Study of “moral grandstanding” helps explain why social media is so toxic
digest.bps.org.uk
digest.bps.org.uk
Honestly, the way people have been dehumanizing each other over politics kind of scares me. It reminds me of the way propaganda dehumanizes 'the enemy' in war time. It's not a good way to look at other people, especially not over which political party they voted for.
I keep hearing this argument that the tone and style of political arguments are getting more vicious and causing harm to society, but nobody can give me concrete examples of what they mean.
Silencing an opposing political opinion through violence is a definition of fascism.
Correct we call that terrorism when it is to further your own political, religious, social, racial, or environmental views.
Domestic terrorism: Violent, criminal acts committed by individuals and/or groups to further ideological goals stemming from domestic influences, such as those of a political, religious, social, racial, or environmental nature.
How correct they are about what they’re fighting is a separate question. As you have demonstrated, there are many different definitions of fascism. The Berlin Wall was described as the “anti-fascism protection wall” by the DDR. And, of course, “my opponent is literally Hitler” is widely dismissed as a melodramatic overstatement.
However, if we presuppose that they are correct about who they are targeting — sadly plausible, given how many genocides followed the one in WW2 — then to say that Antifa as a movement is itself “fascist” is like saying that the Allied powers in WW2 were “fascist” for violently opposing the “political opinion” of Herr Adolf H. and Signore Benito M.
One opinion piece says that Antifa is too violent. Another argues that threats of violence can be harmful.
I don’t see any example of someone saying that “speech merits a violent response”, which is what I was requesting.
If you don't know anything about the survey, read the survey. I intentionally linked the results because I didn't want to present a biased synthesis as fact.
Antifa holds that opinion, and believes violence is justified in return.
From the Atlantic piece previously linked:
> the parade’s organizers received an anonymous email warning that if “Trump supporters” and others who promote “hateful rhetoric” marched, “we will have two hundred or more people rush into the parade … and drag and push those people out.”
> An article in The Nation argued that “to call Trumpism fascist” is to realize that it is “not well combated or contained by standard liberal appeals to reason.” The radical left, it said, offers “practical and serious responses in this political moment.”
> Antifascists call such actions defensive. Hate speech against vulnerable minorities, they argue, leads to violence against vulnerable minorities. But Trump supporters and white nationalists see antifa’s attacks as an assault on their right to freely assemble, which they in turn seek to reassert. The result is a level of sustained political street warfare not seen in the U.S. since the 1960s. A few weeks after the attacks in San Jose, for instance, a white-supremacist leader announced that he would host a march in Sacramento to protest the attacks at Trump rallies. Anti-Fascist Action Sacramento called for a counterdemonstration; in the end, at least 10 people were stabbed.
> A similar cycle has played out at UC Berkeley. In February, masked antifascists broke store windows and hurled Molotov cocktails and rocks at police during a rally against the planned speech by Yiannopoulos. After the university canceled the speech out of what it called “concern for public safety,” white nationalists announced a “March on Berkeley” in support of “free speech.” At that rally, a 41-year-old man named Kyle Chapman, who was wearing a baseball helmet, ski goggles, shin guards, and a mask, smashed an antifa activist over the head with a wooden post. Suddenly, Trump supporters had a viral video of their own. A far-right crowdfunding site soon raised more than $80,000 for Chapman’s legal defense. (In January, the same site had offered a substantial reward for the identity of the antifascist who had punched Spencer.) A politicized fight culture is emerging, fueled by cheerleaders on both sides. As James Anderson, an editor at It’s Going Down, told Vice, “This shit is fun.”
Did you read all of those pieces in the eight minutes between my comment and yours? Your arguments suggest you don't. You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
I did not.
> You can't ask for examples and dismiss them, refusing to read the things I link.
If your goal was to answer my question (ignoring the fact that you misread my question in the first place), then a more effective approach would have been to write an answer. That answer could have included quotes from your material. It is customary to include links to the raw material backing up your quotes, as a footnote.
Instead you just dumped links with no explanation or context. After a few minutes of skimming your material, a coherent point failed to magically appear.
So no, sorry, I’m not going to invest an hour of my time doing research on your own material to produce an answer you couldn’t be bothered to articulate yourself.
I don't know if it's significantly worse than the situation 50 or 100 years ago, but it does get on my nerves.
Arguments over abortion rights commonly frame the opposition as condoning infanticide on one side or violating bodily autonomy on the other. Each framing creates a morally bankrupt opposition.
Both those for and against socialism / redistribution of wealth see their opposition as wanting to take unearned wealth.
The consequence can be an angry social media mob that demands your employer fire you.
Such an opinion could get accused as being a defense of horrible people, as opposed to a defense of everyone's universal rights.
