The world of internet trolling is a tangled web of personality quirks, brain chemistry, and environmental triggers. In this deep‑dive we unpack the top 10 factors that motivate trolls to stir up trouble, from classic dark‑triad traits to the subtle sway of mood and context. Buckle up for a fun yet scholarly tour through the science behind the snark.

Understanding the Top 10 Factors Behind Trolling

10 Narcissism

The DSM‑5 defines narcissistic personality disorder as a long‑standing pattern of grandiose self‑importance, a relentless craving for admiration, and a striking lack of empathy. Those who meet this diagnostic criteria often employ an arsenal of abusive tactics: from verbal assaults and manipulation to emotional blackmail, gaslighting, and even the silent treatment. They may also resort to character assassination, privacy invasion, and subtle forms of control such as “hoovering,” which is the practice of pulling a victim back into a relationship.

The impact on victims can be severe. Narcissistic abuse is described as toxic, traumatizing, and capable of eroding a person’s sense of reality. Victims frequently report intrusive thoughts, flashbacks, avoidance behaviors, and a persistent feeling of hyper‑vigilance. In the long run, they may develop cognitive difficulties, behavioral issues, and profound emotional distress, mirroring symptoms of post‑traumatic stress disorder.

Because the tactics are so varied and insidious, those on the receiving end can find themselves questioning their own sanity, struggling to differentiate between reality and the distorted narrative imposed by the narcissist.

9 Machiavellianism

In psychological terms, Machiavellianism describes individuals who are laser‑focused on their own interests, willing to manipulate, deceive, and exploit others to achieve personal goals. These people often have little regard for ethics, opting instead for whatever strategy—flattery, false promises, or outright criminal activity—that will keep them out of the line of fire.

Unlike narcissists, Machiavellians do not crave the spotlight; they prefer to pull the strings from behind the scenes. Their modus operandi includes competing rather than cooperating, mastering the art of deception, and even using romance as a strategic tool. They excel at presenting a charming façade while secretly orchestrating outcomes that serve their agenda.

Surviving a Machiavellian encounter calls for self‑care, acceptance of personal limits, and reliance on trusted allies. Adopting a mastery mindset—focusing on one’s own objectives rather than trying to outplay the manipulator—can help preserve mental health and authenticity.

8 Psychopathy

Psychopathy, closely linked to antisocial personality disorder, is marked by a pervasive disregard for others’ rights, often manifesting as hostility, aggression, deceit, and manipulation. Psychopaths are known for “weaponizing charm,” using compliments and praise to win trust before pulling the rug out from under their victims.

These individuals can effortlessly lie, act, and prey on kindness. They often mirror the values of their targets, presenting a false moral front while secretly engaging in cruelty, especially in romantic contexts where kindness alternates with harshness. Many report feeling an internal emptiness, sometimes rooted in past trauma.

Early detection is key. Watching for red flags—such as excessive charm, inconsistent stories, or a pattern of exploiting others—can help protect potential victims, who should trust their instincts and seek professional guidance when needed.

7 Schadenfreude

Schadenfreude is the simple, yet unsettling, pleasure derived from another’s misfortune. It appears in everyday moments—like laughing when someone spills coffee—or in more malicious contexts, where observers revel in the humiliation of others.

When combined with the dark‑triad traits of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy, schadenfreude amplifies the troll’s motivation. The blend of self‑importance, manipulative skill, and delight in suffering creates a potent cocktail that drives the most venomous online comments.

6 Negative Social Potency

Negative social potency captures the enjoyment some trolls get from being cruel, callous, and using others for personal gain. Research from Michigan State University shows that users of platforms like Facebook and Snapchat can become addicted to the thrill of embarrassing or angering others.

The more a person engages in trolling, the stronger the reward response becomes, reinforcing a cycle of cruelty and addiction. Understanding this dynamic can help psychologists devise interventions aimed at breaking the feedback loop.

5 Environment and Genetics

Genetics and upbringing both play pivotal roles in shaping traits like narcissism. The Mayo Clinic points to specific gene variations—such as tryptophan hydroxylase‑2—that correlate with personality disorders, while twin studies reveal that identical twins raised apart share more traits than fraternal twins raised together.

These findings suggest a strong genetic component, but they also underscore the importance of environmental factors, such as family dynamics and early life experiences, in the development of trolling‑prone personalities.

In short, while you may inherit a predisposition toward certain traits, the environment can either amplify or mitigate the likelihood of turning those traits into trolling behavior.

4 Brain Damage

Childhood brain injury can erode the neural foundations of empathy and emotional regulation. Damage to the insular cortex—the region responsible for compassion—alongside abnormalities in the hippocampus and amygdala, can cripple a person’s ability to process shame, guilt, and fear.

When these structures are compromised, individuals may struggle to handle their own emotions, leading to a chronic state of anxiety and a heightened propensity for aggression. This neuro‑damage can be exacerbated by abusive parenting, creating a vicious cycle where trauma begets further neural impairment.

