Why Are People Meaner When They're Anonymous? The Online Disinhibition Effect

Quick answer: why are people meaner online when they're anonymous?

• Psychologists call it the online disinhibition effect. John Suler (2004) broke it down into six factors.
• Disinhibition has a toxic side (harsh words, mockery) and a benign side, where people finally open up about things they'd never say offline.
• In experiments, anonymity itself wasn't the strongest predictor of hostile posts. Lack of eye contact and the tone already set in a thread (group norms) predicted it better.
• It's less about being a bad person and more about conditions. On a bad-mood day, in a thread that already opened with nasty replies, pretty much anyone gets harsher.
• The realistic fix is changing the conditions, not relying on willpower. A short pause to picture the other person's face before you post, or closing the thread on a rough day.

Picture someone who types "Sounds good, thanks!" into Slack about twenty times a day. When a ridiculous proposal comes up in a meeting, they keep a straight face. In the group chat, they think twice about which emoji to send. Then at 11 p.m. they open Reddit or some anonymous forum, and their fingers turn into someone else's. In the finale thread for a show they've been watching, they write "the writers clearly lost their minds." Under a casting announcement, they leave a half-sarcastic comment. It feels great in the moment. The next morning, when a reply shows up in their notifications, it's a little awkward.

That doesn't mean they have a split personality. The way people change in anonymous spaces has been studied for over twenty years, and the experiments tend to point at the situation more than the person. Still, "that's just how the internet is" lets you off a bit too easily, because the person posting pays a cost too. Once you know which conditions loosen your words, you can start steering around them.

Screens take the brakes off (the online disinhibition effect)

In a 2004 paper, psychologist John Suler named the tendency to say and do looser things online than face to face: the online disinhibition effect. He listed six factors.

1. Dissociative anonymity: the sense that "this isn't really me." The you behind the username feels separate from the you in real life.
2. Invisibility: they can't see your face, and you can't see theirs. No wince, no frown, so no signal to stop.
3. Asynchronicity: replies don't come right away. You can post and close the app without having to deal with the reaction.
4. Solipsistic introjection: you read their words in your own head voice, so they start to feel less like a real person and more like a character in your thoughts.
5. Dissociative imagination: the online world feels like a separate game, where what you say doesn't follow real-world rules.
6. Minimization of authority: job titles, age, and status mostly disappear, so there's less reason to watch yourself around people above you.

Suler's main point was that these factors combine differently depending on the situation, even for the same person. That's why someone who's careful on Facebook or LinkedIn can sound totally different on an anonymous board. Small design choices, like whether there's a real name, a profile photo, or how fast replies come in, change how hard the brakes grip.

There's a clear limit here, too. Suler's paper is a conceptual piece built from clinical observation and theory. It didn't measure how much each of the six factors actually matters. That was left to the studies that came after.

It's not only the ugly stuff (benign vs. toxic disinhibition)

Suler split disinhibition into two kinds. Toxic disinhibition is the insults, mockery, digging up personal info, and piling on. Benign disinhibition is when anonymity lets you say something you'd never say offline.

A lot of popular posts on anonymous boards start with some version of "I've never told my parents this." A panic attack. Losing out in a salary negotiation. A breakup after years together. Dozens of strangers leave thoughtful replies, and sometimes the person who posted finds the strength to keep going. In Adam Joinson's (2001) experiments, people chatting by computer disclosed more about themselves than people talking face to face, and the effect was stronger when they couldn't see each other.

The key is that the same conditions produce both. Anonymity makes it easier to open up, and it makes it easier to lash out. So "anonymous communities are toxic" and "people are just more honest when anonymous" are each only half right.

Sometimes harshness gets mistaken for honesty. If a comment that starts with "I'm just stating facts" puts more effort into tearing someone down than into the actual facts, that's less honesty and more brakes off.

Eye contact mattered more than names (anonymity, invisibility, and gaze)

So which of the six factors is strongest? Noam Lapidot-Lefler and Azy Barak (2012) paired up 142 adult strangers and had them discuss a dilemma over online chat and agree on a solution. They varied whether people shared their names (anonymity), whether they could see each other on webcam (invisibility), and whether they looked each other in the eye (eye contact).

The results were a little surprising. When the three factors were analyzed together, the one with a clear overall effect wasn't hiding your name. It was the lack of eye contact. Without eye contact, participants reported more hostile expression, and threats counted by raters in the chat logs nearly doubled (from an average of 0.33 to 0.63). Anonymity bumped threats up a little too, but its effect was smaller. The researchers suggested that a good chunk of what we've been lumping together as "the anonymity effect" actually comes from not seeing the other person's eyes.

This study has limits. It was strangers in a lab having a short discussion, which is a long way from a community where people have used the same handle for years. But the general direction, that words get harsher when you lose the sense that there's a real person on the other end, lines up with other research.

You pick up the tone of the room (group norms)

If you've spent time on anonymous platforms, you already know this: even when everyone's anonymous, every board has its own temperature. On some subreddits, snark is the default. On others, everyone's careful and polite.

