1962 study: Subjects divided in two groups, both angered. The study cohort believed their frustrater had been harmed and experiences less emotional tension than the control group. Of note, the group who enjoyed hostility catharsis did not become friendlier.
I don't think it's a shocking observation political hostility on all sides is often a strategy for self-care in the form of hostility catharsis.
Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts.
Every one of those interventions are proven to work in many cases, do no harm, allow the free flow of ideas and where effective open doors for bridge building.
Yeah, seems hokey... until you actually try these strategies and discover they provide tremendous relief.
> Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts.
Except those companies are in the business of emotional disregulation in the name of “engagement”.
Last thing I want is for them to have even more authority on the participants’ emotional states. When not riled up through manipulation of what they see, most people have a good sense of how to be good to each other.
The other problem is social media getting overrepresented in comparison to real world interactions in our lifetime of discourses. I want the full experience of the disagreeable other, ideally in a friend, so that we can hold the tension of disagreement with some love and beers. Textual/propositional discourse is a mere simulation of this, we’re all stranger brains in vats spitting out argumentation in a truncated form of existence. Perception of being right overcomes the actual need for being right and being held in positive regard. We’re here more to impress, and less to dialogue and cohere.
Is this paper exclusive to a certain website? I've had discussions with people of various political persuasions that are downright hostile on this website. If people on this website with engagement mostly removed can't control themselves, who can?
I've looked through some of these people's profiles before and I've been shocked to find that in non-political discussions they're pretty normal. They're not trolls per se, unless you threaten (using this loosely, such as believing in or having experiences counter to) something core to their identity or way of life.
My takeaway, thus far, has been that without you being physically sat in front of someone they can't observe how something so close and dear to them could possibly hurt someone. They can't imagine that something that seems "righteous" could alienate people or the wrong people if their purpose was to alienate. They only see that through the various signals we can't capture in a DOM or across HTTP.
The purpose of fact-checking isn't to improve online discourse. It's to reduce public health crises, like vaccination hesitancy, and extremism based on falsehoods (e.g. countless false claims of ballot irregularities), leading to political violence. But in terms of reducing toxicity, your idea of introducing self-care interventions is great.
I think also part of the problem is English semantics. The terms fact, myth, theory, evidence, research, etc., get thrown around everywhere when it comes to epistemology and peer discussion. They have different meanings in different contexts. People don't always speak with maximum precision. Take GP's comments of the form "Fact checkers said X". This is a hard stance. It also completely contradicts my experience. It would have been softened with "I remember fact checkers saying X" because that opens the door to the possibility their experience does not reflect the whole. A unique reality tunnel. But saying "X happened" opens the door for argumentative replies from anyone with a different experience.
I'm guilty of this, many people do it, maybe even most people. It's easy to lapse into the subconscious mentality that your experience reflects universal experience.
Looks like jackalopes have flagged the parent, but I’m guessing they were referring to how politicized the “facts” were last year. When people were criticized for wearing masks, and laughed at for saying it was irresponsible to keep New York open and accuse Trump of “scare mongering” over the virus. People were kicked off social media for saying “conspiracy theories” which are considered facts today. Remember Biden and Harris saying no one should take vaccines that haven’t gone through standard FDA approval process? Likely not since our “fact checkers” are horribly biased and couldn’t care less about the scientific method.
It’s a slippery slope and some fortune-telling to assume that Facebook and Twitter will not let you post based off potential incorrect facts. If anything, a caution or warning label regarding facts should offer the reader extra information. As MikeTheGreat has aptly highlighted, science is a self correcting paradigm that seeks to prove itself wrong. Old facts, tried and tested overtime, may seldom update but new and not well tested facts may evolve in due time.
Also, the claim that fact checkers are wrong more than they are right is a non-sequiter. Because the prevailing truth at the time of fact checking is the most accurate based off the current body of evidence. And as stated in my point above, our understanding of the truth crystallizes over time.