And some people believe that if you even think that people who are engaging in offensive behavior should have rights, then that makes you just as bad as the offensive people, and therefore deserve to be the target of violence.
Even arguing in favor of free speech, solely in support of these rights, can get you accused of being a terrible person, and therefore a deserving target of violence.
Honestly abortion is one of the messiest, no easy answer issues out there and yet the vitriol and extreme rhetoric is completely over the top.
Just visit twitter and search for "muslim" or "jew" or "african american" and you'll find plenty of vicious and dehumanizing rhetoric. In any hour-long surfing session, you'll see accounts calling for all sorts of ethnic cleansing.
The tenor of the conversation changed almost instantly. It's forced me to be hyper specific when approaching certain topics, but that hasn't come without it's own uncomfortable externalities of conversation.
That's a pretty superficial view of things.
There are a lot of very real issues that matter in real life to a lot of people.
To pick an extremely important one from the past: slavery.
One side thought it was ok to enslave other human beings. The other did not.
But there are a lot of sincere people trying to right wrongs or improve our world out there too.
And there are genuinely evil people who seek only to further their own self interest, or power, or both.
Slavery was bad.
Nixon was a crook.
Of course people are complicated and you have to look at the entirety of things, which makes it complicated, but still, I don't buy the "both sides" stuff either.
As a gay man it would be completely unconsciable to support Republicanism as it exists today, because the overwhelming majority of people in the party are somewhere between apathetic and enthusiastic about denying my rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
A fairly prominent LGBT person, Latrice Royale, at one point did not support gay marriage. That doesn't mean that I agree with that position, nor does that mean the majority of gay people do or should.
In general, having opinions and keeping them to yourself is fine. Being shitty to your colleagues because of it is generally not. And publicly threatening or attacking others is not. It's not about your beliefs, but what you do with them.
I agree with you, US Republicanism is completely incompatible with the healthy existence of gay and queer people as understood by the communities in for example San Francisco (where I am from). There must be gay republican communities in other areas, but I'm sure more west coast queer communities would consider those republican gay (prob not queer) communities to be repressive and unhealthy.
It's a shame people cannot relate to what you are saying, and plenty of evidence that even liberal Silicon Valley (assuming it has an outsized influence on this comment thread) has a lot of growth needed before queer people can really be appreciated in tech circles.
Just because I see them as humans does not mean I have to ignore what they caused to other humans. Or that every human actions must be necessary been seen as good by me.
Nixon: Well, no, actually, but as far as I know, his foreign policy was reasonably decent and somewhat effective. The problem was his attempt to subvert the American democratic process and, primarily, his use of presidential power to conceal that attempt.
But you have a good point: the other side is never Snidely Whiplash, twirling his mustache. On the other hand, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
Of course, Roman slavery still had plenty of problems but it's significantly easier to find examples of humane and (relatively) equitable treatment of slaves (who could be well-educated and own their own property) in Rome than in Europe/early America. And then there was the prostitution/torture/slave soldiers...
Well put. But take it a step further - had you been raised in the antebellum South, or had you been Nixon's friend - would have arrived at the same moral conclusions? For the same reasons? It's easy to condemn "the alien other" - it's much harder to reflect on one's own beliefs and the peers that hold them.
In that case, loudly and publicly condemning groups of people tends to cause them to circle the wagons and double down on their positions. I think there's a lesson for today there as well.
You'd think that. It was amazing to see the mass protests while W was president that simply evaporated as soon as Obama was in office.
But I disagree that people changed their minds. People were still protesting while Obama was president, and anti-war writers like Greenwald kept up a consistent position.
What went on is the press, really a handful of editors, simply spiked stories about the wars and the protests, and by starving them of media coverage, they didn't weigh on people's minds so heavily.
The higher-ups in a news office have to make judgement calls about what a news program is going to focus on, and to them some stuff feels more or less newsworthy depending on who's in office. It could be some shadowy conspiracy, or, more likely, just their personal unconcious biases.
However, it's also true that the anti-war movement died off partly due to failure essentially, as the Iraq War proceeded with essentially no resistance from elected officials, and no coverage from the mainstream media. I think this, more than partisanship, explains why it's basically dead in the water now. If the movement fails to achieve its goals, people will eventually go home. This all happened within W's term.
Protest altogether didn't die out under Obama, however, Occupy Wall Street started in 2011, and was heavily critical of Obama's coziness with the finance industry. Within left movements that exist now, many seem to see a through-line from Occupy Wall Street.
Overall, this speaks to the narrative about tribalism, because there's a tendency to see the opposing group as one mass, when in reality, there are different groups within each side that may disagree with each other as much as they do the nominally-opposed groups. This tendency is also exacerbated by the two-party system in the US that smushes what would really be 3-6 parties together into two.
https://news.gallup.com/poll/183575/fewer-view-iraq-afghanis...
