This particular Facebook post did not indicate who these psychologists were who determined habitual Internet commenting correlated with hateful personality pathologies. Or how it was the amount of time spent doing so somehow related to sadism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism.
Machiavellianism? Making a lot of comments has you being Machiavellian? As in a scheming prince of a manipulator?
I have actually observed a person with a very hateful personality who did do a lot of online commenting who did come across as a bit of a psychopath. But Machiavellian? She was far too stupid to be Machiavellian.
Anyway, this Machiavellian online commenter thing somehow led me to an effect I had not heard of before, that being the Dunning–Kruger effect. A blurb from the Wikipedia article about this very serious effect....
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias wherein unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly assessing their ability to be much higher than is accurate. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their ineptitude. Conversely, highly skilled individuals tend to underestimate their relative competence, erroneously assuming that tasks which are easy for them are also easy for others.
Interesting, the illusory superiority part of this Dunning-Kruger effect thing also describes the aforementioned inept psychopath with the hateful personality.
The online comments of that particular psychopath do come across as hateful, mean-spirited, trying to start a fight, frequently called a "troll", yet more than anything, coming across as an ignorant, stupid, know-it-all.
Wait a second. Am I describing myself?
Anyway, I'm done being Machiavellian now.....
