they were made anonymous and encouraged to be cruel.

Sounds more like that "appeasing the master" complex that society foists on people.

i'll make my half-baked anecdotal observation here, with no real hard science to back it up: my experience from being bullied in school tells me women (well girls, i guess) are easily twice to three times as aggressive as men, and probably ten times more intentionally cruel. boys tended to get bored and were usually more silly than downright mean, but the female pecking-order bullshit is relentless.

and some of them never grow out of it, they just become more sophisticated and sly with the taunts and nastiness.

that's just my experience tho. i'm sure it doesn't jive with everyone's. and no, i'm not bitter. not at all.

*pulls lfr's pigtails and runs away* : )

::calls Pips on the phone:: Hey Pips, what's going on? Hey, did you see what Becky was wearing in school today? Wasn't it ugly? You thought it was ugly, right? HAHAHAHA I KNEW IT! SEE BECKY, PIPS THINKS YOU'RE UGLY!!! Talk to you later :-D

I think it's more that girls learn emotional skills early, and when you're sophisticated enough to know exactly how your actions emotionally affect others, but not mature enough to care, really, then bad things can happen.

They do keep coming up with these studies that "show" that aggression is the single only major difference between the sexes, that boys/men always test higher for it than girls/women. Since every other "Boys are this way, girls are that way" difference has been shown to be societal bias, I have a feeling that the aggression difference will collapse soon, too -- mainly, I think, because girls are aggressive in ways that male researchers haven't historically recognized.

I suspect there's something in what you say, Miko, about anonymity giving women freedom. I also think there's something about the medium of the internet, the tone that happens when a group that's majority male is also majority anonymous, that can turn everyone uber-aggressive really fast.

Which is not one of the medium's stellar features, as far as I'm concerned.

I'm also in the midst of a few conversations with friends on the Kathy Sierra thing, and on online harassment of women in general, so I'm a bit annoyed at the Net this morning.

I just realized that some of what I said was totally contradictory. I guess I mean that the culture of a lot of online communities prizes aggression in the same way that men stereotypically do -- the one-upsmanship, the random mocking/taunting, the lack of easy forgiveness -- which is something both men and women then end up engaging in because "that's how you talk on the internet." Which is something that kept coming up with people defending the Sierra nonsense -- she needs a thicker skin, that's just how the internet is, etc. (And I saw that from women, as well.)

I don't like it, I tells ya.

This actually kind of makes sense. In general the guys just tease eachother to sort of learn 'the code': don't be a crybaby, don't snitch, etc. until teasing and ball-busting becomes the general male way of communicating.And generally if you fight back, even if you lose, you gain respect (or self-respect at least). But girls...they wage little wars against eachother.

(and like occhi, said, big sweeping generalizations, etc.)

mischief, it's more than just appeasing the master, because the anonymous ones were more cruel than the identified ones, though they had the same directions. Obedience to authority was certainly at play as it was in the prison experiment, but the added variable of anonymity in a controlled setting produced different results, so the difference might reasonably be credited to the changed variable.

What interested me was that girls' aggression gets channeled into subtle actions, the kinds of things that TPS and lfr were joking about, so it sometimes doesn't even appear as aggressive to others who aren't tuned in. Because girls are socially penalized to some degree for being directly aggressive, or even assertive, they learn to be indirectly aggressive. So it's interesting that once they weren't identifiable, and therefore there would be no social penalty placed on them as individuals, the girls were willing to crank up the electroshock. I think the thing that made the difference was that they knew they wouldn't be able to catch the rejecting criticism from their peers that would usually be expected.

"mischief, it's more than just ..."

Fine! Pick me out of all the comments. I'll be in my room watching the second disc of "Clarissa Explains It All".

In general the guys just tease eachother to sort of learn 'the code': don't be a crybaby, don't snitch, etc. until teasing and ball-busting becomes the general male way of communicating.

exactly. and we are all socially driven creatures, regardless of our politics. despite our best intentions, we have to survive as social creatures, therefore society and social 'imprinting' definitely colours our daily interactions.

i absolutely found that male 'code' was far easier and more 'friendly' (for me) to decipher and use than the female ones as a kid, and as a rule it was always the dudes who befriended and stuck up for me (it was easy to earn their respect, all i had to do was catch the biggest fish, beat them at games or pull off some particularly brave, random or crazy prank) so i became more male-socialised. likely why i grew up such a tomboy / adrenaline junkie / skater punk and to this day tend to be naturally at home with the locker room ball-busting and prankishness of male socialisation than with the gossip / relationship / acquisitions-fuelled discussions of female society.

i agree that there's so much 'women are this way, men are that way'... and that in a perfect world we'd just say 'people tend to do... blah'. stereotypes and generalisations do persist for a number of complex reasons. like i said, we all live in society and have to function as a part of it. any wild-eyed activist hippie kid who's been forced by necessity to cut their dreads / hide their ink / wear culturally acceptable clothing can tell you this. i don't take a position that this is right, wrong or indifferent. it just is.

not that all this blather has ANYTHING to do with anonymity, mind you (sorry, Miko, for the long derail).

as regards anonymity and the internet(s), well... it can be argued that all of my internet handles over the years have been pretty unisex. reasons for that can be inferred.

