting light of inquiry now into how men are also using makeup, because we also know makeup's just not for the ladies. Men enjoy using makeup as well.

Dr Evita March (06:27):
Yeah.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (06:27):
Evolutionary perspectives provide a way to understand why we behave the way that we behave now

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (06:33):
When you, uh, you know, you got really interested in evolutionary psych and gender roles and differences, is that what you went, went on to do in your PhD as well?

Dr Evita March (06:42):
Yeah. So my fourth year in psychology, I explored these sex differences in mate preferences, but the influence of women's own socioeconomic status, the traditional theory of sex differences in mate preferences is that women give more importance to a mate status and resources and men give more importance to a mate's physical attractiveness, but it's not necessarily physical attractiveness as in they just look banging, uh, it's more it's well, I guess in a way they do it's more so indicators of fertility and genetic fitness. So a waist to hip ratio, clear skin, I said bright eyes before, symmetry. These are all indicators of genetic prowess so men place greater importance on these. I don't need to go into the background of that, but what you should know is that these tend to be quite universal. So universally in studies that have been done by range of researchers have found that cultures, it appears that women place more importance on status and resources and men on physical attractiveness.

Dr Evita March (07:44):
Now, I do also need a flag though, that this doesn't mean it's the thing that they find most attractive in a mate. It's just a sex difference. When you look at how they rate the importance of a range of traits, men seem to rate physical attractiveness higher than women do and women status and resources. I wanted to test the theory because the reason why women are considered to give this emphasis to status and resources is because of their increased level of parental investment. And this is the evolutionary perspective because women have historically had to invest more in offspring, comparative to men. So for example, nine months of gestation and having to raise the offspring, they have had more limited resources. And so theoretically based on this women should place greater emphasis on a mate's status and resources compared to men would, men have not had the same reproductive challenges. I wanted to test the theory if women actually had higher status and resource themselves as operationalised by socioeconomic status, which is education, income, and employment, would they continue to place the same amount of emphasis on a mate's status and resources?

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (08:51):
Interesting.

Dr Evita March (08:52):
Mm I operationalized, employment do you have a current, uh, job? Like how long? And I think I made a minimum that they'd been in the job for three months. So it was at least somewhat constant, their level of income. So using national indicators of low average and high income and also their education status, what level, um, of education that they had obtained. And what I found was really interesting, I predicted that as women's own status and resources, so their own SES increased their emphasis on mates would decrease, but I actually found their emphasis increased.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (09:28):
What is this about? They're trying to maintain their own resources?

Dr Evita March (09:32):
As I said, you can't have evolutionary perspectives without also looking at contemporary cultural context.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (09:38):
Sure.

Dr Evita March (09:39):
We can apply perhaps an evolutionary perspective is that, well, it's going to just persist regardless, because if you look at we've had this past where we have just had all of these reproductive constraints, comparative to men, we will just continue to place this. And by we, I mean, women we'll continue to in place this increased emphasis. I think that this result, and this was really speculative because I was not expecting this based on theory. Like according to theory, it probably that preference should have decreased. I think that for women who have that higher status and resources, there's something in that socioeconomic status that they're still preferencing. So Jasmine, I did a bit of reading around it because it was an unexpected result. And I think perhaps some of the answer to that lay in what it was in status and resources that they still wanted to be high. And as I said before, there's three different ways that we can conceptualize socioeconomic status. We can look at in income, employment and education. Now there's not a lot of research on this, but there is some, overall when you ask men what level of say socioeconomic status, they'd like a mate to be, they don't care. They'll just, no, it doesn't really matter. But if you really press them, you really press, they indicate that they don't want their mate to have higher education. I.e not necessarily higher intelligence.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (11:05):
Okay.

Dr Evita March (11:05):
Now that's really interesting right there, because broadly, when you look at men and women's preferences for a mate intelligence rates really high, they both want an intelligent mate, but perhaps men don't wanna mate, that's more intelligent than them.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (11:19):
Uhhuh.

