Dear FO° Reader,
About 30 minutes from Mar-a-Lago, in Riviera Beach, I wake up each morning and often start my work in a local coffee shop, kava bar or park. If there are more than three people in my vicinity, it’s rarely long before a political conversation emerges.
Sometimes these conversations are thoughtful and steady, and sometimes the opposite. What stands out to me the most, though, is when the time comes to assess the ideological enemy, the assessment turns to complete stupidity. It sends me reeling in front of my muffin or latte, because I know it isn’t true; but I know just as certainly that the same assumptions would likely be made of the people that I’m hearing them from.
This assumption of the opposition’s complete illegitimacy is a pervasive force in political polarization, and one that’s weighed heavy on my mind the past few weeks. I have a finger to point at the psychological consequences of social media.
Photo by the Author in Riviera Beach, Florida.
The problem
What usually makes my ears perk up to that nearby discussion is something about fear of overreach by big tech, a brutalized housing economy, distrust in media, conflicting expectations between men and women, and disillusionment with the food and medical industries in the United States.
Next, though, they whip out the secondary conclusions. Then the prescriptions. A relatable, fact-driven conversation sometimes drifts into something familiar to many of us: absolutism, scorn, cruelty, deification. It’s difficult to listen to, and harder to agree with.
But in those moments, I’m reminded viscerally of something that’s calming and perhaps grounding. Beneath even the most polarizing viewpoints are genuine experiences and legitimate concerns — and real vulnerability.
A conversation that sounds nonsensical begins with the recount of an impossible situation of a family member slipping into poverty under the weight of medical bills. From there, the speaker develops an analysis of the medical industry that overlooks important considerations and arrives at conclusions that might be unreasonable. Yet the incredibly human desperation at the base of that view is difficult to dismiss.
People build their understandings from the realities immediately in front of them, and those conclusions often expose genuine flaws in the systems they navigate. Those are shared experiences, and the emotions surrounding them are just as universal. It is hard not to feel an itching sense that we’re deeply misunderstanding the level of unreachable that each other are.
There is little debate that our era — in my country quite noticeably, but the rest of the world as well — is facing a massive philosophical divide in how we view life, humanity, empathy and the age-old debate of what we owe to each other. From those existential questions, we’ve come to vastly different conclusions about how to solve society’s issues, and we’ve cultivated deeply emotional attachments to those solutions. However, one of the greatest disservices we have done to one another and to ourselves in popular culture is to assume that the other is thoughtless.
The rewiring
Many cultural phenomena may have contributed to this issue, but one stands out as a nearly universally agreed-upon culprit: social media. Conversations about the issue of social platforms often center around the content itself and the legitimacy of information, which is a weighty concern indeed. Perhaps the greater issue, though, is what constant social media interactions do to mental and emotional processing. There are quite a few cognitive effects of this new plane of reality, and it’s all in the nature of interaction on the apps — both with information and other humans.
First, the apps themselves are designed to maximize engagement, and consequently often reward patterns of thinking that are extraordinarily similar to what psychologists call cognitive distortions. These are habitual ways of processing reality that can become maladaptive, making it hard to communicate, emotionally regulate and understand reality through lenses other than your own.
Among these distortions are: black-and-white thinking, a tendency to categorize people, actions and situations in extreme, absolute terms; catastrophizing, where one assumes an extremely negative outcome regardless of facts; and mind reading, where you assume to know what people are thinking and feeling without sufficient evidence.
These “distortions” usually arise from a person’s experiences and serve a protective psychological purpose at the time, but become problematic.
The relational architecture of social media rewards these tendencies.
For example, the separation of groups for the purpose of feeding personalized content results in an increasingly polar online landscape in which truths lack duality. In addition, the short-form layout of social media makes nuance very difficult, often leading to very one-sided conclusions out of necessity. These things almost seem to steward black-and-white thinking.
The proliferation of catastrophization is similar. What gets clicks on TikTok, Instagram or X? Extreme, dramatic versions of events that paint a specific, emotional picture. Humans react with intensity to extremity, and intensity is what the algorithm rewards. There is a benefit to expressing things in the most catastrophic terms available, because it is so much more likely to get you the appropriate response, and to get you a response, period. Thus, those are the videos that spend the most time in broad circulation, continuously rewarding the posters and training viewers to see the world through those lenses and acclimating them to that way of thinking.
One can continue in this vein, and the links between the way a social media user functions and destructive mental tendencies identified by branches of the psychology field can feel striking.
Next, there is an investment problem. In normal human interaction, there are stakes to resolution. You must live together, share resources, protect one another and even continue to exist in the same physical space. Social media forces none of that. You can emotionally dump and run. You can escalate and refuse to resolve, and leave if it gets too uncomfortable. There is much less animal motivation to perform the challenging task of relational rehabilitation, and this is the emotional pattern that we’re nurturing.
Humans are motivated biologically to understand one another because we are motivated biologically to cooperate. When you disconnect people from their motivations to cooperate — physical safety, social stability, awareness of their need for the person’s contributions — you disconnect them from animal instincts that drive regulation and compassion. It’s not surprising, and feels undeniably linked, that our willingness to patiently explain ourselves and to listen to others do the same feels so underpracticed.
What netizens are undergoing psychologically is a transformation of habits and expectations that it’s nearly impossible not to transfer into the real world. In contemporary conversations about reliability and quality of information, protection of the system that processes that information doesn’t come up quite enough for my comfort.
The solution
This is where long form comes in. Ideas expressed in their quickest, most view-garnering form are never going to be fully explained. The counterarguments aren’t addressed, and an understanding of the other side is not demonstrated. It’s easy for listeners to see a train of thought and conclusion and to believe the reasoning stops there.
Reengaging with long form content as a society isn’t just an intervention for the depth of education we’re getting. It’s an intervention for our instincts. We can retrain ourselves to think deeper and more slowly. And if you believe like I do that people are not so lost, then you also might agree with my optimism that we can then retrain that pattern in society as a whole.
Organizations like Fair Observer create a forum in which to express ideas thoroughly — to expand on the small things, so that we might actually understand what one another means and where each other is coming from. Context is everything. The chance to see that a person has thought something through is not a mental luxury; from the perspective of trust, it is a deep and visceral need. We must get used to having that need met again, to demanding it and to providing it for others.
If we make the conscious choice to preserve our ability to think critically, seek context and see a broader picture, it will be properly exercised in the moments where that’s most difficult.
Lucy Golish
Assistant Editor
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