> Goes back to watching impeachment proceedings wherein our current President is being proven to have been extorting _another country_ for personal gain while his party fully stands behind him...
For less important issues, sure, talk it out. Like most domestic political issues, those are just little things. No one's dying, no one's being enslaved. So talking it out is actually not only the preferable choice, but the correct choice.
But for acute issues, say something like slavery, or Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly, or even domestically if some guy goes to shoot up a Walmart, the time for talk has past. I suppose we could ask them to stop, just as a formality, but any answer other than "We'll stop immediately and unconditionally" has to be met with force. That's the whole reason we have police, because sometimes, it's just not practical to "talk it out" in the hopes that the bad actor stops doing what they're doing.
Certainly with slavery we probably waited far too long to stop the behavior, and that hesitation made forcing an end to the problem worse than it otherwise would have been. It's a good reminder that in life, as a general rule, it's always best to handle acute issues as soon as possible.
Now what's funny about all of the animosity today, is that other than the problem of domestic terrorism, there are no acute issues. So there is nothing really worth fighting over. (Again, stopping mass shooters excepted. And I'm not sure anyone is arguing against that idea anyway?) So it's kind of perplexing to me that people get so mad over issues these days? As most of the issues seem so petty in a historic or even cultural sense.
I'd just like to point out that "Germany processing thousands of Jews through death camps weekly" didn't matter to anyone until after the war was over. (Well, anyone outside Germany. And there were people who knew what was going on and tried to show it to the world, but there are cranks everywhere.)
I was with you the whole paragraph until this. Unless you're living in a nice Suburb and haven't been paying attention to news, we (well, the US, but some are global) face a lot of very serious issues that do demand an urgency of action, since talking hasn't been very useful in resolving them:
* Climate Change and decarbonization * Social Media destabilizing and undermining democracies all over the world leading to violence against minorities worldwide * [US] Police brutality and general incarceration of African Americans * [US] Rising healthcare expenses potentially putting reasonable healthcare out of the reach of most Americans, especially the most vulnerable * [US] Inequal economic development completely devastating most regions of the US leading to social instabilities * [US] Massive student load debts, trapping an entire generation under the weight of unpayable debt
And those are just a few things I thought about right away.
There are a variety of issues that need urgent action to tackle them.
Unfortunately, I suspect it's mostly the later.
The reason people tend to just choose a political "team" and root for that team is that there is individual value to that process. If feels good to be part of a team, to cheer with your team's victories, and to complain about your team's losses. That's a big part of what is so fun about sports fandom. It doesn't depend on your actual individual influence on the outcome, which everyone correctly realizes is nearly negligible.
Most political disagreements are nothing like this. Most political disagreements come down to some combination of (a) a trade-off between two reasonable values or (b) differing predictions about the consequences of a particular policy in the future.
If “slavery vs not slavery” is your go-to example of what a political disagreement looks like, then you’re likely to fall victim to the sorts of bad thought habits (other side evil!) that lead to dumb polarisation and tribalism.
It's a rhetorical trick to invoke slavery/genocide, and then group all the other controversial positions held by my political opponents as being in the same category of clear right/wrong.
But if they really were so clear-cut, they'd be invoked as broadly indisputable, standalone examples just as much as slavery and genocide are.
There are tons of issues that are not clear cut, like, say, the optimal rate of taxation. It's healthy to argue about those things and try different approaches.
Other things, like trying to subvert democracy, are clear as day.
https://mobile.twitter.com/mrjamesob/status/1153560242908794...
Put two people long enough in the same room and they'll find a reason to kill each other. It reminds me of that podcast about tribalism: https://youarenotsosmart.com/transcripts/transcript-tribal-p...
It makes no lasting difference to the world if Team A wins against Team B in a sports event.
But public policy choices are absolutely fundamental to personal opportunity, personal safety, quality of life, and financial stability.
There are objectively right and wrong answers in politics. There's also a hierarchy of importance in policy, with some issues making far more of a difference to all of the above than others.
Misunderstanding policy cause and effect and picking and promoting the wrong answers will lead to objectively bad outcomes for at least some other people, and very probably for you personally.
The toxicity doesn't originate in social media. Social media simply amplifies the toxic effects of industries of dishonesty - from PR, astroturfing, and manipulated academic and media narratives, to calculated and deliberate hostile attempts to focus conversations on low-impact but high-emotion issues, and to split populations along tribal and narrative fault lines.
"I believe I have a moral responsibility not to wantonly slaughter my neighbors."
It's a short sentence, but the amount of waffling in it is amazing.