Dr Evita March (11:20):
Now I realize I'm doing a complete generalization here. so I decided, okay, this is very generalized. I'm gonna follow this up in a PhD because you know, why not? I've got time to kill . And so I then decided I'm gonna look at this in again, in a PhD, but this time, in addition, I'm going to explore gender roles. So whether they are ascribed to a masculine or a feminine gender role, and look, I have to say, the too long didn't read here is that gender roles didn't do a lot, but I continued to find the high preference for a mate's socioeconomic status. If women had high levels themselves, firstly, at least it was a reliable result. That's always nice and cross-sectional research, but it also indicated that there is something for it, challenges what that theory suggests. We should do evolutionary perspective, right?

Dr Evita March (12:14):
If we have higher status and resources ourselves, then perhaps we don't need that anymore, but apparently we still place preference on it. Look, that's adopting an evolutionary perspective. What I had to almost conclude in a way was, although I did find support that men continue to put that high preference on physical attractiveness. Yeah. That just keeps happening. but what I thought and what I theorized at the end was what we were finding this result for women's increased status and resources in place and that emphasis on a mate's own status and resources indicates another theory maybe at play here. Social role theory originally proposed by Wendy Wood and Alice Eagly social role theory is that women have historically been constrained or have historically experienced more constraints to their own freedom to achieve status and resources comparative to men, patriarchy. Right? So to me, this would, might indicate such that result, that even in the presence of their own increased status and resources, because they have historically been so constrained, they will continue to preference it, even when they achieve it on their own. Although I really enjoy evolutionary perspectives, I do find the conversations and dialogue around it. Very interesting. I don't adopt an evolutionary perspective to understand everything. I think it just gives a nice compliment to understanding phenomena.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (13:39):
Yeah.

Dr Evita March (13:39):
I think that it would be really shortsighted to only approach every phenomena, behavior, whatever human condition from one theoretical framework.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (13:49):
Mm.

Dr Evita March (13:49):
Evolutionary perspectives, just to provide a nice compliment to social perspective, particularly social perspectives. I feel the best perspective will be an interactionist one where you can consider different possible causes or theories for the phenomena you are exploring.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (14:06):
Mm yeah. The conversations I've had with people around evolutionary psych has been with people who are this, like, no, it explains everything. And I've found that really challenging to accept and then completely polarize. Uh, I can't say that I can take issue with anything that you've said. It makes a lot of sense.

Dr Evita March (14:25):
well that's good

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (14:26):
you have this overlap with, you know, social aspects and thinking about, you know, micro meso, macro aspects of.

Dr Evita March (14:33):
yes.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (14:33):
What understanding the context of behavior. Um, and this is something that might come into play

Dr Evita March (14:39):
That is a wonderful way to consider it. It just adds a framework to understand the context of behavior ancestral mechanisms that could explain proximal ways that we behave now, but it is just a different framework to adopt. And I know a lot of people who do adopt evolutionary perspectives in psychology, they do have a very biology background, far more biologically minded than I am. So that could explain some of the fierce stance on the evolutionary perspective and look absolutely like, I mean, for them yeah. Live the dream. Uh, but for me, , I think because my inherent interest was always interpersonal relationships, not biology that led me to actually adopt ranges of different theoretical frameworks.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (15:30):
Yeah. And these interpersonal relationships in a really new context, right. If we're gonna take evolution and processes that may have been developing over a really long time and they go, ah, all of a sudden here we are performing so much of our social interaction in an online context. Like, you know, right now us recording this yeah. Everything is online, especially right now with COVID then that's only gonna get you so far to focus on that one theory.

Dr Evita March (15:57):
I think what comes as quite a surprise is that because my area of research now is cyber psychology, right? Like I am interested in our online behavior and exploring why we behave the way that we do online. And that is very different to what I it's different to what I did in my PhD to an extent, but I still have the same mindset I always have in approach in an exploring behavior.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (16:22):
Mm. Yeah, absolutely. So a couple of the online behaviors that you've looked at, uh, trolling and cyber dating abuse,

Dr Evita March (16:31):
mm-hmm, ,

New Speaker (16:32):
I'm wondering if you might be able to give the kind of elevator pitch of what trolling is and how trolling is different to bullying.

