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Brian: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. My next guest is Dr. Mary Aiken, an Ireland-based leading expert in the emerging field of cyberpsychology, which is the study of how technology impacts human behavior. She also advises global police agencies such as the EU's law enforcement agency, Europol, as well as the FBI. In her new book The Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online, Dr. Aiken documents some of the effects the internet has on human behavior. She joins me now to discuss some of the findings in her book and also provide some cyberpsychoanalysis about how the internet is impacting the presidential election. Dr. Mary Aiken, welcome to WNYC.

Mary: Thank you, Brian. Good morning.

Brian: One of your examples is that people tend to be less inhibited online because of the anonymity the internet provides. I think a lot of people know about this because there's ugly bullying online that people may not be comfortable with in person, but your book points out how this behavior online can affect in person behavior. Can you give us an example?

Mary: Yes, what we've seen is that we've seen loss of empathy online, in terms of studies and surveys and we've also seen increases in narcissism and narcissistic behavior. The important point is that what happens in a cyber context or what happens on the internet is not confined to that domain. It actually can affect what we call the so-called real world as well.

Brian: An example of this is something you call it paraphilia, which means behavior beyond usual or typical love, what's paraphilia?

Mary: Paraphilia is a clinical word for fetishistic behavior in terms of fetishes and effectively, in the book actually, I write about the book Fifty Shades of Gray. I discussed that I actually started to read it, but had to stop about 50 pages in. It was ethnographic research, but it's certainly not something that is my choice of read. The point I was making is that when you popularize sadistic behavior or masochistic behavior, really that can be quite risky because ultimately, you can be talking about clinical conditions and you can't try some types of drugs a little, you can't try S&M behavior a little either. You don't know what you might be getting into and where the behavior may lead.

Brian: Another thing you write about is cyberchondria, what's cyberchondria?

Mary: Cyberchondria is anxiety induced by escalation during health-related search online to review morbid or serious content. What does that mean? You have a headache and you start searching online for headache and you suddenly jumped to brain tumor and start to actually experience anxiety as a result.

Brian: That's becoming more and more common?

Mary: It is, yes. The problem is that people have a predisposition or an instinct to actually look at the worst-case scenario probably to eliminate it. If you went to your doctor and said I have a headache and he said, it could be anything from a hangover to a brain tumor, you would say, "Oh my goodness, talk to me about the brain tumor," and effectively that's what happens online because the ranking algorithms that underlie search, they're based on a frequency model. Things that are frequently searched and clicked are the things that get served and in fact, if you put any body part into search, you're likely to get pages of tumor and cancer.

Brian: There's a chapter in your book titled "Designed to Addict," where you discuss how the internet in itself is set-up in a way that gives users a comparable feeling to playing the lotto. Why do you compare it to lotto, with a lottery?

Mary: The "Designed to Addict" piece is really about how we interact with technology. For example, the average person checks their cell phone 200 times a day. In terms of the science behind that, we really put that to variable ratio and intermittent reinforcement aspects of technology, which is a fancy way of saying that the technology can be like a giant slot machine, that every so often you get delivered a great results so you get that fantastic texts that you're waiting for or you get some praise from your boss, or you hear about some great gossip.

That is far more compelling to get random good news or good results. Then if every result was good or every result was bad, but I'm not somebody who really believes in internet addiction. I discussed this at length in the book, because if we're talking about addiction, then the only treatment is to abstain and we can't abstain from air. We can't abstain from drinking water. In this day and age, we certainly can't abstain totally from engaging with technology.

I write about it as a problem of adaptation and the problem behaviors that we see related to technology. I described them as cyber maladaptive behavior. The good news about maladaptive behavior is just learning, just like learning to stop biting your nails when you're anxious, you can actually do something about

Brian: How about positive impacts on behavior of the internet. Are there any?

Mary: Absolutely. There are many good things about technology in terms of the democratization of knowledge, in terms of connectedness, in terms of altruistic behavior online, for example, crowdsourced fundraising, but in the opening chapter, I say, look we know about the good things. Why, because we have an army of marketeers out there q43 telling us it's all good. I wanted to write a book that was going to actually introduce some balance into the debate and say, yes, we know about the good things, but here are some of the problems and more importantly, here's what we can do about it.

