Mary Aiken - The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online

I am sitting on a hard, cold bench. My back is against a concrete wall in a police briefing room somewhere in South Los Angelesin a neighborhood known for gangs, crime, poverty, urban decay, and, twenty years ago, brutal race riots. It is 4:45 in the morning. I havent eaten anything for hours. Not a wise move. My stomach is churning, a combination of hunger, jet lag, and apprehension.

LAPD lieutenant Andrea Grossman begins the police briefingand explains how, in an hour or so, a special task force will be arresting the biggest human trafficker in the United States and one of Californias Most Wanted. About forty law-enforcement officers will be involved in the operation, a team of experienced professionals pulled from the FBI, Homeland Security, Internet Crimes Against Children (ICAC), the California State Police, and the LAPD. And then theres me, the one person at the briefing without a gun. Only sworn officers are allowed to carry them.

Back in Ireland, where Im from, it is rainy. The spring drags on, gray and wet. I think about my cozy office in Dublin, my library, my desktop computer, and my quiet academic life. Except my life is not so quiet lately. Over the past decade, while establishing myself as a forensic cyberpsychologist, I have traveled the world to meet with other experts in my field, conducted research, worked with law enforcement, attended conferences, and given hundreds of talks, seminars, workshops, and presentations. The field of cyberpsychology is new and still emerging, and each year it draws more interest. The sense of urgency is escalating. I think most of us who work on the front lines can feel it, along with a profound sense of loss of control. Our lives are changing, and human behavior is evolving. As a cyberbehavioral scientist, I believe this is because people behave differently when they are interacting with technology than they do in the face-to-face real world.

Some changes have occurred so quickly that it has become difficult to tell the difference between passing trends, still evolving behavior, and something thats already become an acceptable social norm. In this book, to make things simpler, I will be referring to face-to-face reality as real life or the real world to set it apart from cyberspace, although I am fully aware that what happens there can be as real as anything. New norms created online can migrate to real life. So what happens in the virtual world affects the real world, and vice versa.

Whenever I am asked to talk about my work, I start off with the formal definition. Cyberpsychology is the study of the impact of emerging technology on human behavior. Its not just a case of being online or offline; cyber refers to anything digital, anything techfrom Bluetooth to driverless cars. That means I study human interactions with technology and digital media, mobile and networked devices, gaming, virtual reality, artificial intelligence (A.I.), intelligence amplification (I.A.)anything from cellphones to cyborgs. But mostly I concentrate on Internet psychology. If something qualifies as technology and has the potential to impact or change human behavior, I want to look at howand consider why.

Time is not on my side. My work is always in a race with technology. This presents a major challenge to how academics normally study a phenomenon. As scientists, how can we possibly keep pace with the tech changes we are seeing in our lives, in our behavior, and in our society? A good longitudinal study, which looks at human behavior over time and allows a researcher to make conclusive scientific statements, can take anywhere from a couple of years to a few decades. Thats several lifetimes in tech-terms. And given what Ive seen already, particularly the new norms that are rapidly being created due to an accelerated form of socialization that I call cyber-socialization, I dont think we should sit around waiting for answers.

The good news: Some aspects of Internet psychology have been studied since the 1990s and are well known and documented. The effect of anonymity onlineor perceived anonymityis one example. Its the modern-day equivalent of that superhero power invisibility. The subject of some fascinating studies across many disciplines, anonymity has an impact that cannot be underestimated. It also fuels online disinhibition, another important contributor to other effects. I have been involved in a dozen different research silos, and have studied everything from organized cybercrime to cyberchondria, health-anxiety facilitated and amplified by doing online medical searches, and the one thing I have observed over and over again is that human behavior is often amplified and accelerated online by what I believe to be an almost predictable mathematical multiplier, the cyber effect, the E = mc2 of this century.

Altruism, for example, is amplified onlinewhich means that people can be more generous and giving in cyberspace than they are face-to-face. We see this phenomenon in the extraordinary growth of nonprofit crowdfunding online. Another known effect of cyberspace is that people can be more trusting of others they encounter online, and can disclose information more quickly. This leads to faster friendships and quicker intimacy, but it also means that people tend to feel safe when they arent. Due to online disinhibition effect (ODE), individuals can be bolder, less inhibited, and judgment-impaired. Almost as if they were drunk. And in this less-inhibited state, like-minded people can find one another instantly and easily, under a cloak of anonymity, which results in another effect: online syndication. I will explain these cyber constructs and effects in detail in this book, and they are described in a glossary of terms, but ultimately they will be fully understood and evaluated only by empirical scienceby undertaking intensive experimental studies, manipulating variables, and identifying cause and effect. But cyber isnt a lab with white mice and levers. We are talking about a complex matrix of human data that is manifested in a virtual context. It involves painstaking digital forensic and cyberbehavioral detail.