Dr Evita March (16:41):
Great question because I do get asked this quite a bit. It is such a complex behavior, both in observations of what trolling is, but also in operational definitions, trolling online actually has a really rich history. In the extent, literature, it probably would surprise people that it actually dates back to like the nineties when it was first appearing as trolling on news net. But then since that time it's really gone through some changes, how the original conceptualisation, what the original conceptualisation of trolling was, which was this mischievous online prankster, who it was that art form, right. It came from the term for fishing trawling to bait a line and then to reel people in and then be like lol you got trolled. If we picked apart that behavior, the intention is to amuse, right? There's no real harm done except maybe to the person's ego who got trolled, but it doesn't have ongoing psychosocial impact.

Dr Evita March (17:48):
Actually, I should say if you want some great examples of that nostalgic trolling and art form look up Ken M, Ken M is known as that legendary troll. He made trolling the art form. Enter around 2010 or so the media really picked up this term trolling to start referring to online abuse. I think that the other thing that the word trolling provided was it was quite empowering to think of your online abuser as this ugly troll living onto the cyber bridge, right? Like it was a word that could empower people going. They're just a troll. Don't worry about it but, because of this adoption and this is where just the overall research field of cyber psychology does get a bit tricky sometimes because there's so many operational definitions, the world of technology moves so fast. There's probably been another iPhone released as we've been talking now, it's really difficult. It's very hard to keep up with things. So it's almost as if by the time researchers start exploring a phenomena, it's been through a complete shape shift online and come to be something very different.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (18:58):
Mm.

Dr Evita March (18:58):
So one of the first real empirical studies of trolling was in 2014, when Canadian researchers published a paper in personality and individual differences called trolls just wanna have fun. and they adopted an operational definition of trolling, which was that it represented more of the anti-social behavior that we have come to know it to be today, that it is a disruptive destructive anti-social behavior online. And this is broadly the operational definition that has been adopted since then. Now I certainly was using that as my operational definition when I started studying the behavior prompted by this article and also my fascination with being a girl gamer and just experiencing that level of trolling online.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (19:43):
Sure.

Dr Evita March (19:44):
I know I dropped that in there. Right. so,

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (19:46):
yeah.

Dr Evita March (19:47):
And using that same definition, but the more I search this behavior, the more I realized that it was fraught with operational discrepancies, not just from what the public thought trolling to be, but also examples that researchers were using to portray trolling. So I would see some studies where they would give participants examples of trolling, and they'd be rather innocuous examples, right? It'd be a common online saying, who did you sleep with to get that grade? But then in other studies, the examples of trolling that they would give participants, for example, one study used, um, after the Christchurch earthquakes number of years ago, there was a user on YouTube that kept changing their name at one point that they were Annie Berkowitz and, and they were posting horrible, horrible comments on these videos of the earthquake to families. It was just awful.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (20:38):
mm-hmm .

Dr Evita March (20:39):
So that complete discrepant two different forms that were chosen to represent behaviour, just highlighted how divergent it is, how we conceptualise trolling

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (20:49):
right.

Dr Evita March (20:50):
A colleague and I in 2019, stripped this back, we decided to do a qualitative study and trolling asking people, how do you define trolling? And look, largely we found that for the majority of people, they consider trolling to be an anti-social online behavior with the intent to harm someone. But many people do know that it's different from cyber bullying.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (21:12):
mm-hmm .

New Speaker (21:12):
And I thought that was an interesting capture because although it has been, um, conceptualised as different from cyber bullying in the literature. So for example, like the deceptive more disruptive elements of trolling aren't really captured in cyber bullying. Also typically in trolling the individual patrol doesn't know the individual that they are attacking. Whereas when cyber bullying, they tend to know that person in real life. So there are some distinct differences and that was reflected in the answers that we received and how people conceptualize trolling. But I think what was important is the, that idea and conceptualisation of trolling as this old trickster intent to amuse, its really changed. And now we see it as something very different. The problem I have, however, with all of these operational discrepancies is it makes it very difficult to research when we're using different definitions for online behaviour. And it also makes it very difficult to criminalize. Now I realized that that was not at all an elevator pitch, but it's just so difficult to say, this is what it is when it has such a rich, differing history.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (22:24):
Yeah, I think it, I mean, it's an interesting one because we often have this struggle in psychology of, you know, clinical trials and observation and the pros and cons with things like survey based or questionnaire based research. I'm not sure how else you could measure this other than asking people directly. So I kind of wanna throw that to you and extending on what you've said around the challenges of operationally defining some of the pro and cons of how, how to measure this and how to research this.

