![]() ![]() Grandstanders scrutinize every word spoken by their opponents-and sometimes even their friends-for the potential to evoke public outrage. Grandstanders tend to “trump up moral charges, pile on in cases of public shaming, announce that anyone who disagrees with them is obviously wrong, or exaggerate emotional displays.” Nuance and truth are casualties in this competition to gain the approval of the audience. Like a succession of orators speaking to a skeptical audience, each person strives to outdo previous speakers, leading to some common patterns. The philosophers Justin Tosi and Brandon Warmke have proposed the useful phrase moral grandstanding to describe what happens when people use moral talk to enhance their prestige in a public forum. Another 2017 study, by the Pew Research Center, showed that posts exhibiting “indignant disagreement” received nearly twice as much engagement-including likes and shares-as other types of content on Facebook. Brady and other researchers at NYU measured the reach of half a million tweets and found that each moral or emotional word used in a tweet increased its virality by 20 percent, on average. If you constantly express anger in your private conversations, your friends will likely find you tiresome, but when there’s an audience, the payoffs are different-outrage can boost your status. ![]() We are easily lured into this new gladiatorial circus. Human beings evolved to gossip, preen, manipulate, and ostracize. Social media, with its displays of likes, friends, followers, and retweets, has pulled our sociometers out of our private thoughts and posted them for all to see. We don’t really need self-esteem, Leary argued rather, the evolutionary imperative is to get others to see us as desirable partners for various kinds of relationships. The social psychologist Mark Leary coined the term sociometer to describe the inner mental gauge that tells us, moment by moment, how we’re doing in the eyes of others. What happens, though, when grandstands are erected along both sides of that street and then filled with friends, acquaintances, rivals, and strangers, all passing judgment and offering commentary? Intimacy builds as partners take turns, laugh at each other’s jokes, and make reciprocal disclosures. We often think of communication as a two-way street. The problem may not be connectivity itself but rather the way social media turns so much communication into a public performance. As social media has aged, however, optimism has faded and the list of known or suspected harms has grown: Online political discussions (often among anonymous strangers) are experienced as angrier and less civil than those in real life networks of partisans co-create worldviews that can become more and more extreme disinformation campaigns flourish violent ideologies lure recruits. What Social Media Changedįacebook’s early mission was “to make the world more open and connected”-and in the first days of social media, many people assumed that a huge global increase in connectivity would be good for democracy. But what would happen to American democracy if, one day in the early 21st century, a technology appeared that-over the course of a decade-changed several fundamental parameters of social and political life? What if this technology greatly increased the amount of “mutual animosity” and the speed at which outrage spread? Might we witness the political equivalent of buildings collapsing, birds falling from the sky, and the Earth moving closer to the sun?Īmerica may be going through such a time right now. Madison presumed that factious or divisive leaders “may kindle a flame within their particular States, but will be unable to spread a general conflagration through the other States.” The Constitution included mechanisms to slow things down, let passions cool, and encourage reflection and deliberation. ![]() He thought that the vastness of the United States might offer some protection from the ravages of factionalism, because it would be hard for anyone to spread outrage over such a large distance. ![]() 10,” James Madison wrote about his fear of the power of “faction,” by which he meant strong partisanship or group interest that “inflamed with mutual animosity” and made them forget about the common good. But they were excellent psychologists, and they strove to create institutions and procedures that would work with human nature to resist the forces that had torn apart so many other attempts at self-governance.įor example, in “ Federalist No. The Founding Fathers knew that most previous democracies had been unstable and short-lived. Constitution was an exercise in intelligent design. Let’s rerun this thought experiment in the social and political world, rather than the physical one. To hear more feature stories, see our full list or get the Audm iPhone app. ![]()
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