![]() At the next level, there is what you might call Viral Screaming Syndrome-the natural tendency of web content to veer toward high-arousal emotions, such as outrage and paranoia, to attract attention and promote social sharing. At the bottom, there is group polarization and the natural tendency of moderate people to become extremist versions of themselves when they interact with like-minded peers. The psychological roots of online hatred have three levels. But something about the design of our social-media platforms-and perhaps something inherent to the internet itself-has amplified the worst angels of our nature. The latest episode of Crazy/Genius, produced by Patricia Yacob and Jesse Brenneman, analyzes the recent wave of internet-inspired violence-from Charlottesville to Christchurch-and asks why the web became such a fecund landscape for extremism. But to a social psychologist, it sounded like a machine for injecting public discourse with ideological steroids. To a technologist such as Mark Zuckerberg, this characteristic seemed to promise a new age of transnational peace and moderation (not to mention: profit). Above all, social media are a mechanism for allowing people to find like-minded individuals and to form groups with them. Social networks such as Facebook and Twitter are many things at once-a modern railroad crossed with a modern telephone network, mixed with a modern phone book, on top of a modern Borgesian library. What does this have to do with the internet? Approximately everything. Just plop them in a like-minded group, and human nature will do the rest. If you want to make people more extreme, you don’t have to threaten them or brainwash them. Spending long amounts of time with people who agree with you doesn’t just lead to groupthink, these researchers have found it can also lead to the gradual silencing of dissent and the elevation of, and consensus around, the most virulent opinions. Today this effect is known as group polarization, and unlike other pseudo-phenomena in the field of psychology, it’s been ratified by several additional studies. When the groups disbanded, the liberal students had become much more liberal, and the conservative students had veered sharply right. He divided several hundred undergraduates into two camps based on their attitudes toward feminism, creating a conservative cluster and a liberal one. Myers conducted a famous experiment on the power of groups. In the early 1970s, the psychologist David G. Subscribe to Crazy/Genius : Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play
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