Profiles of Cyber Abusers

The King or Queen Bee - This type of bully ultimately seeks online power. S/he may or may not enjoy social humiliation as a goal unto itself, but humiliation is always the weapon of choice. This bully (a) drags their victim into a controversy or (b) spreads gossip, lies, and/or twisted half-truths aimed at maligning the victim in order to (c) stir up his/her Drones. The Drones do the majority of the work/bullying from there while the King/Queen sits back and enjoys the show.   The Drone - This type of bully is driven by the need for attention and/or validation. They don't possess bravery except in hordes or use critical thinking skills to separate fact from fiction. They typically rely on a King or Queen Bee for information. They will attack en masse even if they know the information is false because they (a) seek the K/Q Bee's approval and/or (b) derive a feeling of communal acceptance from their hive. The end result (attention, a sense of belonging, etc.) justifies the means and overrides all else for them. Examples.   The All or Nothing Egocentric - This type of bully believes they are more intelligent & sophisticated than their peers so any social, political, or religious viewpoint other than their own is dismissed and ridiculed. While the dismissal of conflicting viewpoints on subjects you strongly believe in is benign in and of itself, the AoNE won't just "agree to disagree" but will demean, ridicule, and harass their victims into silence.   The Social Justice Warrior - This bully can be difficult to differentiate from the All or Nothing Egocentric because the two behave and operate very similarly. It's also quite probable that most (if not all) SJWs are AoNEs, but not every AoNE is necessarily a SJW. The main difference between the two archetypes is the AoNE will argue the most trivial of points to the proverbial death because they cannot tolerate appearing anything less than all-knowing in front of their hives, while the SJW ultimately seeks attention and hive adoration. Because I did not coin the term Social Justice Warrior, I will defer to the Urban Dictionary's definition: "A pejorative term for an individual who repeatedly and vehemently engages in arguments on social justice on the Internet, often in a shallow or not well-thought-out way, for the purpose of raising their own personal reputation. A social justice warrior, or SJW, does not necessarily strongly believe all that they say, or even care about the groups they are fighting on behalf of. They typically repeat points from whoever is the most popular blogger or commenter of the moment, hoping that they will "get SJ points" and become popular in return. They are very sure to adopt stances that are 'correct' in their social circle. The SJW's favorite activity of all is to dogpile. Their favorite websites to frequent are Livejournal and Tumblr. They do not have relevant favorite real-world places, because SJWs are primarily civil rights activists only online." Examples.   The Tormentor - This type of bully may or may not be a King or Queen Bee, but s/he always derives gratification out of humiliating and/or terrorizing his/her victims. In other words, humiliation and/or torment are the main goal/s of this bully. The weapons of choice deployed by a tormentor tend to be (1) shaming (appearance, size, sexual orientation, race, handicap, etc.,) (2) victim blaming, (3) stalking, & (4) actions and/or threats of physical, emotional, mental, social, and/or financial harm.   The Stalker - This bully has a lot in common with a Tormentor, but the driving force behind his/her behavior is obsession with and/or jealousy of the victim. A Stalker is rarely a King or Queen Bee; s/he tends to be either a loner (operates without the support and encouragement of a hive) or a Drone. What makes the Stalker perhaps the creepiest of all cyber-bullies is their tendency to chart, graph, screenshot, and keep records of their target's online comings and goings, whether real or perceived. Because such little scientific scrutiny has been given to adult-on-adult cyber abusers in general, it is unknown how likely (percentage-wise) a Stalker is to escalate their behavior by (1) hacking into their victim's computers, social media accounts, etc., and/or (2) stalking their victim offline. Examples.  © Tina Engler, 2015 Profile Archetypes Last updated: November 15, 2015 What is Common to all Cyber Abusers

1. They love to dish it, but can't take it. The slightest criticism often sends them into annihilation mode.
2. The advice "don't feed the trolls" does not work in severe cases. (Click here to read what Pew Research considers a severe case.) You can ignore them and they will continue. You can defend yourself and they will continue. They will not stop until you are dead and rotting in the ground so take this seriously. I witnessed one Queen Bee (an adult woman in her forties) have her drones relentlessly attack an elderly woman until the victim suffered a heart attack. Then they made fun of that.
3. They believe, or at least convince themselves, the victim deserves the abuse dealt out to them. This phenomenon is basically the online version of the mini-skirt defense. 