Dr Evita March (22:52):
I consider this in every limitation section of those journal articles, because I'm hyper aware it's self-report of trolls. The chance that I got trolled is very high and I know it is I look through the responses and I can tell when, you know, so well, some are perhaps a bit more, uh, covert, but some are very much in your face. They will say, you know, that they identify the gender, they identify is "yo' mama". So I, you know, can pick it up pretty quickly.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (23:23):
Well,

Dr Evita March (23:24):
but as far as the, and that, that that's exactly right. How do we objectively measure a behavior that occurs typically in an anonymous de individualised setting? Mm it's very challenging. I think one way that researchers have been able to do this or overcome this potential limitation is by showing people posts and then asking them to respond. But even still, it's still an experimental setting. Do we really think that people are going to really let fly the way that they might do in the privacy of their own home or wherever they are, are compared to, in an experimental setting saying, how would you respond to this? Either way it still is artificial. At least the self report, I suppose, overcomes that, or it increases that ecological validity. And hopefully they're answering the way they behave. There are some measures, I suppose we could put in place to try and overcome that limitation of self-report like assessing social desirability and controlling for it as a potential confound, which I do try to do. And at least, um, for those who do tend to respond either consistently socially desirable or consistently un-socially, if that is a word or so, social undesirable is probably more pro um, proper. Uh, so that is one way that I try and control for this. But look, I think perhaps the most important thing here is reliability in that so far across a number of studies now, and a number of cohorts of different ages, different gender ratios, I have found pretty consistent results for personality traits that predict the trolls or people who at least perpetrate trolling at an increased frequency than others, even if they don't think of themselves as trolls. So we think it really comes down to employing consistent, reliable methods of assessing this behaviour, whether it's object. I dunno how you get objective measures off this. If people have ideas, I'd love to hear it because it's just a very challenging area.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (25:36):
It might be self-report, but it's also anonymous.

Dr Evita March (25:39):
Mm-hmm .

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (25:39):
like the context in which they're trolling.

Dr Evita March (25:41):
mm-hmm, .

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (25:42):
also thinking that there's a bias there or that the bias is outweighing the pros of this research maybe assumes that people are trying to hide that behaviour, which might not necessarily fit with some of your findings around the personality aspects, like someone who is looking to cause harm to somebody else and finds that entertaining. Are they really gonna hide that in a survey?

Dr Evita March (26:03):
You would assume not, and I guess we do try to mask the intent by not using the word troll.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (26:10):
Right.

Dr Evita March (26:11):
So assessing the behaviour without saying, I like to troll instead will assess, like I enjoy greifing other people online, so we will try and mask it. Although I have to tell you Jasmine, there was funniest things when I was first exploring this and I was using one of the trolling measures, gosh, I can't remember the exact phrasing, but the end of it said for the lolls, but it was for the lols as an L U L Z. Right? And so when I submitted this to our, our research ethics committee for approval, they came back and said, we don't know what this means, but I didn't wanna change it because I was like, well, a troll will know what it means like for the lulz is net speak.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (26:52):
Exactly. So that's, it's good to hear the ethics committee is not overlapping with my design population here. That's possible.

Dr Evita March (27:00):
I don't even think of that. That's hilarious. that's really good. If you're in an ethics committee, maybe you shouldn't know what this means.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (27:12):
Uh, so you, you made your case and you got to keep that item?

Dr Evita March (27:16):
I did. Yes I did. Yes. It was a psychometrically validated item and way of speaking. So that was fine. And I did make the case that I understand that they might not know, but the population I am interested in assessing will know what for the lulz means.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (27:33):
Talking about your research in this area of trolling, what was the kind of key issue you were trying to address?

Dr Evita March (27:39):
I was just curious as to why are we so mean to each other online? And I've spoken a bit about this. A lot of that was triggered as well. When Charlotte Dawson suicide, after being pretty viciously, attacked by people online who were dubbed the trolls, but, you know, they were just people who were so awful to somebody who actually did express their intent, that they were going to hurt themselves and people still continued to pile on. And I was just so curious, like, why would people do this?

