Web Rage: Why It Happens, What It Costs You, How to Stop

CIO — Two companies had formed a joint venture to develop a new telecommunications product. Engineers in both companies were hard at work, but the project itself was stalled.

The reason? A consultant we know diagnosed the problem this way: "Engineers on each side never saw each other," he told us, let alone coordinated their work on the project. "The two sides just e-mailed their irritations to each other. They were having a flame war."

Flaming, of course, refers to an e-mail message that comes across as rude or otherwise annoying, and a flame war happens when the recipient of such a message flames back, leading to an arms race of insult. Flaming is but one of numerous ways a lack of social intelligence can sabotage the use of technology, especially when it comes to working with others together online. Any IT manager takes a risk that a group's efforts will falter if he ignores the psychological dimension of social computing.

Flaming is a symptom of a larger malady-an epidemic failure of social restraint. The same syndrome seems at work in bloggers who take a perverse glee in attacks and threats (such as those recently against blogger Kathy Sierra), who somehow see Web rage as cool. In games like The Sims (an online role-playing environment), "griefers" are players whose goal is to ruin the experience for other players. In chat rooms and on Listserv discussions, "trolls" take pleasure in baiting people into pointless arguments that waste time and energy. And of course, no business environment would be complete without some opportunity for passive aggression, which may be expressed in a variety of ways, from answering a critical e-mail late (or never), or providing only partial or obtuse answers that force a questioner to re-ask her question in increasingly picayune detail.

Why People Are Rude Online
There is a technical name for this unsociable behavior in cyberspace: the online disinhibition effect. All cases of cyber-rudeness would be far less likely in face-to-face interaction, where subtle, mainly nonverbal cues help us govern our responses to others. Neuroscience diagnoses the mechanics behind flaming as a design flaw in the interface between the online world and the brain's circuits for reading and responding to another person.

When we talk in person, massive numbers of parallel neural circuits process emotional signals and let us decide instantly what to say or do. A crucial hub for this adaptive bit of empathy is the brain's orbitofrontal cortex, which both conducts this social scan and helps orchestrate our response so an interaction goes well. Patients with damage to this circuitry are unable to censor their unruly impulses—they will make mortifying gaffes or insult people. In essence, they flame while face-to-face.

For individuals with an orbitofrontal cortex that is operating normally, a fleeting frown or a lilt in tone of voice is the basis for "mind sight," which lets us sense what the other person feels and thinks. But short of a two-way webcam conversation, the online world lacks a channel for such in-the-moment cues from voice, facial expression and posture that the social brain needs to navigate well. Without those cues, we become "mind blind"—unable to sense what the other person thinks and feels—and thus more prone to send a response that seems "off."

The Costs of Mind Blindness
The cost of mind blindness isn't just measured in rude behavior—it also robs us of some of our most powerful tools for decision making. Consider asking a question in e-mail and getting back "No" as an answer. Does that No mean "My first answer is no, but I could be talked into it" or "Absolutely not"? Face-to-face, we are able to read all kinds of nuance into seemingly concrete answers—we know a "Yes" from a "Yeah, sorta," and we can tell a "Maybe" that means "I'm thinking about it" from a "Maybe" that is just a polite refusal. Online, No is merely No, and considerably less informative as a result.