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people are talking about online trolls especially people like us to have to
deal with it
all the freakin time so researchers at george mason university
I at the George Mason University Center for climate change
and communications should be very specific up wanted to do a survey to see
how troll psychologically impact people that participate online
so the survey in about 1,000 183 people
and they had these people look at an article that
you know has to do with climate change and the comments on that article are
either littered with trolls
or their literate littered with up people there may be reasonable arguments
or whatever it is right
they found out that if you read comments
that go out of their way to make you feel stupid or dumb or put you down and
make it seem like you're argument doesn't make sense
you're actually more likely to believe an argument that you initially made in
the first place
it is not going to change your mind is just going to make you are it's just
going to reinforce whatever it is that you believe in the first place yet
well I think so we just a few weeks ago I think we reported on a new study has
been done several times
about how %uh when presented with information showing that a fact you
believe isn't true it will double down on it
and so we understand the imposing sort of conflict on people
will make them love you there policy preferences values and slightly
different ways
so we knew that already but it's very interesting to find out that the
comments
underneath an article can help trigger that definitely and that
yeah in I mean we have to deal with this ourselves I'll
the time and i actually I was aware that it could make me double down on
something that I already said on the show but you kind of have to open
yourself up to another perception even if someone's calling you done it yet
I you just have to say okay well this person is being very insulting however
they may have a point what if I DM a dumb idiot maybe I haven't
know maybe when i sat on the show was wrong or maybe my perspective
should be tweaked a little bit so you have to be open to
the criticism without letting the stupid in Salt get under your skin
up and I should be clear at the articles that they gave the respondents had to do
with nanotechnology
yeah so I don't want US I think that their climate change article so they
look at the net and I don't act technology article
and then be read the comments and I depending on whether or not they were
trolls
you know the either double down with the RT believed on nanotechnology is
or they are more open minded to chain yeah and that that's an important
a shut I guess just a minute that's an important distinction to make because
but with nanotechnology people don't go into the article having very strong
opinions
and so it's but they're already there doubling down so we take similar climate
change or people already have strong opinions we should expect to affect to
be even stronger
now what is interesting to me about this is that
but when we worry about trolls who worry about insulting trolls
but this is about actually changing what impact a scientific or
opinion based article will have on people and if you're hosting a site or
if your host YouTube channel and you're trying to educate
or persuade and then these people that you're allowing them to reside
underneath your content are totally undercutting the whole point of what
you're doing
he leaves the interesting question of should you ban it and in fact popular
science just today announced that they're getting rid of their comments
section
because they've read research like this and they're trying to educate the public
in
they're not forced because the first amendment rights to provide a venue or
forum
for people to completely undercut their mission and they're getting a lot of
pushback
based on that I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it