Higher Online Political Hostility in Less Democratic, More Unequal Nations

Quota sampling matched participants to age, gender and education distributions. Respondents answered surveys about political discussions in past 30 days and completed a risk-taking questionnaire identifying individuals willing to risk money, power or prestige. Follow-up experiments with 4,294 U.S. participants tested for social desirability bias, narrative priming and confirmed reliability of self-reported hostility.

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Countries with lower Liberal Democracy Index scores showed higher online victimhood. Higher Gini coefficients correlated with greater hostility; the United States was typical for a high-inequality nation. Across all samples, individuals hostile online were also hostile offline, indicating cross-domain consistency.

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The authors link heightened hostility to status-seeking motivation, a trait associated with aggression. Status-driven individuals were more common in less democratic societies, amplifying digital aggression. Young men emerged as the most hostile demographic, reinforced by younger populations in many low-democracy nations.

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Bor noted that the study extends earlier work in the United States and Denmark, showing that the same individuals tend to be hostile both online and offline. He emphasized research beyond Western contexts, especially toward the Global South, to capture internet-related conflict.

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The authors acknowledge that the design cannot prove causality; hostile online environments might also worsen offline inequalities. Reliance on self-reports rather than digital trace data introduces recall bias, and hostility-detection algorithms lack reliability across languages and cultures.

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While cross-national patterns are documented, the study cannot determine the direction between offline inequality and online hostility. The lack of longitudinal data and behavioral metrics leaves a gap in understanding how political or economic shifts might alter digital aggression over time.

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“Most people assume that there is something in the internet that brings out the worst in people,” Bor said. — Alexander Bor, Researcher

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“Yet, our research shows that for some people, those who have a strong status-drive, the internet is just another domain where they can be hostile.” — Alexander Bor, Researcher

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“We think this is the best way to compare countries, but admittedly, we are talking about subjective perceptions and objective hostility.” — Alexander Bor, Researcher

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“We study self-reports using survey questions and not actual behavior on the internet,” — Alexander Bor, Researcher

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The team proposes longitudinal studies to monitor how shifts in democratic freedoms and economic distribution affect online hostility. Bor also announced a five-year project on how moral intuitions shape support for democracy, indicating future work will integrate political psychology with digital behavior research.

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