Science confirms: Online trolls are horrible people (also, sadists!)

Alec Baldwin reminds us of the troll's mantra.

New Line Cinema / Aurich Lawson

If you have siblings, you no doubt harbor a hint of the sadist; who hasn't delighted in getting the occasional rise out of a younger brother by petting his cat after he ordered you not to do so? (To take one, ahem, utterly fictional example that is not in any way drawn from my childhood.) But your run-of-the-mill backseat pokers, hair pullers, and forbidden cat petters don't generally grow up to spend large portions of their time harassing total strangers on the Internet in search of "lulz." They don't, in other words, turn into Internet trolls.

That's because the true troll has a lot more of the sadist hidden deep inside than you do, gentle reader—at least according to a new study, "Trolls just want to have fun," which appeared in the academic journal Personal and Individual Differences. The Canadian researchers behind the study conclude that "online trolls are prototypical everyday sadists... For those with sadistic personalities, [their] ideal self may be a villain of chaos and mayhem—the online Trickster we fear, envy, and love to hate: the cyber-troll."

Rise of the Tetrad

Though it sounds awesome in an "evil magician" sort of way, the Dark Tetrad is actually a set of four "noxious" personality traits: narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy, and sadism. Professors Eric Buckels, Paul Trapnell, and Delroy Paulhus hypothesized that online trolls would rank highly in Dark Tetrad traits, and they set out to test the idea with surveys administered both to Canadian students and to random users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk program (the latter group receiving fifty cents per person for their trouble).