Importantly, not every narcissist has a history of brain injury, and not every brain injury results in narcissistic behavior; however, the link highlights how biology and environment intertwine in shaping trolling tendencies.

3 Neurobiology

Recent research by Dr. Royce Lee of the University of Chicago Medicine reveals that narcissistic personality disorder is associated with heightened oxidative stress in the bloodstream, which in turn may fuel interpersonal hypersensitivity. This raises the chicken‑and‑egg question: does the disorder cause oxidative stress, or does chronic stress trigger the disorder?

The study suggests that oxidative stress can impair the recognition and expression of shame, making individuals more reactive to perceived slights. This neuro‑biological perspective reframes narcissism as a medical condition rather than merely a character flaw.

Understanding this link opens the door to potential medical interventions—targeting oxidative stress could, in theory, lessen the intensity of narcissistic drives that power many trolling episodes.

2 Mood and Discussion Context

A peer‑reviewed study shows that a negative mood, when paired with a heated discussion environment, can double the likelihood of trolling. Participants who observed hostile troll posts entered a more irritable state, making them more prone to respond with similar aggression.

The researchers concluded that mood and context together explain trolling behavior better than any single personality trait. In other words, even a generally well‑adjusted individual can slip into troll mode under the right (or wrong) circumstances.

1 Other Environmental Factors

Beyond the dark triad, a host of environmental influences fuel trolling. The online disinhibition effect—where anonymity and a screen barrier create a false sense of security—lets trolls act without immediate repercussions. Tribalism, perceived threats to personal beliefs, and conditioning (where sadistic tendencies are rewarded) further intensify hostile behavior.

Practical defenses include building strong social support, refusing to feed trolls, and using platform tools to block or mute abusive users. By removing the audience and the reward, many trolls lose their motivation to continue.

As the stoic philosopher Epictetus wisely said, “Any person capable of angering you becomes your master; he can anger you only when you permit yourself to be disturbed by him.” Let’s keep that wisdom in mind and refuse to hand trolls the power they crave.

When we talk about the 10 factors made the Black Death so deadly, we’re diving into a perfect storm of biology, environment, and medieval mishaps that turned a regional disease into a continent‑wide catastrophe. Below is a ranked rundown of each contributing element, complete with vivid details and original illustrations.

10 Easily Carried by Fleps

For most of its evolutionary history, Yersinia pestis, the bacterium responsible for the plague, was no more mobile than Ebola or tuberculosis, so outbreaks seldom occurred, were confined to small areas, and claimed lower numbers of victims. That was back when human‑to‑human transfer was required for the disease to spread. At some point in recent millennia, a change in the genetic landscape of Y. pestis occurred that gave it some serious wheels: It developed a resistance to toxins in the gut of the flea.

This gave it the ability to spread with and thrive within fleas as they traveled the globe on the backs of rats, cats, and otherwise. With this newfound vector, the Black Death was able to spread far beyond where it had beforehand. The rest is history.

9 Filthy Living Conditions

Imagine a world with no sewers, no running water, and rats. Lots of rats. Where rats are found, fleas tend to follow. In the middle years of the 14th century, the odds were good that many of those fleas carried our good friend Y. pestis. If you were living anywhere in Europe, Asia, or North Africa at the time, the odds were also quite good that you lived in squalor and had little (if any) means of avoiding contact with the plague or anyone infected with it.

In Europe, in particular, people lived in close quarters with one another and often shared their living spaces with all sorts of vermin. They seldom washed, and they lived close to their own filth. Gone were the baths, sewers, and aqueducts of Roman times. Returning to prehistoric levels of filth left the people ripe for infection.

8 The Silk Road

Named for the luxuriant threads spun by the Asian silkworm that merchants carried along its 6,400‑kilometer (4,000 mi) span, the Silk Road was founded during China’s Han dynasty. Though the route was a marvel of commerce and diplomacy and allowed for the exchange of goods, languages, ideas, and customs between just about every society from the Atlantic to the Pacific, it also served as a superhighway for infectious diseases.

Historians and epidemiologists alike agree that the plague started somewhere in present‑day China or Mongolia and then followed the Silk Road and had reached Crimea by 1346. Though outbreaks of bubonic plague had occurred before in recorded history, most notably in the Plague of Justinian in the sixth century, they hadn’t occurred in a world half so connected as that of the mid‑1300s. With the blessings of trade and cultural exchange came the curse of microbial exchange.

7 The Siege of Kaffa

Whereas the Silk Road was a peaceful means by which the Black Death made its way to Europe and Africa, the Mongol conquests of the High Middle Ages were a far more cataclysmic vector. Beginning with the rise of Genghis Khan in the late 12th and early 13th centuries, the Mongol conquests took Eurasia by storm. Within the lifetime of Genghis, the Mongols, masters of the horse and composite bow, had laid waste to an unspeakably large swath of land stretching from the Korean peninsula to Hungary. After Genghis Khan died, the empire fragmented into different factions, called khanates, held by his numerous sons.

