Quote from: KedP on June 23, 2011, 05:26:25 AM

bitsalame - I'm a psychology nerd too, and I've found that it's almost impossible to discuss even basic psychology with most people on the internet. Especially internet forums.

My hypothesis is that internet forums are a social ghetto for neurotic people, and almost any kind of psychology discussion that deals in facts is threatening to someone reading.

It hits home, it makes them think of possibilities they hadn't considered, and is generally just dangerous to their idealized self-images. Half the people in these internet forums think they are automatically informed on any topic because they know how to google, or because they read a crappy news article once.

Their self-esteem defence mechanism is always a poorly cobbled together recitation of logical fallacies (which they mis-apply) and shallow wikipedia scans which they misinterpret.

Follow the adage: "Never argue with an idiot. They'll drag you down to their level and beat you with experience."

Yeah, I know.
I am also fascinated with the "troll" phenomena in Internet... but I am against labeling them as "idiots" (although I call them idiots in their faces, lol), most of them are inexperienced young guys (and I emphasize males).
You can tell that they are still adolescents by the way they ask questions and the way they reason: they are purely theoretical, mainly because they haven't experienced life enough (ie. getting a job, washing their clothes, living alone, making their own food, researching in academia, etc...)
Older people have the "empirical" experience of life so they don't make "stupid questions".

The best sign is when they suggest us to learn "logic" (especially when we provide empirical or correlational evidence), they love debating semantics (as a fallacious rhetoric recourse), they have difficulties recognizing formal and informal fallacies (unfortunately there are adults who never learn), they wonder about what is real and what is not (it might hint some psychosis if they are adults), and my favorite: they try to define technical terms with a dictionary or find "proofs" with Wikipedia (that one is cute).
Profiling them is a piece of cake, if all of above is true: the range of their age are usually around 17 to 20.
Also the internet makes us more neurotic (troll) than in real life fueled by the anonymity because we have no real accountability for bad behavior on the net. The same effect has in mobs in real life, the more diluted our identity, the crazier things we do.

Anyhow, I better be going, I am glad to have found another "psychology nerd", KedP Wink