A behaviorist perspective on corporate harassment online: Validation of a theoretical model of psychological motives

Cyber harassment has been seen in the literature as a problem among school-aged children, or at the adult-level, as a legal problem involving attacks that have typically been associated with retaliation for some psychosocial or monetary gain. However, with the rise of the social networking phenomenon, cyber harassment has spread from school-aged children to a wider developmental and behavioral phenomenon. Companies and professionals are increasingly the targets of personal attacks on social network sites and in blog postings by “trolls” and “cyber bullies”. Thus rather than gaining information, these kinds of attacks often disseminate misleading or false information to damage their targets, to interfere with them, or for the purposes of extortion. We conducted a randomized field study of a bounded population into motivations that may lead people to conduct these kinds of attacks, we validated the model empirically, and we drew some potential behavioral responses along with implications for further research.