Leonie Rösner and Nicole Krämer (2016) tested this in the lab. Participants commented on a blog post while the researchers varied whether they were anonymous and whether the existing comments were aggressive or not. What drove people to use more aggressive language was the tone of the earlier comments. Anonymity on its own had no direct effect, though anonymous participants did show a tendency to follow an aggressive tone more closely. The theory behind this is the social identity model of deindividuation effects (SIDE). The idea is that anonymity doesn't make you lose yourself and go wild. It makes you follow the norms of the group in front of you more strongly.

Justin Cheng and colleagues at Stanford and Cornell (2017) added mood to the picture. In an online experiment, putting people in a bad mood with a hard puzzle, or showing them a discussion that already had troll comments, each raised the chance that they'd write a hostile comment. When both conditions were combined, that chance roughly doubled. Then they looked at comment data from a large news site and found more flagged comments late at night and early in the week, when people's moods tend to dip. The paper's title says it plainly: "Anyone Can Become a Troll."

So a lot of the harshness can be explained less by "that's just who they are" and more by conditions stacking up: a low-mood day, walking into a thread already full of nasty replies. That doesn't mean individual differences don't exist. It means personality alone leaves a big part unexplained.

Venting feels good, but it leaves something behind (the cost of anonymous spaces)

Plenty of people say it feels great to unload on an anonymous board. But the belief that venting anger makes it go away doesn't hold up well in research. In Brad Bushman's (2002) experiment, angry participants who hit a punching bag while thinking about the person who'd made them angry were actually more aggressive afterward than people who just sat quietly. It was a lab setting, so it's worth being careful about applying it directly to online comments. But it's fair to say there's weak support for the "let it all out and you'll feel better" formula.

The cost builds up on the poster's side, too. A few common patterns:

• You can't say anything unpleasant to people offline, so you swallow it, then dump that anger on some random target online. And the person you actually needed to talk to still hears nothing.
• When someone replies with a rebuttal, you end up stuck on it for hours. The asynchronicity felt comfortable at first, but that comfort is gone the moment the notification arrives.
• As the board's tone becomes second nature, sarcasm starts slipping into your offline conversations.

If the first one sounds familiar, how to set boundaries when you can't say no is worth reading alongside this. The words that get stuck face to face and the words that pour out anonymously often come from the same place.

Things to try before you hit post

Telling yourself "I'll be nicer" is less realistic than poking at the conditions above, one at a time.

• Before posting, read your comment out loud as if the other person were sitting across from you. It's the eye-contact experiment in reverse. In three seconds you'll know whether you'd say it to their face.
• On days when your mood is at rock bottom, don't open argument threads. If Cheng and colleagues are right, that version of you is closer to a troll than usual.
• Skip posts that already have twenty nasty replies, or if you go in, decide ahead of time not to match the tone. In Rösner and Krämer's study, the tone of earlier comments was the strongest factor.
• After posting, turn off notifications for about an hour. If you don't reply to pushback right away, most arguments cool off on their own.
• Keep a note of topics that set you off online again and again. If the same targets keep coming up, like a certain actor, a certain generation, or a certain kind of job, that's probably more about you than about the board.

That last one often turns out to be the most useful. The spots where you keep getting sharp are usually tied to feelings you've been holding down offline. One trap to watch for: big resolutions like "I'm deleting the app for good" rarely last more than a few days. Something small, like turning off notifications, tends to stick.

How do you cope when things get uncomfortable?

Anonymous spaces are also where your least polished habits for handling stress show up. Some people cope with sarcasm, some with jokes, some by going completely silent. If you're curious which defensive style feels most familiar to you, the Discover Your Defense Style test is a good place to start. The result isn't a diagnosis. Think of it as something to reflect on about which way you lean in uncomfortable situations.

If you're being harassed online, or comments are costing you sleep and shaking up your daily life, try not to deal with it alone. Nothing here is a diagnosis, and if the heavy feelings keep going, talking to a professional is a good idea. If you're in crisis, you can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US) any time, or contact your local emergency number. Outside the US, findahelpline.com lists support lines by country.

What slips out of you on an anonymous board isn't your "true self." Some nights, that same app is the only place you can say what's really on your mind. Tonight, when you open a comment box, it's enough to notice whether your thumb pauses for a second over the send button.

References

• Suler, J. (2004). The online disinhibition effect. CyberPsychology & Behavior, 7(3), 321–326. https://doi.org/10.1089/1094931041291295
• Joinson, A. N. (2001). Self-disclosure in computer-mediated communication: The role of self-awareness and visual anonymity. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31(2), 177–192. https://doi.org/10.1002/ejsp.36
• Lapidot-Lefler, N., & Barak, A. (2012). Effects of anonymity, invisibility, and lack of eye-contact on toxic online disinhibition. Computers in Human Behavior, 28(2), 434–443. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2011.10.014
• Rösner, L., & Krämer, N. C. (2016). Verbal venting in the social web: Effects of anonymity and group norms on aggressive language use in online comments. Social Media + Society, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116664220
• Cheng, J., Bernstein, M., Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, C., & Leskovec, J. (2017). Anyone can become a troll: Causes of trolling behavior in online discussions. Proceedings of CSCW 2017, 1217–1230. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998213
• Bushman, B. J. (2002). Does venting anger feed or extinguish the flame? Catharsis, rumination, distraction, anger, and aggressive responding. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 28(6), 724–731. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167202289002