Psychological Fallacies of Cyber Abusers

• Adaptive Bias: basing decisions on limited information and biasing them based on the costs of being wrong.
• Anchoring: the tendency to rely too heavily on one trait or piece of information when making decisions (usually the first piece of information that we acquire on that subject)
• Availability Cascade: a collective belief gains more and more plausibility through its increasing repetition in public discourse.
• Bandwagon Effect: the tendency to do (or believe) things because many other people do (or believe) the same.
• Backfire Effect: when people react to disconfirming evidence by strengthening their beliefs.
• Cheerleader Effect: the tendency for people to appear more attractive in a group than in isolation.
• Clustering Illusion: the tendency to overestimate the importance of small runs, streaks, or clusters in large samples of random data (that is, seeing phantom patterns).
• Confirmation Bias: a tendency to search for or interpret information in a way that confirms one's preconceptions.
• Conservatism Bias: the tendency to revise one's belief insufficiently when presented with new evidence.
• Dehumanization: the psychological process of demonizing a victim, making them seem less than human and hence not worthy of humane treatment. 
• Desensitization: a diminished emotional responsive to a negative or aversive stimulus after repeated exposure to it; especially true of Drones and Tormentors.
• False Consensus Effect: the tendency for people to overestimate the degree to which others agree with them.
• False Memory: a form of misattribution where imagination is mistaken for a memory.
• Halo/Horns Effect: the tendency for a person's positive or negative traits to "spill over" from one personality area to another in others' perceptions of them; the tendency to view people, especially strangers, as either all good or all evil.
• Illusion of Asymmetric Insight: when people perceive their knowledge of their peers to surpass their peers' knowledge of them.
• Illusion of Truth Effect: people are more likely to identify as true statements those they have previously heard (even if they cannot consciously remember having heard them), regardless of the actual validity of the statement. In other words, a person is more likely to believe a familiar statement than an unfamiliar one.
• Illusory Correlation: inaccurately perceiving a relationship between two unrelated events.
• Ingroup Bias: the tendency for people to give preferential treatment to others they perceive to be members of their own groups; this explains why Drones seek the approval/validation of the King or Queen Bee and/or their Hive.
• Irrational Escalation: the phenomenon where people justify increased investment in a decision, based on the cumulative prior investment, despite new evidence suggesting that the decision was probably wrong.
• Just-World Hypothesis: the tendency for people to want to believe that the world is fundamentally just, causing them to rationalize an otherwise inexplicable injustice as deserved by the victim(s).
• Mirroring: when a person subconsciously imitates the gesture, speech pattern, or attitude of another; this is typically present in Drones.
• Naïve Realism: The belief that we see reality as it really is – objectively and without bias; that the facts are plain for all to see; that rational people will agree with us; and that those who don't are either uninformed, lazy, irrational, or biased.
• Negativity effect: the tendency of people, when evaluating the causes of the behaviors of a person they dislike, to attribute their positive behaviors to the environment and their negative behaviors to the person's inherent nature.
• Negativity Bias: psychological phenomenon by which humans have a greater recall of unpleasant memories compared with positive memories.
• Objectification: treating a person as a commodity or an object without regard to their personality, dignity, or humanity.
• Projection or Blame Shifting: a defense mechanism wherein the abuser attributes their own shortcomings and failures onto their victims.
• Selective Perception: the tendency for expectations to affect perception.
• Self-Serving Bias: a tendency for people to evaluate ambiguous information in a way beneficial to their interests.
• Source Confusion: confusing episodic memories with other information; creating distorted memories.
• Stereotyping: expecting a member of a group to have certain characteristics without having actual information about that individual.
• Subjective Validation: Perception that something is true if a subject's belief demands it to be true. Also assigns perceived connections between coincidences.
• Suggestibility: a form of misattribution where ideas suggested by a questioner are mistaken for memory.
• System Justification: the tendency to defend and bolster the status quo. Existing social, economic, and political arrangements tend to be preferred and alternatives disparaged, sometimes even at the expense of individual and collective self-interest.
• Trait Ascription Bias: the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior, and mood while viewing others as much more predictable.
• Ultimate Attribution Error: an error wherein a person is likely to make an internal attribution to an entire group instead of the individuals within the group.