Internet trolls are powerless without anonymity: By obscuring their identities behind random screen names, they can engage in hateful exchanges and prey on complete strangers without fear of retaliation. In doing so, they illustrate one troubling characteristic of humankind: People are shitty to people they don’t know.

Fortunately, curbing this tendency is extremely straightforward, scientists report in a new study.
Internet trolling

In a new paper to be published in Science Advances, a team of scientists reveal a simple solution for getting people to cooperate: “Removing the cloak of anonymity seems to go a long way towards making people more thoughtful about their actions,” Hokkaido University biophysicist and economist Marko Jusup, Ph.D., a co-author on the study, tells Inverse in an e-mail.