Even then, there is generally agreement that murder is wrong, and that murder means killing innocent people. The disagreement is generally over what constitutes "innocent" and "people". Similarly, pretty much everyone agrees that stealing is wrong, the differences are just in the details of what constitutes property and associated rights.
The problem comes when I act as if I am certain that my policy proposals are better than yours - and, worse, that you are therefore evil for proposing such flawed policies as you do. We assign to policies a certainty that they don't deserve.
"In reality no political program can be more than probably correct." - C. S. Lewis.
I would say it just amplifies human traits.
If "There are objectively right and wrong answers in politics." and "In politics the opinions actually matter." we're fucked because surely after 6 million years of evolution we shouldn't be where we are now. We're just fancy apes with a way to shitpost world wide instantly and it's not helping anyone.
You're right that political opinions matter but I don't believe they matter for the right reason. It's still a "us vs them" problem all the way to the top, just that that one is more complex and out of reach to the average joe. So instead of informing people we throw them 5 min clips of clickbait video here and there and ask them in which "team" they are every few years, after a while the teams are naturally swaped because "nothing changed", rinse and repeat.
And you’re my instant hero! Saved, favorited, bookmarked, etc.
That’s genetic evolution.
Memetic evolution? We’re just getting started.
A normal individual has very little effect on the outcome of sporting competitions, but an individual sports fan does get satisfaction from choosing a team to cheer for.
Likewise, a normal individual has very little effect on the outcome of major government policies (e.g. federal policies in the USA), but an individual voter does get satisfaction from associating with a particular political group, following their events, researching their arguments and rebuttals to opponents' arguments, etc.
It's true that major government policies actually are extremely important, but that doesn't mean that individual political participation has much of an influence on outcomes. It is very common for people to have a strong association with some political group and act similarly to sports fans (e.g. "my group is great, your group are a bunch of hateful cheaters"). It's not as common for people to spend effort and resources attempting to increase their actual influence on political outcomes (things like having constructive discussions, organizing events, campaigning, or even running for office), because people correctly realize that most of the time the effort and resources spent would be larger than the resulting effect on the outcome.
In politics, all sides are wrong about something big. And it isn't clear whose mistakes are bigger. More importantly, all parties promote narratives where we argue about inconsequential items to distract the public from bigger issues.
For example in the USA, Republicans argue against universal healthcare even though their own internal analyses show that, done right, we would save money and have better healthcare outcomes. Democrats argue for a level of micromanagement in regulation that creates bad outcomes for everyone. Republicans have politicized basic science and generally believe it to be propaganda. Democrats put political correctness above sanity. And so on and so forth.
But neither party wishes to discuss the fact that we have become a surveillance state, with an insane legal system, and a prison system that is one of the horrors of the world. They do not wish it discussed because party leaders have reasons to continue these policies, but according to polls a solid majority of Americans, across political parties, would prefer these policies discontinued. See, for example, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/11/15/key-takeawa... and https://www.prisonlegalnews.org/news/2018/nov/6/polls-show-p... for evidence of that.
Therefore the fact that politics is about something that matters is an argument that team A vs team B rhetoric is itself actively destructive. The more important you believe the issues to be, the more that you should aim to depolarize the discussion.
I tend to think that sentiments like these are perfect arguments for a one-party authoritarian technocracy.
> policy cause and effect
Something that sounds so trivial yet notoriously difficult to establish.
What would be considered objectively right or wrong?
Usually not; policy goals are a matter of subjective preference. What policies maximize goals may be matters of objective fact, but most political debate is (sometimes under the surface of the rhetoric) disagreement about goals, not mechanisms.
That's a rather negative perspective. Sometimes they'll become inseparable friends to the very end.
In my course on the EU the instructor asked why the American colonies formed into a cohesive nation while the EU is still largely fragmented. Of course, there are a lot of answers to that, but I pointed out the colonies had to unite to stand against Britain. The EU hasn't had any external entity to unite against, thus the focus remains on the differences between the member states rather than the goals they share.
2? Sure, nice and compact.
4? Hipster but OK I can handle it.
Tabs? Well you're probably the most technically correct even if I don't like it.
3? I'll cut you man. I can get along with most people, but everyone has limits.
We don't say everyone should make up their mind on whether somebody is guilty of a crime -- we say a few specially informed jurors should make that determination.
This makes me wonder whether demarchy / sortition / Athenian democracy (rule by the randomly selected; similar to juries) is superior to elective democracy.
Variations of this quote are often banded about to apologise for and defend the imperfections of given democracies. It shuts down questions of electoral reform with the straw-man of autocracy. Not all democracies are equal.
There are minor variations of republics and how they elect people with resulting variations. However they are all better than alternatives (including democracy).