One of these divisions, the Golden Horde, stretched from Siberia into Eastern Europe. It covered the Crimean Peninsula, in which lay the city of Kaffa. A group of Italian merchants was granted special privileges for the control of Kaffa, which proved beneficial for the Mongols in that it gave them access to European markets. After relations between the Italian merchants and the natives began to deteriorate, the Mongols laid siege to Kaffa.

During the siege, the Black Death began to make its way through the Mongol ranks. Rather than letting the disease get the best of them, they made it work for them. True to form as masters of murderous ingenuity, the Mongols loaded the plague‑ridden corpses of their soldiers onto their catapults and launched them over the city walls in an early instance of germ warfare. This, of course, brought the plague into the city, just as the merchants were fleeing back to Sicily. It is generally agreed that the siege of Kaffa was a watershed moment for the expansion of the Black Death into Europe.

6 Climate Change

Many experts argue that climate change, not fleas and vermin, was the preeminent culprit for the deadliness of the Black Death. Whether or not it was the foremost factor, it certainly had a part to play. The onset of the pandemic coincided with the end of the Medieval Warm Period, an era of warmer summers and milder winters lasting from about 900 to 1300. The period allowed for more bountiful harvests and made people less susceptible to illness.

Researchers have determined that this stretch of mild weather was caused by an alteration of global heat distribution through changes in pressure systems. The normalization of said systems pushed much of the Northern Hemisphere back into a cooler, rainier period, which led to lower crop yields and cold, wet conditions that left people far and wide ripe for the plague.

5 Famine

When the Black Death came around, it had the proverbial red carpet rolled out for it to come in and wreak havoc, and famine had a huge part to play in that. In the early years of the 14th century, a period of hunger aptly dubbed “the Great Famine” struck the entirety of the European continent, ranging from Italy to Russia. The famine, which started in 1315, was triggered by an unusually cold winter, which gave way to an unusually cool and rainy spring and a subsequent summer, which followed suit. This, of course, decimated crop yields across the continent, and people were left starving. An estimated 10 to 25 percent of Europe’s population perished in the two years that followed.

Though the severity of the famine had abated a bit by 1317, the cooler, wetter conditions lingered through the decades leading up to the Black Death, and people were left malnourished, with weakened immune systems that could do little to stave off the ravages of Y. pestis.

4 People Were Already Weak From Other Diseases

As previously mentioned, the citizens of mid‑14th‑century Eurasia were already weak and hungry by the time the plague rolled around. Therefore, it would stand to reason that they were often sick in the years leading up to the big show, which, of course, they were. Diseases like typhus, smallpox, and tuberculosis thrived in the confines of their immunodeficient hosts, leaving them weak, weary, and ill‑equipped to resist the plague when it came around.

From studying the corpses of plague victims, researchers have determined that many of those who died from it were concurrently ill with the aforementioned diseases and more. They were killed by a terrible cocktail of contagions.

3 Medieval Medicine Was Lacking

One of the foremost accounts of the Black Death was issued to King Philip VI of France by the medical council of Paris. It claimed that the Black Death was caused by an unfortunate alignment of three planets in the heavens, which caused the spreading of a “great pestilence” in the air. People genuinely thought that the black, festering sores and internal bleeding wrought by the plague were brought on by bad air. One can imagine how such a society might have fared in treating a profoundly infectious disease to which it had never been exposed.

Between the iron grip of the Catholic Church on the scientific community, the loss of medical advancements made by prior civilizations such as the Romans and Greeks, and a general inclination toward superstition, medieval medicine was no match for the Black Death.

2 It Had Three Different Forms

As deadly diseases went, the Black Death was something of a Swiss Army knife. It didn’t just go after the blood or the lungs or the lymphatic system—it went after all three, in various forms and stages. Scientists have identified the plague as having three different types: bubonic, the most common and best‑known, which caused lymph nodes all over the body to turn into bulbous, black pustules; septicemic, which infected the blood; and pneumonic, which ran the lungs afoul.

All three forms were accompanied by acute fever, and victims often vomited blood. It’s no surprise that a virulence so versatile had such a prodigious kill rate.

1 No Natural Immunity

Ever catch a case of the plague? Smallpox? Tuberculosis? The answer for just about everyone reading is almost certainly no. You probably don’t know anyone who’s been infected, either. You can thank immunization and, in some cases, eradication for that. However, circa 1350, there was no plague vaccine, and the disease was so novel that most people had essentially no natural resistance to it. If people had been exposed to it intermittently over thousands of years, as was the case with afflictions like smallpox, their immune systems might have been better prepared, and the lives of millions could have been spared.

As it stood, no such luxury was afforded, and all but those who avoided infection altogether and a lucky few who bore beneficial mutations that gave them a greater degree of resilience to Y. pestis were doomed to perish. The genetic legacy of the Black Death is evident today, as researchers have discovered that roughly ten percent of Europeans are immune to HIV, a benefit that they believe to be a genetic relic of the mutation that saved their ancestors from one of the closest things to an extinction event that modern man has ever seen.