"Truth doesn't evolve" is a profound statement. Is it from Hermes? The downvotes on your comment reminded me of one well known historical figure who told not to give jewels to the crowd as they would get agitated, because of ignorance, and try to lynch you.
I corrected my op to clear up ambiguity. What I meant was our understanding of “the truth” evolves and crystallizes over time. Not Truth itself (the truth I was referring to in my OP was our own truth about the truth). So, as we gather more data, revise our hypothesis, throw away wrong ideas and formulate new ones, we get a clearer picture.
Speaking of fact checking, this whole post needs a _citation needed_. I don't recall fact checkers _ever_ say masks below N95 "doesn't work". There was a brief period where mask wearing wasn't recommended, in a possibly ill-suited ploy to prevent hoarding.
I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the lab theory was "preposterous", only that it was unsupported by evidence at the time.
I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the vaccine "stops" the virus spread, only that it dramatically reduces transmission. There was always concerns about variant escape from like, April 2020.
Addition: Clearly, there is a disconnect between what I experienced "fact checkers" saying, and you, or others, experienced. Using the phrasing "fact checkers said X" is extremely veridical in tone, and opens the door for lots of clashing with anyone (such as myself) with differing observations.
Also, when you say "fact checkers did X", are you speaking for _all_ fact checkers? Some? Which ones? It's an epistemological mine field.
Addition 2, before I get nit-picked over the "masks don't work". OP's statement is:
> In early 2020, the fact checkers told us that anything less than an N95 mask doesn't work. The fact checkers of today tell us that any face mask prevents the transmission of the virus...
So I interpret "work" here to mean "prevent transmission of the virus." I remember extremely distinctly at the time the recommended guidance, because my aunt asked about whether she should wear a mask. I told her, as was guidance at the time, late Feb 2020, that a typical surgical mask would not dramatically reduce her risk of contracting COVID, she would need a respirator (N95), and at this point in time, unless you were high risk, this was probably overkill. Cases were rare enough that your best bet at the time was handwashing and social distancing. Then, two weeks later, around Mar 14, I told her "yeah actually you should be wearing a mask around others, even cloth ones, lest you be an asymptomatic carrier." What changed in that timeframe? The number of cases in the USA started skyrocketing, and we discovered that COVID can be asymptomatic in a large percent of cases, and has a long incubation period. New information was acquired, the recommendations changed. That's how all rational, informed decision making should work.
I really don't think it's helpful to say "Fact checkers said X" without providing proof and context.
Unsurprisingly it turns out that social media - platforms designed to promote aggressive argument for "engagement" - are a very bad way to distribute public health information. Or reputable factual information about anything at all.
Reality-based audiences will try to select credible sources. But everyone else gets a diet of anger, fear, hearsay, misunderstandings, shock-value anecdotes, lies, and noise.
I think it's unwise to ignore how much of an influence this has had on what's happening now.
As it turns out, I apparently don't interact with media employing fact checkers all that much. Apparently, I get stuff from the horse's mouth.
"I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the lab theory was "preposterous", only that it was unsupported by evidence at the time."
As I recall, officials and experts were saying that the lab-leak theory was unsupported by evidence, while people were boycotting Chinese restaurants and attacking vaguely Asian looking people because they held "China" responsible for the pandemic.
"I don't recall fact checkers ever saying the vaccine "stops" the virus spread, only that it dramatically reduces transmission. There was always concerns about variant escape from like, April 2020."
As I recall, experts have always been saying that the vaccines were very effective at preventing death and hospitalization, but did not eliminate the possibility of infection and if you were infected, it might still be possible to transmit the virus. And yes, the effectiveness of the vaccines against variants of the virus has always been a question.
People who believe in things like flat earth have already rejected argument from authority. Ostensibly, fact-checkers exist for the benefit of people who do trust experts but also would be convinced by a random facebook post. Maybe such people exist, but, like you say, in the 5 years (?) that fact-checkers have been implemented on social media, they've already overplayed their hand and can no longer be viewed as totally consistent with expert opinion. They are often used to manipulate political opinions and distribute propaganda.
