It is much commented on that there is far more anger, acrimony, and ascerbic speech online than in real life. There is, of course, more than one reason for this. Anonymity reducing people’s normal inhibitions is a commonly cited one, and there is, no doubt, some truth to it. Sometimes a lot of truth. But I think that an often under-appreciated aspect to this is the non-interactive nature of online interaction. The people we interact with online don’t react like we’re build to expect them to, and that screws with our social instincts.

In normal human interaction, that is, interactions that take place face-to-face with people in the same place, the person listening reacts to what the other person is saying through body language. But they don’t wait to react; they react while the other person is speaking. And we look for this while we’re speaking. In the normal course of events, the other person’s reactions as we’re talking may well change how we finish our sentences, to say nothing of what the next sentences are. If we are saying something important to us, we look to see that the other person is giving us their full attention—a sign that they understand the importance of what we’re saying. And here’s the crucial part: if we don’t see that they get how important this is, we amplify our intensity.

That might mean using greater volume, or it might mean using intensifiers like “dirty words”, or it might mean intensifying the thing being said. A person might go from “there’s a problem” to “There’s a !@#$ problem” or they might go to “This is a catastrophe.”

If that doesn’t work, the next intensifier available is to indicate that the relationship between the speaker and the person listening is threatened. This will tend to take the form of insults, because a person is only willing to insult someone that they are willing to do without. This is true in theory much more than in practice, of course; a great deal of insulting is really an attempt to signal where things are headed rather than to indicate where they currently are.

If we consider the nature of online interactions, it should immediately jump out that they all lack real-time feedback. But unlike previous technologically-intermediated means of communication, such as books and letters, the online ones feel far more immediate. When you write a book or a letter, you know that, if you get a response, it will be days or weeks in the future. Online, you might receive a reply in the time it takes someone to type a sentence. This can kick our processing of what they say into real-time processing, as we prepare to immediately respond to them. But our real-time processing relies very heavily on the many aspects of communication apart from the words being spoken and it’s easy to forget how much of the person’s response we actually lack.

We lack it first because most of the time we’re using text so there is neither tone nor cadence nor facial expression nor volume conveyed, all of which are very important to understanding how to interpret the words. The other problem is that the space limitations of text mean that we have to pick and choose what we respond to in what the other person said. But this act of picking and choosing, coupled with the lack of facial expressions/body language as they were speaking, means that they got precisely zero feedback on everything else they said.

It is extremely easy, under these circumstances, for people who have shifted into real-time processing to take this as complete indifference to their attempts to communicate the importance of what they were saying. When this happens, their instinct is to do what they would do in person—amplify and exaggerate.

The instinct to exaggerate, here, is really about accuracy within a context. If a person who is hard of hearing doesn’t hear you, the polite thing to do is to repeat yourself. If you’ve ever had a loved one who suffered from hearing loss in the age before ubiquitous hearing aids, this might get to the point of almost shouting into the person’s ear so they can hear you. In like manner, if you say that a problem is a problem and the other person pays no attention, and you say it’s a catastrophe and they pay no attention, and finally you say that the world is about to end and they finally rouse themselves to listen to you, the intention is to clearly communicate that there is a problem, not to stimulate them into a panicked rush. (This is distinct from people who use exaggeration in order to achieve disproportionate effects, but these people usually start off exaggerating, they don’t start off reasonable. And even the approach meant to accurately calibrate to the insensitivity of the other is fraught with problems, and I’m only trying to describe it, not defend it.)

The other thing that people may do when they perceive that the importance of what they’re saying isn’t being appreciated, you will recall, is to start indicating that the relationship is in danger of being breached. That is, they may start insulting the other person to get their attention.

I suspect that this explains more than a little bit of the acrimony that we see online.