I don't know about every single country on the list, but at least the one I am somewhat informed about (North Korea) is a republic only in name, as it is pretty much an authoritarian dictatorship state controlled by the military class.
It's basic human nature, which we should all try to rise above.
Maybe the new thing is that political tribe is now our primary identification. Nation, race and class used to be the big ones.
We can simultaneously see that partisan politics isn't completely rational and also observe that one side, for various reasons, is working that irrationality harder than the other.
My anecdotal evidence bears this out. Progressives tend to be far more intolerant of opposing viewpoints than conservatives.
https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/majority-of-democrats-at-...
Is the takeaway from this that holocaust deniers are more accepting people?
As another reply to you has shown, it's very easy to find specific differences and elevate them to an all-encompassing explanation, if that's how you decide you want to look at things.
I almost said exactly the same thing you just did. I have absolutely no clue which "side" he's talking about.
"I think it's the party engaging in voter fraud [1] throughout the country, and the one that tried to impeach the president when someone from the other side won [2], and the one that literally fled the state so that the legislature didn't have quorum and couldn't pass legislation [3], even though they were a clear minority. Or the one that falsely accused a supreme court nominee of rape [4], in an unprecedented move. I could go on."
It's evident to me that people of all political bents in this country are extremely tribalistic, and none of the tribes count many saints among their numbers.
Citations added simply to highlight that I'm not pulling any of this out of thin air:
[1] https://www.heritage.org/voterfraud
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2019/politics/impeac...
[3] https://www.npr.org/2011/02/17/133847336/wis-democratic-lawm...
[4] https://reason.com/2018/11/05/brett-kavanaugh-due-process-fa...
This is hardcoded in us.
It reminds me of this:
> And it is triple ultra forbidden to respond to criticism with violence. There are a very few injunctions in the human art of rationality that have no ifs, ands, buts, or escape clauses. This is one of them. Bad argument gets counterargument. Does not get bullet. Never. Never ever never for ever.
https://www.readthesequences.com/Uncritical-Supercriticality
But counterarguments, well, you might not always have one of those. It could be that actually you're wrong about something. And if you're wrong and you still have a big fat angry mob behind you who can shout down anybody who tries to point that out, isn't that better than losing?
No. It isn't. It's better to lose when you're wrong. Because it's the only thing that allows you to win when you're right.
But it still feels bad, and you still have an angry mob at your disposal, and if you're weak you do the wrong thing.
Too many people today are weak. And they, we, should feel bad about that.
To use vitality as an example, a healthy person can handle the odd cold or cut that could be fatal to someone with compromised immune system. Rightly then the vulnerable person will react quickly and intensely to perceived threats that the healthy person may shrug off (or even engage with, like volunteering in a hospital.
Historically, the mainstream news media would not even cover certain stories and would just spike them. People eventually go upset and found other ways to tell their story or force their opinion, e.g., social media and mobs.
Doing wrong is wrong even when you're angry.
And it's a short term gain for a long term loss. Every careless attack on a person who turns out to be innocent is an advertisement to join the opposition.
Worse than that, if you shout down dissent then you stay wrong. If you can't admit to a mistake then you can't stop making it.
Treating people with respect is a good thing.
Helping those in need is a good thing.
Ensuring a fair chance whenever possible is a good thing.
I could go on and on, but I think you know which side of the aisle I stand on.
I hate sports for the very reason you describe, but my objection to people who hold opposing views to me is grounded in an understanding of an intrinsic respect and value of humanity, not some ra-ra us vs. them mentality. I'm more than happy to welcome someone with opposing views if it seems they genuinely wish the best for others in their views. But on asking how they might right the wrongs of this world, their answers usually come down to "tough shit."
Not everyone is a knee-jerk go reds/blues/yellows/whatever supporter.
Those skilled at propaganda certainly appear to use the idea that everyone is in two camps as a primary tool in their arsenal however.
[1]: https://www.latimes.com/business/hiltzik/la-fi-hiltzik-repea...
All of the status-seeking behaviors the researchers describe existed before Likes, but by gamifying social status Facebook threw gasoline on the narcissism fire.
And yes, Facebook didn’t invent the like button (that was Friendfeed) but they made it a standard.
Also worth noting that a key component of Facebook’s initial positioning was that it did NOT have any gamified counters, unlike MySpace and Bebo which were fueled by profile views and friend counts.
Source: was Bebo engineer/exec 2007.
Who knows, maybe they do actually see the possibility of culture at large making a hard turn away from SM due to its tendencies to increase depression & anxiety, increase conflict, etc., as a serious risk to their business.
The ones I was on were sure tribal and it was just a gaming forum that could get pretty ridiculous over just Xbox vs PS2 vs Gamecube. Because humans are viscously tribal.