It's a little ironic. They probably introduced fact-checkers to avoid regulation, but in an ideal world I feel the most important regulation would be expressly to prevent big social media corporations from centrally controlling information like that.
I don't think 'wrong more often than they're right' is accurate, we just hear about when they're wrong and not when they're right. I also want to say that 'ineffective' is the wrong word for vaccine's relationship to new variants. The vaccine still dramatically reduces spread, and almost always prevents hospitalization and death.
A related idea to your thought while reading your comment is that it appears that two groups of people arguing competing ideas don’t agree on how to derive the truth; one being the scientific approach (bending over backwards to prove yourself wrong) and the other seeking through confirmation bias and both claiming victory.
There is a less popular to mention third group. The majority of people are midwits who are neither stupid enough to believe the truly ridiculous (flat earth), nor critical enough to think for themselves. They are the ones welcoming the tyranny our ruling class is only too happy to facilitate.
> [...]hostile political discussions are the result of status-driven individuals who are drawn to politics and are equally hostile both online and offline. Finally, we offer initial evidence that online discussions feel more hostile, in part, because the behavior of such individuals is more visible than offline.
Not only more visible, but more out of context. The identical political conversation between someone and their parent, for example, in the context of a loving family relationship, will be remembered differently than that discussion with a faceless online swarm. You're forced to think of your parent as a person, whereas anonymous opposition is easy to dehumanize. And if you're a middle-class PMC, you can just fall into thinking of the internet as a mob of subhuman lumpen morons out for bloodsport and seeing every interaction in which people vehemently disagree with you as further evidence of that.
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Edit: The fixation on online culture as the source of strife from people annoys me. I know plenty of mean, aggressive people in real life. I know very few on the internet - because I know fewer people online than I do in real life.Seeing people you don't know be mean online and thinking that online life is meaner is like watching the local news and concluding that everyone but you, your family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers are murderers.
The question is if the ability of the hateful to find communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist, organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred in ways that were less likely than before.
I’m not sure what the answer is, tbh. I certainly doubt something like the Trump presidency would have been -possible, or as likely, before the internet. Organizations from ISIS to “proud boys” certainly profit from the ability to proselytize on YouTube. But, at the same time, the general trend of the arc of history bending towards justice appears to be still alive, to some degree.
Do you see these folks you're talking about as fully human? I see this kind of classification a lot, as though 'they' are just a swarm of zombie NPCs following some simplistic algorithm.
Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer is that they are not, nor do they wish to exist in one. They want power and total control over, hilariously, the lives of others who simply want to live in and contribute to a civilized and prosperous modern society.
They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show that they're incapable of coexisting with others who don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
In the context of the article I'll replay how I processed your reply.
> fully human
This is a bad argument.
My immediate reaction was 'it was a question, not an argument' and got a little stab of cortisol from my endocrine system. The 'bad' adjective could be interpreted as ignorant/incomplete or malicious, but usually when I see folks invoke the whole 'bad X' question, its really just a play to reframe the discussion or ignore some nuance of it.
So it didn't start off well, and I immediately felt that the comment was either reactionary or using my comment as a trampoline to project some tangential point.
Perhaps try "humans capable of living in and contributing to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
So this led me to believe we're going down the 'reframing' road, as the comment is adding a bunch of conditions to the term 'human'. This, to me, is simply a way to filter out humans that don't meet those conditions. Particularly when the comment includes 'capable', which clearly creates two classes of human from a political standpoint, one of which should be engaged with because they are capable of being influenced, the other is simply livestock.
and, unfortunately, I think you'll often find the answer is that they are not, nor do they wish to
exist in one. They want power and total control over, hilariously, the lives of others who simply
want to live in and contribute to a civilized and prosperous modern society.
The comment kind of lost me here, to be honest. Clearly this could apply to any individual interested in amplifying their own political perspective.
They're hateful, violent, and time and time again show that they're incapable of coexisting with others who don't share their same close-minded fantastical views.
