- Title
- An exploration of trolling behaviours in Australian adolescents : an online survey
- Creator
- Marrington, Jessica; March, Evita; Murray, Sarah; Jeffries, Carla; Machin, Tanya; March, Sonja
- Date
- 2023
- Type
- Text; Journal article
- Identifier
- http://researchonline.federation.edu.au/vital/access/HandleResolver/1959.17/194661
- Identifier
- vital:18394
- Identifier
-
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0284378
- Identifier
- ISSN:1932-6203 (ISSN)
- Abstract
- To understand why people “troll” (i.e., engage in disruptive online behaviour intended to provoke and distress for one’s own amusement), researchers have explored a range of individual differences. These studies have primarily been conducted in adult samples, despite adolescents being a particularly vulnerable group with regards to both being trolled and trolling others. In this study we aimed to (1) explore Australian adolescents’ experiences of trolling, and (2) replicate adult research that has constructed a psychological profile of the Internet troll by examining the utility of personality traits (psychopathy and sadism), self-esteem, empathy (cognitive and affective), and social rewards (negative social potency) to predict adolescents’ trolling behaviours. A sample of 157 Australian adolescents (40.8% male, 58% female, 0.6% non-binary) aged 13–18 years (M = 15.58, SD = 1.71) completed the Global Assessment of Internet Trolling-Revised, Adolescent Measure of Empathy and Sympathy, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, Youth Psychopathy Traits Inventory-Short Version, Social Rewards Questionnaire, Short Sadistic Impulse Scale, and a series of questions related to the experience of trolling. Results showed in the past year, 24.2% of Australian adolescents reported being trolled and 13.4% reported having trolled others. Gender, psychopathy, sadism, self-esteem, cognitive empathy, affective empathy, and “negative social potency” (i.e., enjoyment of antisocial rewards) combined, explained 30.7% of variance in adolescents’ trolling behaviours (p < .001). When accounting for shared variance, gender (male), high psychopathy, and high negative social potency were significant predictors of trolling, aligning with findings of adult samples. Contrary to adult samples, sadism was not a unique predictor of adolescents’ trolling. For adolescents, the variance in trolling explained by sadism was nonsignificant when controlling for negative social potency. These similarities, and differences, in predictors of trolling across adult and adolescent samples may play a critical role in the development of targeted interventions to prevent or manage trolling. © 2023 Marrington et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
- Publisher
- Public Library of Science
- Relation
- PLoS ONE Vol. 18, no. 4 April (2023), p.
- Rights
- All metadata describing materials held in, or linked to, the repository is freely available under a CC0 licence
- Rights
- https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
- Rights
- Copyright © 2023 Marrington et al.
- Rights
- Open Access
- Subject
- MD Multidisciplinary
- Full Text
- Reviewed
- Funder
- A University of Southern Queensland Capacity Building Grant (Project Number: 1007582) for the amount of AU$7712.27 was awarded to JZM, EM, CJ, TM, and SM. The grant was used to support this research through employing a research assistant, to purchase gift cards for participants, and to partially fund open-access publication. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. The authors would like to acknowledge all the adolescents who participated in this project.
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