I think the like-button is a distraction from a reality we don't want to admit.
This is terribly interesting, especially if you've read Haidt. It means that every political argument on the internet will naturally split up into left-associated "virtue signalers" and right-associated "trolls."
The interesting part is that there is no place for honest beliefs or serious discussion on any side of any argument on the Internet.
Unfortunately I think this is reflective of our society. With social media, there is little room for growth, acknowledgement of mistakes, and understand. You're either with the crowd or not. It's a big reason why I've removed myself from social media. Glass houses everywhere.
0:www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/juliareinstein/des-moines-register-iowa-reporter-fired-aaron-calvin-carson
Of course, instead of throwing a book at you, here's his 1-hour podcast interview with Sam Harris about the topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zaniQUlqzgE
Though the book (nor interview) is just focused on call-out culture. But it does talk about some interesting aspects of it, like how calling out is a way to win prestige.
For examples of people getting cut off or ignored by their families and friends purely based on politics, look up the "WalkAway" group, there are hundreds of emotional video monologues by regular people. Fair warning - it is a partisan FB group, but a majority of the uploads specifically name the cancel culture they experienced as a contributing factor to why they changed their political beliefs.
Cancel culture affects ordinary people's social lives and career just as much, perhaps more so than media figures who can rely on the sympathy of like-minded crowds to bounce back.
This I think is why moral grandstanding is a more valuable concept than Virtue Signalling - VS wouldn't make sense in an anonymous context, and apparently signalling means something different anyway according to this: https://www.adamsmith.org/blog/stop-saying-virtue-signalling
When the quality of these ideas is challenged, it therefore can be a challenge to the quality of the person holding them, if they base their identity on their thoughts. I find this is quite common.
Another effect of this mindset is that changing your mind becomes more difficult. It's a hard thing to get out of.
Maybe "it doesn't matter what I think, I'm $Nationality and that's who I am"? [But does anyone think like that? And isn't that just an idea that informs identity?]
Here are some other things that might inform/create identity besides political opinions shared on twitter: race, religion, ethnicity, nationality, gender, occupation, consumption preferences, skills, activities, appearance.
All of these are ideas to some degree, but some are more concrete than others. But ultimately, identity itself is an idea and I don't think it can be fully separated from other constructs of the mind.
It's strange because I don't have such issues in real life. And my friends confirm that I'm intellectually honest and nuanced, or at least not nuts. I just can't imagine people talking to me face to face in the way I'm so used to on the internet, all smug and doing their best to find the worst possible interpretation of a comment.
13. When I share my moral/political beliefs, I do so to show people who disagree with me that I am better than them.
14. I share my moral/political beliefs to make people who disagree with me feel bad
28. Even if expressing my moral/political views does not help anyone, it is important that I share them.
…and lo and behold, they found that people who answered "yes" to those questions were also more narcissistic and more concerned with appearance than substance. Ok. Well, that's not really surprising. But it tells us nothing about how prevelent these motivations are compared to genuine concern for the issues at hand.
I'm quite sure Hacker News would have ripped into this sort of study if it weren't promoting the "politics is sports" narrative that this community is so fond of, which is sort of ironic given how the study specifically talks about "echo chambers."
I found that to be a curious statement, because—and I didn't read the study, just here for the commentary—it seems like we're talking about how certain types of behaviour are differentiated from a whole for some reason. In this case, the effort seems to be toward finding disingenuous grandstanding, but how do we define genuine concern? When does a political belief that someone has become genuine and how do others outside this apparent narcissistic group reflect more noble intention?
My impression for some time has been that genuine concern for any given political topic is a function of the cost in having, revealing, or defending it. For example, if you are Brandon Eich, there is a tremendous cost in upholding his homophobic values; to himself and others. The racist who has never met whoever they hate, the gay man with anti-abortion values, nor the 17 year old who screams on reddit about Hong Kong and Blizzard but still buys their games and isn't in the crossfire quite a lot less.
-- Tried to use contemporary references. Brandon recently did an AMA and refused to answer any question about that controversy, not building too much confidence in his product called "Brave"
This study is being used to attack the character of people who make bold statements about politics online (See: this thread), on the basis that they do it out of narcissism and power-seeking. I think this study does a very poor job demonstrating that, because they clearly selected for people who are narcissistic and power-seeking, which for all we know is small proportion of people who post about politics online. This is sort of like if I published a study saying "people who post on tech forums are greedy, immoral capitalists," but I selected my group of tech forum-posters by asking "Agree or disagree: I lie to drive interest in my products."
> When does a political belief that someone has become genuine and how do others outside this apparent narcissistic group reflect more noble intention?