I think I landed at this comment attempting to shift focus to extremists rather than the rank and file of any particular political persuasion. It's possible that connects back to the article because the extremists of just about any ilk are a) interested in amplifying their political perspective and b) are quite possibly more inclined to engage in sharp discourse on the internet.
> "humans capable of living in and contributing to a civilized and prosperous modern society"
You're doing a common technique of insulting someone's ability when really you mean that they hurt you or you hate them for some reason.
Isolated self-sufficient people, severely disabled people, children with terminal illnesses, very old people, etc. all meet your definition. Do you really have something against people for not being born with the ability to do valuable work for others? I doubt it.
>The question is if the ability of the hateful to find communities of like-unminded people allows them to persist, organize, and affect the lives of the objects of their hatred in ways that were less likely than before
I suspect this is a serious factor. In the before-times, the ability of these people to meaningfully organize was hampered by their comparative rarity and geographical distribution. The consequences of those two factors created a damping effect: the majority of their social interactions were with non-extremists, giving them neither a chance to express extremism nor mutually reinforce their extreme beliefs.
The problem with censoring is the bias you showed in your comment, with who you selected as examples.
Eg, mentioning the Proud Boys, but not Antifa — the violent street gang who committed billions in arson, murdered dozens, and is still pepper-spraying children in Portland parks. You picked the smaller street gang, likely because you’re politically aligned with the larger, more violent one.
I don’t disagree that many groups are “bad” — but that doesn’t mean I believe we can regulate that without the censorship being corrupted into something worse.
How is the "hostility gap" in the paper not just what happens when you remove physical consequences from these people and people like them? The authors appear to do some free association with status seeking and threatening others as well, and I'd wonder whether there is a clearer way to present the ideas.
Having met and known trolls personally in real life growing up online and working for ISPs in the 90s, to me they fell into a few categories. The most obvious one was the assorted personality disorders that were just really damaged goods. It was a blessing to the world they found the internet instead of preying on people in real life, which surely at least a few did. The ostensibly sane ones were a kind of henchmen to bullies who lacked the physicality and charisma of the bully they followed and instead could reify their cruelty and revenge fantasies online and get off on the attention.
The final group was nihilistic political operators, who got into politics because having an opposition team is an outlet for an urge to be a piece of shit to others, and it's a kind of sport to them. You see them disrupting and derailing conversations with talking points, arbitrary racism and hostility to keep thoughtful people away from a controversial topic, and low effort comments. They worked up from activist groups to political party "rat f-er" operatives, and in a more successful life they might have been spies, prosecutors, or jail guards.
From what I can tell about the trolls I met, I think they are trying to become something more contemptible than they already feel they are, as a way to reclaim their own shame and self-hatred by rebasing their identity on something can they control, instead of self-identifying by the life event that made them feel ashamed. There's nothing you could say that will make them feel worse than they already feel about themselves, and unless you are capable of delivering a level of psychological harm that is competitive to their personal peak negative experience, and only with internet arguments, anything you say just makes them feel stronger. This is how they thrive on the negativity. You just can't get drawn in.
In terms of how this effects online discussion? I'd be concerned the paper has a bunch of policy prescriptions buried somewhere in it, and the solutions aren't in the domain of policy. It may be as simple as judiciously booting accounts that don't meet a bar instead of legalistic lowest common denominator rules for trolls to litigate against, and teaching young people that cruelty is an expression of need.
Your comment about the removal of physical consequences reminded me of this quote from Robert E. Howard: "Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing."
Reminder that this quote does not describes real world in the slightest. You have in fact polite unarmed non violent societies and rude as hell violent societies.
I don't know if anyone else felt this, but I've experienced a real sense of calm and relief in the past couple days since reading an analysis of this paper.
I'm not on social media (except Nextdoor - ugh), but sometimes I find it hard to not challenge people who say really noxious things in online comments. I was brought up in a family of legal scholars who approach political and interpersonal debate with facts, proofs, and Socratic reasoning. And so I fall into arguing with online trolls who seem to sense that they can get me worked up just by their sheer unwillingness to engage in civil, reasonable conversation.