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (28:09):
Mm,

Dr Evita March (28:10):
how could we treat someone this way? And to understand this, I was just interested in the psychological profile of the internet troll, who is this person? Who is likely to behave this way? Because if we can understand the who, then maybe we can understand the why, and then we can try and manage it.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (28:31):
Yeah. And what did you find? What does the typical troll look like and why do they perform that way?

Dr Evita March (28:36):
So this has been a deep dive for me now over a number of years into what characterises your garden, variety, troll, and, and, uh, found very reliable, consistent results in regards to some traits. So to begin, I adopted the personality model that was adopted by the Canadian researchers. And that was exploring the dark tetrad of personality, which elevator pitch: it is comprised of four socially obnoxious anti-social personality traits. It comprises of trait narcissism. So being egotistical and grandiose entitled it comprises trait machiavellianism, which is manipulating others for your own means. Trait psychopathy. So impulsivity, callousness, uh, lower empathy, and also trait sadism, the enjoyment of causing others harm. And we also explored social motivation because trolling is a social behaviour, right? It's socially dependent. It cannot exist without that social environment. And so we were also curious whether people experienced or what kind of social reward they experience from this behaviour.

Dr Evita March (29:43):
We have two main types of social rewards, uh, prosocial and antisocial rewards. Prosocial is if I help somebody and I feel good about myself, I feel rewarded. I'm motivated to keep engaging that way. So I help a little old lady carry her groceries across the street. And I feel good about myself. I'm like, ah, that felt good. I wanna keep doing that. Anti-social rewards is feeling good when you don't behave so nicely. So this time, I don't know, I see a little old lady struggling and she trips and drops her groceries and I laugh. And then I'm like, well, that felt good. I'm motivated to keep behaving anti-socially, what did we find in that initial study? We found that although all of the dark Tetrad traits correlated with trolling only trait sadism and psychopathy emerged as significant predictors of the behaviour.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (30:31):
mm-hmm.

Dr Evita March (30:32):
and that reflected what they found in 2014 in that Canadian study. And in addition, unsurprisingly, we found that trials were very on antisocial rewards, actually beyond personality traits. So we entered that antisocial reward. It's also called negative social potency, very ominous . We entered that in the final step of the regression model. And we found that blew everything else out of the water, all of the personality traits, if you were motivated to cause social mayhem and enjoyed anti-social behavior, you were very likely to engage in trolling. So from that a whole branch of research came out and that was really then exploring characteristics associated with these traits that could explain this. So for example, because psychopathy was so significant, we thought, well, psychopathy is traditionally associated with lower empathy. Maybe people who troll have lower empathy. And this was also at the time, uh, there were a number of trolls who were being ousted, who, uh, were saying, I didn't realize what I was saying. So this is during the time that Clementine Ford was ousted in some of the trolls that had sent her pretty heinous message. And they were saying, it was a joke. I didn't realize it would hurt your feelings. So we thought let's test that. Let's see if they actually lack empathy. Maybe they do. Maybe they don't realize the hurt that they're causing. And so we assess those personality traits again of, uh, the dark tetrad, but this time we also assessed empathy. Empathy is considered to have two main forms. There are other models of empathy, but this is the one that we adopted. Now, when we typically think of empathy, when we think of that sharing and feeling what someone else feels that is termed affective empathy, like your affect. So affective empathy is being able to share that physical experience like, oh, I feel what you are feeling.

Dr Evita March (32:24):
It's really putting yourself in their shoes. Whereas the other form of empathy is more analytical and that's called cognitive empathy. And cognitive empathy is probably also overlap with emotional intelligence. It's being able to understand how somebody feels, being able to understand that people have emotions, understanding that might hurt someone's feelings. Although we found that sadism and psychopathy continued to be quite strong predictors of engaging in trolling, we found that low affective empathy did predict propensity to troll. So that's a poor it at our hypothesis. They did seem to have low, affective empathy. Or in other words, they're less likely to be able to really feel the emotions of others. Now, although in a bivariate level, cognitive empathy did not share a relationship with trolling. We actually found an interaction between cognitive empathy and psychopathy in that, if somebody had high psychopathy and high cognitive empathy, they were more likely to troll. That was quite surprising because we thought, yeah, right. that was quite surprising cause we thought, oh, okay. So they do understand what they're doing. Now. I should note that that cognitive empathy is dependent. It is interacting with psychopathy. So if they have high psychopathy and high cognitive empathy, they're likely to troll. If we actually take a step back and look at this, it, it does make sense because psychopathy has traditionally been associated with deficits in affective empathy, but cognitive empathy seems to remain intact.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (34:04):
I guess that higher cognitive empathy means that you really have the ability to take the perspective of the other person and to see how much you have messed with them. Right?