Brian: Now we get to the election because your book wasn't written to tie into the US presidential election, but you wrote an article for Time. I see titled, Welcome to the troll election, Donald Trump is the King under the bridge and you wrote, "Trump's success as a presidential candidate is a vivid example of what you call cyber socialization." What is cyber socialization?

Mary: Everybody was, I suppose, initially quite shocked when that particular candidate came at us with misogynistic comments and hate speech and racist remarks and particularly in Europe people were saying, goodness why, how can people tolerate that speech in this day and age? My argument was, well, it's quite predictable really because the internet has actually normalized some of this content, sadly, but it has normalized.

You referred to earlier to the power of anonymity online. Anonymity online is a superhuman power. It is the power of invisibility. We talk about invisibility in mythology, but that comes with great responsibility. Invisibility is fueled by online disinhibition people always say things online that they would never say in the real world. My real concern is that that online environment has created an appetite and a tolerance for very, very negative sentiment.

When you see somebody being successful, as Trump has been in terms of the whole nomination process, I think it's really a terrible pissy, not just for the political process, but for people like me, who spent my time trying to teach children, not to cyberbully or teens not to troll. When you see a political figure use cruelty as a strategy and appear to be successful as a result of it, it makes our jobs so much harder.

Brian: I see that you wrote in that Time Magazine article that Trump's schoolyard taunts and cruelty, changing the conduct of other candidates does-- I'm sorry, let me say that right. That Trump's schoolyard taunts and cruelty actually changed the conduct of other candidates who may not have been inclined to that. Here's a clip from a rally. Marco Rubio held in February, which is an example where he wound up behaving like Donald Trump.

Marco: He says that I'm sweating all the time. It's hot in here. Am I sweating now? No. Why? He doesn't sweat because his pores are clogged from the spray tan that he uses. Donald is not going to make America great. He's going to make America orange. Now, the other thing he says, he's always calling me little Marco and I'll admit, the guy, he's taller than me. He's like 6' 2", which is why I don't understand why his hands are the size of someone who's 5' 2". Have you seen his hands? They're like this. You know what they say about men with small hands--

Brian: We all know by now what that's supposed to refer to. Marco Rubio admitted being embarrassed by that whole episode and wished that he had never sunk to that depth. Is that an example of what you're talking about?

Mary: I think so. The point that I think is quite sad is that the office of president of America, it's not only the highest office in the land here in the US, but as somebody who's not American who lives outside this country, and I don't have any votes or any say in what's been happening in this election. I think it just lowers the status of the office for people to engage in name-calling and these schoolyard tactics that we try and teach children not to engage in this behavior. How on earth are they supposed to know what the right thing is to do when they see this behavior at this level?

Brian: What are you doing with the FBI? I gather you're consulting them and also the European police agency, Europol.

Mary: Europol, I'm the academic advisor in cyberpsychology to Europol. I explore what's called higher-level architectures of behavior manifested in the cyber context. In terms of looking at creating typologies of behavior, I've just finished a project where I was principal investigator, where we were examining youth pathways into cybercrime. We were looking at hacking as a phenomenon. I would talk to the FBI in a similar way in terms of exploring these cutting edge evolutions of behavior and understanding them.

For example, if you have a 13-year-old boy who's got incredible tech skills, and they're upstairs in their mother's bedroom in the house, and they're engaging in what we call cyber juvenile delinquency in terms of say exploratory hacking behavior. They then enter into domains like the deep web, which is a very bad neighborhood online, and their talents and skills are exploited by organized cybercriminals. Is that child then a criminal or a victim or both simultaneously.

I would argue as a society that we haven't done enough to educate these young children, to educate their parents in terms of what is acceptable behavior online in terms of technical curiosity, and the line between that and breaking the law. We can't rush to criminalize and to prosecute when as a society we have failed to identify in the schooling system, identify their talent, nurture it, mentor it, reward them, and also to clearly make them aware of the line between acceptable behavior and criminal behavior.

Brian: Mary Aiken is an Ireland base leading expert in the emerging field of cyberpsychology. She is now the author of the Cyber Effect: A Pioneering Cyberpsychologist Explains How Human Behavior Changes Online. So interesting. Thank you very much.

Mary: Thank you, Brian.

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