Actually, Miko, the 1969 Zimbardo study seems to have only used female subjects, separated into two groups, one with anonymity and one without. As you mentioned, the group with anonymity became much more aggressive, but this, in and of itself, says nothing about gender (i.e., whether anonymity increases aggressiveness more in females than it does in males). One can't, therefore, draw any conclusions about the "secretiveness" of female aggression, per se, from this study. It may simply be that people, in general, male or female are more aggressive given anonymity. Perhaps if the study was repeated with males, it might give a clearer picture of gender, anonymity, and aggressiveness.

It's MetaChat! Derails welcome, usually.

I had a similar experience growing up, lfr. After the girls generally stopped doing things I understood, like jumping rope, the 'female' rules became confusing and hard to master. The daily drama of inter-girl politics was befuddling and exhausting. The male rules seemed simpler. In addition, by seventh and eighth grade I enjoyed the company of boys more because (for example) at lunchtime most of the boys actually did things, whereas many of the girls spent their leisure time sitting in a circle under a tree.

Pips, the conclusion of the study was about the power of anonymity, I realize. I'm definitely just speculating about what the anonymity might have meant for women. It does indicate that there's no widely shared internal threshold for aggression among women, though. The study shows there are conditions under which women will be less agressive and conditions under which they'll be more aggressive, and finds they'll be more directly aggressive when anonymous, which is just interesting on its face. It could well be true that the results are exactly the same for men.

But the indirectness of female aggression has been studied and written about enough that I'm taking that as sort of a given. You're right; it would be interesting to compare females and males to see what differences there might be.

by seventh and eighth grade I enjoyed the company of boys more because (for example) at lunchtime most of the boys actually did things, whereas many of the girls spent their leisure time sitting in a circle under a tree.

hallelujah, amen.

i'd definitely be curious to see the outcome of a randomised study of this sort with both genders. i think it might go a ways towards defining how PEOPLE interact in anonymous situations.

i will freely admit i've used the anonymity of the net on discussion forums to be more of a tool than I (typically) am. it's just so tempting sometimes. and often it's in situations where escalation is the norm and often expected. teenage-boy-gamer syndrome, to wit.

whereas many of the girls spent their leisure time sitting in a circle under a tree.

well, the guys did that, too, but we were usually passing a joint.

I was always such the tomboy, too. I just could not understand why the girls at sleepaway camp would rather go back to the cabins for showers than go sailing. I mean, sailing!

*sits down in jon's circle with box of girlscout cookies*

Hmmm.... Even in the office where I work (which contains 200 people, none of whom are anonymous) people are still inclined to be assholes when they use e-mail. I'm pretty sure that just not seeing the person you're attacking is enough to make it easier to do. If there's a perceived benefit to attacking someone then that makes it more likely too. For example, some idiots think if they treat me like shit then their computers will get fixed sooner (these people must live a life of perpetual dissapoinment). Online some people think they'll go up the pecking order or achieve greater infamy if they attack other, more prominent members of the community.

Now I think of it, when Milgram did his Obedience to Authority tests they did play around with the proximity of the person administering the shocks and the "shockee".

* goes to get the book *

Ah yes, here we go.

Victim unheard: 65% obedience
Victim heard in other room: 62.5%
Victim in same room: 40%
Victim's hand has to be held on metal plate: 30%

So if we ignore the stuff about obedience, we can see that people are quite happy to kill another person, even if they hear their screams, as long as they're not in the same room.

[BTW, I also see that women didn't fare any better than men in Milgram's experiments]

Us humans are a strange bunch.

That was an interesting article, mainly because I learned for the first time that he was dating the person who objected. I hadn't caught that detail previously, only that he was shocked into his realization by "a colleague". (I wonder what happened to them... it doesn't sound promising.)

Also, what a pussy. Shuts down his experiment for a woman.
See, that's part of the point too. Right?

I totally wondered the same thing, stilicho. I heard him talking about that on Democracy Now last week...first time I'd ever heard mention that he was dating the girl who was repulsed by the experiment. The way he phrases it, he shut it down because she had a pretty powerful argument: that his own obedience to the experimental ideal was causing him to behave just as evilly as his supposed subjects.

WikiPedia says the girlfriend married Zimbardo and is now a professor at Berkeley.

Sort of the ultimate accountability, there.