My takeaway from this paper was that it's not the online environment causing otherwise-normal people to act as trolls. It's that online trolls drown out more reasonable voices, and that they're not nice people in real life. They meet the definition of psychopaths. They are not people who can be swayed by logic or nuance IRL any more than they could be online. They're likely not even interested in whatever falsehoods they're spouting other than trying to get satisfaction by pushing people's buttons. In other words, if you ran into them at a bar, you wouldn't have a conversation with them. You wouldn't even go to the places they go. You wouldn't have them over to dinner and try to have a civil discussion. They are too busy at home beating their wives or whatever it is psychotic people do when they're not trolling online.
And this gave me a sense of relief, because now I feel I can ignore them better. I can think of them as people like my SO's abusive father, or my abusive half-brother. People you just don't speak to and don't engage because you won't give them the satisfaction. I know "don't feed the trolls" is nothing new, per se, but somehow it's something I've been good at IRL and bad at online for most of my life. Because online I give people the benefit of the doubt that they're more than what they appear to be at first blush. This essentially proves that they are one-to-one the same people you wouldn't have anything to do with in real life, and for me that's a powerful reason to just walk away and ignore them.
Abstract: Politics on the internet doesn't make people assholes. Instead, assholes are drawn to, and conspicuously visible in, politics on the internet.
Seeing some people whom I knew well offline first and now interact with mostly online (typically schoolmates), it seems like their offline acidity is around lemon juice and their online acidity is 6 to 12 molar HCl.
It’s simultaneously correct to describe them as being “more acidic” online, but practically, the penny arcade cartoon seems to fit better.
I understand what the general argument is. I’m saying it’s incongruous with the actual study presented here, which posits that people who are acidic online are also similarly acidic offline in political discourse.
(It seems unintuitive to me, because I have similar experiences to you! But I’m wondering if my resistance personally to the concept is due to bias…)
The study is looking specifically at hostility in the context of political discussions, not just general internet misbehavior.
In any case, The Penny Arcade comic seems to depict the mismatch hypothesis which the study found little evidence to support:
> Overall, however, we found little evidence that mismatch-induced processes underlie the hostility gap. We found that people are not more hostile online than offline; ...
And while they're not ruling out the mismatch hypothesis entirely, they do offer an alternative which they call the connectivity hypothesis:
> ...Thus, our findings suggest that the feeling that online interactions are much more hostile than offline interactions emerges because hostile individuals–especially those high in status-driven risk taking –have a significantly larger reach online; they can more easily identify targets and their behavior is more broadly visible.
I've heard that as an explanation for why we have so many fuckwad politicians. Only the most shameless will tend to volunteer themselves for such a hostile career path. Normal people don't want it.
This seemed true back in 2004 when it was originally posted, but since then Facebook and YouTube have both pursued real name policies (at one point or other) but that doesn't seem to have fixed it. Eg Anti-vaxxers have little qualms on having their names attached to their opinions.
If online discourse is to evolve, merely linking to an irrelevant post from 16 years ago, being presented as gospel, would make for a good case study on why it hasn't evolved.
People spouting things online, would never say them in real life, for fear of getting punched in the face. Its interesting to me that the threat of violence is a useful deterrent in civilized society. Its almost like a paradox. That some underlying threat of violence is what causes us to respect each other in real life to some degree. Perhaps a keyboard that zaps stupid social media users fingers would be a useful deterrent. If it hasn't been invented yet, I'm claiming patent.
I don't think it's a shocking observation political hostility on all sides is often a strategy for self-care in the form of hostility catharsis.
Along these lines, if Facebook, Twitter, etc. were sincerely interested in improving online discourse, they would jettison "fact checking" and censorship for additional content that focuses on the safety of the present moment, temporal perspective, breathing, visualization, humor & timeouts.
Every one of those interventions are proven to work in many cases, do no harm, allow the free flow of ideas and where effective open doors for bridge building.
Yeah, seems hokey... until you actually try these strategies and discover they provide tremendous relief.
Study abstract: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1963-05053-001