Dr Evita March (34:13):
Bingo.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (34:14):
It's almost like you need that in this whole combination to get, to get the gratification out of trolling.

Dr Evita March (34:21):
Exactly. Not only the gratification, but to know what hurts, right? Like you are actually very talented and not you, but by you like the general talk she's onto me. I'm sorry. But what this indicated to us was not only is there empathy or their cognitive empathy, at least intact, but with that combination of psychopathy, they're actually very good at knowing what would hurt someone and very bad at sharing that affective impact. So it's almost a bit of a diabolical mix in that you have with the trait psychopathy of, of that callousness, that lack of personal responsibility, a lack of guilt for their actions, but they're very good at knowing what will hurt you.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (35:09):
Mm that's super interesting. I was reading another aspect of your work that was talking about the interaction between self-esteem and sadism.

Dr Evita March (35:20):
mm-hmm .

New Speaker (35:20):
that blew my mind a little bit. It, because if I've gotten this right, there's an interaction between self-esteem and sadism that when they're both high.

New Speaker (35:27):
mm-hmm .

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (35:27):
we would tend to see greater trolling.

Dr Evita March (35:29):
Yeah.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (35:30):
And that to me was really fascinating because I think this role of the media and popular media in general perception of what a troll is, is that, you know, maybe low self-esteem, maybe keyboard warrior in their paren'ts basement by themselves. And this idea that actually when you put those two things together and this person actually has high self-esteem, that was really fascinating.

Dr Evita March (35:53):
Yeah. Well Jasmine, actually, I mean, this is a really timely conversation too. There was just an article release with, um, the ABC today, which is, uh, dive into online abuse and trolling of science and researchers, which I strongly recommend checking out. But in that article, I also talk about that these trolls are not our stereotypical hiding in mom's basement, in the dark corner with a hood over their head, a lot of trolls are very professional established figures in some I sight in this article was an assistant commissioner in ethics, in the police in Victoria a few years ago.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (36:30):
What,

Dr Evita March (36:31):
um, members who sit on hospital boards, I feel sometimes that like the term trolling, this stereotypical image, it's all designed as well to at least empower the target because you think of like, you are pathetic, you're just sitting there in this basement doing this. Like it's quite jarring to think that they're just people like you and me, if not actually quite professional people who have positions and ethical standards and behave this way.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (36:59):
Interesting

Dr Evita March (36:59):
That research on self-esteem was because I kept reading that trolls have low self-esteem and I was in the trolley literature research this going, I've never seen that. like, I've never seen that.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (37:12):
where's this come from?

Dr Evita March (37:12):
result exactly. Where's this coming from? Now, part of the problem of where it could be coming from is that is actually a pretty reliable relationship between low self-esteem and increased cyber bullying. And again, we've got that operational definition problem, right? Like if trolling is just subsumed by cyber bullying, maybe that's what it's based on. So we just decided to empirically test this, do trolls actually have, or do people who troll have lower levels of self-esteem and we found no relationship to start like self-esteem did not predict the level people were trolling. So the answer initially was no, but then we also found an interaction between sadism and self-esteem and once again, it went in a really diabolical direction in that if people had high sadism, so they enjoy harming others and they had high self-esteem, so they had a high level of self worth, they were more likely to troll.

Dr Evita March (38:06):
So what does this mean? well, what it means, and I guess that just basically, and I should also note that we haven't done a lot of replication with self-esteem I, that interaction between psychopathy and cognitive empathy, I was able to replicate in other studies. So I think it's showing it's somewhat consistent. I haven't looked at the sadism self-esteem again, but what that initial finding to me would suggest is that these are not individuals who have low self worth. They're not engaging this way because they feel bad about themselves. They actually enjoy harming others and they almost have the self worth to feel that they're entitled to behave this way

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (38:47):
In reading your work. I think at one point you comment on there's costs that sadist and trolls will go to personal costs that they'll go to, to get the gratification out of trolling. You know, the amount of time spent online and the potential for being discovered

Dr Evita March (39:02):
There has been, uh, some and again, this is the same research, the Canadian researcher, Erin Buckels, who has done some really amazing work into sadism. And the fact that sadists will also incur personal costs to achieve their goal of harming someone like they're willing to put themselves through the ringer to get that ultimate goal of hurting someone.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (39:22):
Mm.

