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Members kef and einar have written about some recent research:
"A new study from the University of Manitoba has claimed that internet trolls might not be so nice or mentally stable in real life. While previous studies have shown that people with negative character traits are using the internet more frequently for their own amusement, not to socialize, the results seem to link trolling to sadism. Two surveys among amazon's mechanical turk users were conducted which allowed creating a character profile of the participants. Based on the profile, internet behavior could be correlated with different character traits. Trolling appears to be correlated to sadism.
From the study:
... correlations, sometimes quite significant, between these traits and trolling behavior. What's more, it also found a relationship between all Dark Tetrad traits (except for narcissism) and the overall time that an individual spent, per day, commenting on the Internet. ... To be sure, only 5.6 percent of survey respondents actually specified that they enjoyed "trolling." By contrast, 41.3 percent of Internet users were "non-commenters," meaning they didn't like engaging online at all. So trolls are, as has often been suspected, a minority of online commenters, and an even smaller minority of overall Internet users.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by EvilJim on Wednesday March 05 2014, @03:41AM
Actually this reminds me of the turk study on Americans belief that astrology was a science... it was entirely based on a flawed question, Americans didn't actually know the difference between astrology and astronomy, here it seems their definition of trolling is not the same as ours. they define it as 'causing chaos on the internet' whereas we might define it as baiting someone into responding to something they wouldn't normally respond to... not quite the same thing.