Who's Keeping You in Line Online?

The 'Disinhibition Effect'

Deirdre is a veteran of the online moderation business. She started moderating for America Online in 1996 as a volunteer. But still, she said, malicious posts, and the negativity they indicate, sadden her.

"If you look at the online community as sort of a metapicture of the bigger world, people's willingness and readiness and speed with which they devolve into name-calling ... would never, ever happen in the real life," she said.

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The most upsetting part, she continued, is that if people are bold enough to hurl hateful speech on the Internet under the veil of anonymity, then they must also think those thoughts privately and just never articulate them.

John Grohol, a clinical psychologist and founder of the online mental health resource Psych Central, explained Deirdre's observation.

"Psychology has identified what we call the "disinhibition effect" on online behavior," he said, adding that when people communicate through message boards, they do often say things that they wouldn't dare utter in face-to-face interactions.

"We tend to lose sight of the fact that behind those screen names there are people just like us," he said. Because we only see the words -- but know nothing about the person offering them -- we tend to slip more quickly into an emotional and argumentative mode.

That passion can often lead to a desire to proselytize, he said, which presents moderators with a tricky task: encouraging people to express their opinions without letting the conversations become flame-fests.

But assuming we don't let online dialogue forums deteriorate into verbal cesspools, some sociologists suggest that we actually need the culture clash.

According to Keith Hampton, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, a growing body of research shows that our social circles have become smaller in the past 20 years.

This loss of exposure to diverse opinions probably has some impact on our ability to deal with others, he said.

"It's opportunities like [online message boards] that expose us to these very strong opinions," he said. "Even if they are very strong, at least over time it helps us recognize that there are other people with other points of view and gives us strategies for coping with very strong opinions."