New Speaker (39:23):
And it's probably also a really, uh, good point for me to insert too, because I do get asked a lot about gender age and trolling. Let's just begin with age because that one's easy. I find pretty much broadly, no relationship with age, sometimes a couple of cohorts that I found a negative relationships. So younger populations were trolling more, but by and large, it remains pretty nonsignificant. So they appear to be of any age. Now, gender is a bit more of a, to use your term dicey topic.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (39:55):
Mm-hmm .

Dr Evita March (39:55):
I have found really differential patterns of gender and trolling. When I began researching in this area, I would find that men were more compared to women, more likely to be trolling that has really changed a bit over time. Sometimes I find no difference. So when I looked at trolling on Tinder, I did not find any differences between men and women's perpetration of trolling. Sometimes I just collect samples where there's no gender difference. So I'm not too sure what's going on there. But one thing I do note is that it never emerges that women are trolling more than men. So it's either men are trolling more or there's no gender difference. It never emerges that.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (40:37):
Interesting.

Dr Evita March (40:37):
women are trolling more. So one, um, theory we had for this is that trolling and gender is context dependent or in another way of putting it platform dependent. So for example, perhaps men do troll more on say gaming platforms, maybe women troll more on, um, Facebook. So that platform may interact and obviously for Tinder, that they were trolling at the same rates.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (41:04):
I'm wondering if there seems to be a qualitative difference in the, in the way that trolling is performed based on gender, um, broadly, you know, if we think about aggressive behaviours, you know, of, especially in children, um, that difference between instrumental or emotional aggression, whatever else do we see that trolling is performed differently based on gender?

Dr Evita March (41:24):
Now, I can't say about trolling, but I can say that there has been some research done on cyber aggression and adopting an evolutionary perspective. This one study was published in 2019, which looked at what sex differences were in the, the type of content that received abuse online. And the researchers found that women do tend to experience more abuse that is appearance based, whereas men did experience more abuse about their status.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (41:53):
mm-hmm okay. So those gender differences are really more about who the target of the abuse is?

Dr Evita March (41:58):
Mm, Mm-hmm

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (41:59):
yeah. Interesting. You know, not that surprising, really like gender stereotypes and targeting. That dies hard too,

Dr Evita March (42:07):
it does. I know, right? We still observe that targeted difference or that gender target difference in online aggression, why it exists, why women are attacked more on physical appearance or physical characteristics and men more than on status. Look at evolutionary perspective would say, well, look at what they have prized throughout. Like women have been, or it received more value and importance for those physical characteristics. Whereas men for that status, even as a social, like adoption of explanation, like historically women have been prized for physical characteristics. Men are expected to have this highest status. So it makes it, you know, it's a target that can offend that sex. It might not be the type of abuse or aggression they engage in, but who the target is to determines what the content of the abuse will be.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (42:56):
Evita I think that we could literally keep discussing trolling for an extended period of time, but it, this might be a good point for us to kind of shift gears and think about cyber dating abuse. As another kind of problematic is probably a euphemism a problematic online behavior. What you've found in this area, how it links to an evolutionary perspective.

Dr Evita March (43:18):
My initial, uh, when I first started really considering intimate relationships online was the initiation period. So particularly online dating what a mess that is.

Dr. Jasmine B. MacDonald (43:31):
That's where we wrap up this episode with Evita about trolling. In the next episode, we talk about Evita's work in cyber dating abuse. For those of you at home, that's all for today. Show notes for the episode can be found at www.psychattack.com. If you've enjoyed listening to Psych Attack, please rate it on your favourite podcast platform and share this episode to help other people find the show. If you have questions or feedback, you can reach out on Twitter (@psychhattackcast). Thanks for listening. And we'll catch up with you again, next time.