There are so many stories about people who have caused themselves endless trouble through one (or, sometimes, several) indiscrete tweets that I hardly need recite them for you. If you’re a Twitter user, or even if you just keep up with that odd area of news where tech meets celebrity, you’ve already heard a heap of them. If you’re one of the very few who haven’t heard examples of the tweet gone wrong, try this one (a more mild example) from a thoughtless cafe owner in the midst of a local tradegy:
http://socialmediatoday.com/suzannevara/178609/how-not-use-twitter-tweet-gone-bad
But what leads some people to tweet things that are obviously going to cause them grief in pretty short order? Are they drunk? Just stupid? Well, maybe, but psychologists also point to a phenomenon called the online disinhibition effect. In simple terms, this refers to people acting differently online than they do in “real” life (that is, in person).
Disinhibition is the loss of a person’s usual inhibitions as a result of some kind of stimulus. The stimulus could be alcohol, drugs, or many other things, but in the case of the online disinhibition effect, the stimulus is the online world itself. The effect is something that does not manifest in Twitter alone - any kind of online communication tool can provide the stimulus. The effect of the..errr..effect…is to cause a person to lose the usual inhibitions (that little, often sensible, voice in their head that says, “Nope, better not do that”) that prevent them from breaching accepted social mores, such as avoiding racist or sexist language, censoring themselves before the profanity-laced tirade begins, and such protective mechanisms. What a person may not dare to say in a group of colleagues in the office, or at a dinner party, or wherever, can come spilling out online.The lack of obvious and immediate sources of negative consequences can lead to a complete abondonment of their usual restraint, or at least a loosening of it.
To be fair, the online disinhibition effect is not always a negative. It can lead an otherwise shy person to open up to others, to take risks they would not normally take in person to get to know others and widen their social circle. History shows, however, that it certainly can have profoundly negative results - such as the woman who, while tossing up a job offer from Cisco, tweeted a summary of her dilemma that amounted to “Do I take the big paycheck and do work that I hate with a company I hate?” As is the way with the worst of these examples, decision makers at Cisco found out, and the job offer quickly disappeared. I suppose that made the woman’s decision much easier.
Generally, there are six factors that contribute to the online disinhibition effect:
1. Anonymity
2. Invisibility
3. Stop/start communication
4. Voices in one’s head
5. An imaginary world
6. No authority figures who could punish us
There is a good summary of all six factors here if you’d like to read the details of each.
There is a fairly simple way we can avoid the problems that others have experienced, though, and it arises from simply learning from their mistakes. Knowing the six factors that lead to disinhibition in online communication, take the time to think about whether they are actually true or just a convenient illusion. As the consequences suffered in some of the more famous tweet-based cock-ups show, the feeling of security that could be afforded by the six causes listed above is most certainly an illusion. When communicating online with others, take the time to ask yourself whether you would be comfortable to see the contents of your communication printed on the front page of a newspaper or on your most frequently used website. If considering that leaves an uncomfortable feeling, maybe you should think again before you hit the post button.
- January 27
- , 2011