You seem to be operating from the very strange assumption that by default, all political statements are made out of narcissism, and that we need some special reason to think that they're genuine. This contradicts how we tend to think in pretty much every other area of life. For instance, if I wrote "Java is the worst language in the world." you would probably assume that I was disliked Java for some reason. You would probably not assume that I was secretly trying to make java programmers feel bad, or that I was trying to suck up to C# programmers, or whatever. Likewise, if someone says "$POLITICIAN is a criminal who should be in jail," my assumption is that they really believe it. There doesn't have to be anything noble about it: it's just normal. People say what they believe.
> My impression for some time has been that genuine concern for any given political topic is a function of the cost in having, revealing, or defending it.
That suggests that only minority opinions are genuine, and moreover that broad, genuine agreement throughout the population is impossible. I think almost the entire United States was genuinely concerned about terrorism the day after 9/11, even though you would probably not lose anything by speaking out against terrorism.
Regarding the last point, I'd say that cost wouldn't designate a belief genuine or not, and now that I think of it, narcissistic intention doesn't negate that either. Rather, it's an assessment of how bold a statement is, or the degree to which it's likely to be shallow or indicative of attention grabbing for personal gain. More concisely, putting your money where your mouth is.
After 911, if you were afraid of terrorism, it might come up in conversation and you'd talk about it, but going to random places on the internet and discussing it unprompted—especially if you used it as a vehicle for middle eastern bigotry, which was also common—would signal something else, especially if you have a figurative grand stand available. Those that have a minority opinion would be less likely to be doing it for claps—although they might get them—because their audience is more ambiguous. More about the degree being the measure. I'm concerned about climate change, but have only personally given up a bit in the name of it. If I were to be extremely vocal on reddit about that, it would be for imaginary personal gain. That said, a third case of both being true definitely exists. Having high cost and an opinion doesn't negate the possibility that you're moral grandstanding.
I suppose what I was thinking about was more to do with how much you'd need to have considered a given stance, based on potential conflict with your personal beliefs or those of most people around you.
That’s right, I don’t respond to baiting — especially from handles with obvious twitter accounts who were planning to drag me in front of a mob. I’ve written elsewhere on Reddit and even more often on HN too, so take your imputation of cowardice back to the shop and do read more of what I have written.
It's fair to say I was outraged since I threw an "F" word in there. Although I didn't do it to seek status, it got something like 2000 upvotes.
Anecdotally, I can see that grandstanding works, if "karma" is what you care about.
This makes being a person who people listen to an important aspect of being part of a society. If you're listened to, then you and your "social lineage" get to survive to the next generation of how to live. This also means that you don't have to relearn the lessons of a competing "social lineage" in order to stay compatible with your peers.
Getting likes is an easy feedback mechanism to know if people are listening to your ideas. Additionally, some people will listen to people who others listen to. So getting likes can directly feed into your own social fitness.
Likes are much more real that most other things that people deal with in their day to day lives.
> Political ideology had no relationship with moral grandstanding scores.
i.e. narcissism is a bipartisan problem. (I mean, we knew that already, didn't we? "Crooked X", "X belongs in jail" and the like, relating to a well-known presidential candidate, is not something that the "left" came up with!) OTOH, it's nice to finally have an actual research paper that clearly links this sort of hypocritical grandstanding with narcissistic tendencies.
Social media is just the fully fleshed out network. I'm just thinking about the progression from letters, the pony express, the railroad, the telegraph, the telephone, radio, movies, television, internet, to now social networks.
Haven't those with access to the information network always used it to express why their opinion is right or wrong? The toxicity is maybe just a function of the rapid increase of access. There is now an "infinite" number of those with access to an "infinite" number of listeners. With TV or radio, the listeners are still there, but access to dissemination is highly restricted. With telegraphs or telephones, both access and audience are restricted.
I'm not sure if this problem was ever solved before. Maybe it was just stifled....
I think the more contemporary issue would be with individuals attempting to manipulate the 'psychological set" of a large group through a moderated grandstanding eg your with us, or your with the [insert villain here] ! note this is simultaneously an assertion of brinksmanship.
It gives me hope to see researchers starting to tackle this social phenomenon. Now that there is a foothold on some scientific results, maybe we can finally start to take it seriously and influence behavior. IG's experimenting with removing likes seems to be a step in that direction. Hopefully there will be more initiatives like this.
Around these parts we used to describe performative, status-seeking wokeness as 'craw-thumping'.
Yes, but the individual may not know they're doing that. (I guess this is too obvious to the researchers to bother saying.)
This is much better known under the name "virtue signaling"...
The intersectional left however, is generally the group with words and actions powerful enough for it to be highly visible, at least at the national level. In local terms, say at the level of school/church/neighbourhood I think, paradoxically, it's people of very conventional/classical morality that might have more power via shaming etc..
