The Psychology of Trolling

Cory of Gutless Pacifist has a great post up about what makes people troll, both in the blogosphere and IRL:

But the internet troll and the real life troll share the same frustration. Buried deep within each of us is an overwhelming desire to be understood and to be treated fairly, to be given the benefit of the doubt especially as we try to give others that benefit, to be tolerated as we try to tolerate and to have our basic human dignity respected. Trolling - whether driving by a blog to call people stupid or driving by a bus stop to call people fags - is a tremendous and distrubing affront to this. It goes beyond a simple indignity because it is someone making an actual effort to hurt you, to be unfair and to treat you intolerably even though you did nothing to them.

One could make all sorts of psychological hypotheses to explain it. Saint Augustine attributed his own youthful indiscretions as the desire to succor his own alienation from God and others by revelling in it. One inflicts pain because one is in deep pain themselves, whether or not they realize it. I'm also reminded of the episode of The Simpsons in which Bart wins an elephant from a KBBL Radio. At the end, a park warden attempts to explain that some animals become emotionally maladjusted because of traumas suffered in their past. Others, he notes as Homer starts headbutting him, are just jerks.