1.4. Social exclusion and online trolling
behavior neglect, aggressive behaviors, narcissism, psychopathy, sadistic, humor
While findings of the Dark Tetrad traits and internet trolling are relatively consistent across studies, it is important to keep in mind that other variables may be of importance as well: Naturally, behaviors can be influenced by individual (e.g., a sadistic personality) and situational (e.g., being exposed to aggressive behaviors from others) factors and this should also be the case for trolling behavior. For example, in a study in which trolling behavior was assessed by rating comments the participants made, the authors found that negative mood (and exposure to troll comments) triggers trolling behavior [To the authors’ best knowledge, most studies on trolling behavior neglect the investigation of external variables; however, one experiment showed that participants who were socially excluded through a mobile phone text messaging set-up with two other people wrote more provocative messages afterward [Hence, based on the prior research described above [H3: Participants who are socially excluded show increased immediate trolling motivation compared to people who are socially included.As shown in H4: Social exclusion and Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and/or sadism can predict immediate trolling motivation.The present study aims at expanding prior findings by (a) confirming the previously established predictive role of Dark Tetrad traits, (b) investigating the role of humor styles as predictors of global trolling behavior, and (c) testing the impact of a situational variable, namely social exclusion, on immediate trolling motivation. Based on these aims, we conducted an experiment using the Cyberball paradigm and tested the effects of inclusion and exclusion on the participants’ immediate trolling motivation.