Whereas at on CNN for example generally one's 'private sex life' is out of bounds (unless there's something illegal) ... I think that in social circles, there's a lot of gossip and talk about that kind of stuff.
To me the results of this study are obvious, but it would be interesting to point out how it may have nothing to do with the validity of the moralisation. 'Virtue signallers' may often be right, but it's the ugly sanctimony and lack of context that I object to.
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/papa.12075?...
I personally strongly disagree that anything from 2016 can be "extensively explored and defined in philosophical literature".
IMHO its due to the rise of cable news silos and talk radio charlatans taking on the role once reserved for journalists and experts. By oversimplifying very complex issues into Us vs Them, they created an environment ripe for exploitation. And since the currency of media is Attention, the more sensationalist you become, the more attention and money you receive.
This translates perfectly to social media, where the currency is also attention and the rewards, a bit more convoluted than just money. Its what this article describes, the need for attention outweighs the actual results...
The dynamic within christian groups that leads to a the things I described all have considerable in-group signaling component.
Also, some level of that in-group signaling is functional - people don't just randomly take coordinated actions like that. The signaling component is likely necessary for the organization to happen.
Modern social media may exacerbate the effect, but it didn't invent it.
What benefits has it brought about? We know we're increasingly anxious, lonely and isolated despite it, so what "social" benefits have these "social" enterprises actually caused?
Because the list of damage is endless, and the list of victims never-ending.
Watching politicized animosity, done for the purpose of the researched grandstanding, spill over into universities and public life has been horrifying. Careers and lives ruined for not keeping up with the ever-changing morals of the online mob, culminating in events such as those at Evergreen State College, the Christakis furore at Yale, the constant speech policing because non-adherent political speech now makes others feel "unsafe", etc. People who were once the leaders of progressive movement turned into right-wing nazi bigots over publications that were on-narrative, or ahead of it, when published, now resurrected to be held against them by today's constantly changing standards.
Even in this thread, a topic on an objective study of the effects of social media, simply pointing to it has caused an uncontrolled, partisan, shitshow.
None of this ends well. A society full of increasingly anxious and isolated people, seeking purpose in online identity groups known for electing the most vitriolic doomsday preachers as leaders, who are increasingly viewing the "other side" as an enemy, armed with a treasure trove of historical tweets/fb posts/etc. to dig through for evidence of their crimes, does not end well.
Social media may prove to be the biggest mistake we've ever made.
Then why are social media companies so hell bent on suppressing the ones they don’t like? They’re reaching _somebody_.
Your base agrees with you, and is invested in that position. They're not going to change their mind, but they may abandon you if you don't demonstrate that you're committed. Your aim is to motivate them to support you, through money or activity.
The other side's base is the opposite, of course. And your aim there is to get them to stay home, or to abandon their side. This is why hypocrisy is such a common charge and there's so much focus on various scandals.
Persuasive arguments are aimed at people who haven't formed an opinion. That's why plainly ideological outlets will present themselves as objective and authoritative; people who feel they are neutral can sign on with them without feeling like they're actually taking a side.
So the reason you don't hear people changing their mind is the people who are likely to are those who haven't formed an opinion, and thus aren't sounding off in the first place.
Moreover, the evidence you present is rarely as compelling as you think. Ask a lawyer how often they've had to talk down clients who were convinced they had an ironclad argument. The big ideologies have axiomatic differences they are not necessarily fully aware of, and those tend to be why neither is convinced by the other.
But it is possible to raise a point they have a genuine problem with. If you have done so, the thing to look for is not an immediate response. It's that the other side's talking points shift in response; especially if they shift to "let's change the subject."
I think the GP's only indefensible claim is "none of this is true," the observations the researchers made could all be statistically valid and people may be "seeking social change" by moral grandstanding.
After all, you have a mess of political tribes vying for influence, and the dominant tribe is the one that broadly gets to set the rules.
[1]: https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/11/psycholo...
Epstein didn't kill himself. Sorry, I don't have any proof. But they did a study, and lied.
For example, charity is a good thing (feeding the poor, etc.), but would anyone say that making a show of your generosity is a phenomenon that never happens? It's an impure motive, but it's also very common. So common it's a standard PR strategy for companies.
You can say that good can still come of it regardless of motives, and I'd agree, but when trying to understand a social phenomenon, I think it's fair to look at what motivates people to participate.
Correct, they seek social status by bashing unseen unknown people in front of people with higher social status. The more powerful those they seek to impress, the more people will seek to impress them.
In my view I see it as a primary motivator, and I think people are unaware of this.
Take a look around you next time someone starts ranting on “Save the oceans” or Climate change — and as much as you know those individuals think about what is intrinsically motivating them.