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Alicorn comments on A Suite of Pragmatic Considerations in Favor of Niceness - Less Wrong
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It may not be too weak. In the ancestral environment, everybody you could consider being mean to was probably in the room with you at the time. They could hurt you, and if you were frequently mean, the other people in the vicinity would back them up. All we need to explain why people are mean, on the Internet and in civilized societies where assault is fairly uncommon, is a mechanism that ties the disposition to be nice to the power of the other person to do you harm.
This hypothesis makes good predictions in general, although I think it's a subconscious phenomenon and therefore subject to cues and priming as well as the other's actual power to retaliate.
I can't find it now, but I read a study where some form of antisocial behavior (perhaps it was keeping everything in a one-shot trustee game) became less common when the victims could see the perpetrator, even when no retaliation was in fact possible (and the perp knew it). So joining a faceless and pseudonymous community should be a perfect recipe for disregard of niceness and other cooperative instincts.
Like I said, the hypothesis makes good predictions.
So should we add avatars to LW?
I think they'd be visually distracting; LW isn't otherwise full of pictures. Additionally, a lot of people using avatars on the internet apart from Facebook do not use their own faces, or even real faces that don't belong to them; if I attached a little picture of a unicorn to my name, would that have the same effect?
Please, please, no!
I imagine they'd be visually distracting and take up page space, but if it's considered that the civility benefits of having available faces attached to names are significant, there's ways to mitigate that- have a user's avatar or profile picture appear when rolling over a user's name, for example, instead of being displayed on every comment whether you want to see it or not. Or some similar solution for making them immediately available but unobtrusive.
Absolutely. At least support Gravatar.
Indeed, and is hardly a novel observation. For instance, a well-regarded--though slightly more informal--presentation of the hypothesis was published here (Holkins & Krahulik, 2004).
I think to be complete we need a more detailed exposition of the payoffs of meanness.
It's a signal that you aren't scared of being retaliated against. Which can be a pretty powerful signal. It means you're too valuable to lose and don't think you'll be attacked, or that you're very good at defending yourself and can afford to get into an altercation.