Dear Haters, you aren't going to like this...
Some night, early 2010’s, Molly McNearney, Jimmy Kimmel and I were sitting at our computers. I started reading some mean tweets people were sending me online:
”You look like Micheal Jackson. I hope you die.”
”Hello Voldemort, you Canadian idiot. Go back.”
Jimmy began reading his mean tweets to me.
Molly swiftly turned the moment into a segment for JIMMY KIMMEL LIVE! called, “Mean Tweets”
Like my time of being “snarky” in the early 2010’s, Mean Tweets was also put to bed after a run. Being mean and talking about being mean felt bad. Who wants to feed that energy, in 2024? I wonder.
And my wonder turns to psychology.
I get hate, death threats, crazy DM’s, haters, trolls, cyberstalkers, cyberbullies. I have dealt with it since around the year 2000.
After receiving a paranoid hate letter this morning, (will post later in this newsletter) I contacted a psychologist friend.
I asked the doctor, “What do you make of the psychology of haters?”
She sent me this article:
From: PERSPECTIVE article
Defining Online Hating and Online Haters
Volume 12 - 2021 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.744614
A hater is a person who routinely engages in hating behavior and it is reasonable to assume that such persons typically possess a common set of psychological features. It is also reasonable to assume that the characteristics of haters would be different than those common for people who engage in the other kinds of online behavior that were described above [trolling, hate speech, cyberbullying]. While haters are likely to share some features with trolls, for instance, they are unlikely to share all of them. For instance, as both hating and trolling may result in upsetting people, these are unlikely to be engaged in by people with high or typical affective empathy. But at the same, while a troll will likely score high on cognitive empathy – without this he or she will not be able to accurately predict what will provoke people (Golf-Papez and Veer, 2017; March and Marrington, 2019; Moor and Anderson, 2019), this is not necessary for a hater. Similarly unnecessary for a hater are Machiavellianism, i.e., “a tendency to strategically manipulate others,” and narcissism, which are in turn typical for cyberbullies (Goodboy and Martin, 2015), and those engaging in hate speech (Withers et al., 2017), respectively.
Unfortunately, there is almost no research on the psychological features of haters, and the existing literature tells us only that haters are characterized by a low sense of self-identity, self-awareness, self-control (Chao and Tao, 2012), lack of confidence (Bishop, 2013), psychopathy (Sorokowski et al., 2020), high psychoticism mediated by cognitive distortion blaming others (Pace et al., 2021). The present research on hating (and its resulting definition of hating behavior) may anchor and provoke further studies, which could be based on the proposed systematization
When haters are hating, they are displaying:
A LOW SENSE OF SELF-IDENTITY
A LOW SENSE OF SELF-AWARENESS
A LOW SENSE OF SELF-CONTROL
PSYCHOPATHY
HIGH PSYCHOTICISM MEDIATED BY COGNITIVE DISTORTION
Here is an example of something like this…