I strongly endorse your central point that in modern social media culture, our normal intuitions and heuristics about how to assess people’s moral traits get completely derailed by the power of bad actors such as stalkers, grudge-holders, mentally ill people, and unscrupulous journalists.
From an biological perspective, there’s probably some deep ‘evolutionary mismatch’ at work here . We evolved for many millennia in small-scale tribal societies including a few dozen to a few hundred people. In such societies, if some person X is subject to serious accusations of unethical misconduct by several independent people, it’s prudent to update one’s view of X in the direction of X being a bad person, psychopath, liar, harasser, or whatever. The reputational heuristic ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ can be reasonable in small-scale contexts. If 5 people out of 50 in one’s clan report seriously negative interactions with person X, that’s a pretty high hit rate of grievances.
However, in modern partisan social media culture, where someone can have many thousands or millions of followers, including hundreds to thousands of ideologically motivated hostile critics, this heuristic breaks down. Anybody who is sufficiently famous, notorious, or influential, and who is even marginally controversial, will attract a virtually limitless quantity of negativity. It becomes easy to find not just 5 people who hate person X, but 50, or 500 -- and our Pleistocene social brains interpret that as dispositive evidence that the person X must be worthy of hatred.
Then it becomes easy for journalists, bloggers, or random social media obsessives to compile all this negativity into a carefully curated grievance-bundle that makes someone—or some group, organization, subculture, or movement—sound very bad indeed.
Naive readers exposed to such grievance-bundles will see several examples of smoke, and conclude that there must have been some underlying fire.
My hypothesis—which is speculative, and untested, but, I hope, plausible—is that our evolved social-judgment heuristics are just not very scope-sensitive about social information when we’re judging the reputations or moral virtues/vices of people and groups. At least, not scope-sensitive enough to be very accurate when we’re judging reputations in the modern world of social media, which includes literally millions of very unhappy, hateful, resentful, and/or delusional trolls who spend a LOT of time, energy, and dark creativity trying to bring others down.
A secondary effect of this ‘social-reputation scope-insensitivity’ is that when the trolls see other trolls complaining about a particular person or group, their own social judgments get confirmed, through a combination of social proof, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. If they were alone with their negativity, they might doubt their judgment. But it is always easy, on social media, among millions of others, to find dozens to hundreds of others who share their negative views—which validates their initial judgment, and makes their grievance seem righteous and worth sharing even more widely. This can lead to a runaway effect, where once a critical mass of negative judgment coalesces around a person or group, more and more people dogpile onto the target.
This seems to have been happening a lot to Aella as an individual. It’s also been happening a lot to EA as a movement in the last few months. It is the social-psychological heart of cancel culture. And we should be very wary of it, just as we should be very wary of all scope-insensitive judgments.
Aella—thanks for writing this.
I strongly endorse your central point that in modern social media culture, our normal intuitions and heuristics about how to assess people’s moral traits get completely derailed by the power of bad actors such as stalkers, grudge-holders, mentally ill people, and unscrupulous journalists.
From an biological perspective, there’s probably some deep ‘evolutionary mismatch’ at work here . We evolved for many millennia in small-scale tribal societies including a few dozen to a few hundred people. In such societies, if some person X is subject to serious accusations of unethical misconduct by several independent people, it’s prudent to update one’s view of X in the direction of X being a bad person, psychopath, liar, harasser, or whatever. The reputational heuristic ‘where there’s smoke, there’s fire’ can be reasonable in small-scale contexts. If 5 people out of 50 in one’s clan report seriously negative interactions with person X, that’s a pretty high hit rate of grievances.
However, in modern partisan social media culture, where someone can have many thousands or millions of followers, including hundreds to thousands of ideologically motivated hostile critics, this heuristic breaks down. Anybody who is sufficiently famous, notorious, or influential, and who is even marginally controversial, will attract a virtually limitless quantity of negativity. It becomes easy to find not just 5 people who hate person X, but 50, or 500 -- and our Pleistocene social brains interpret that as dispositive evidence that the person X must be worthy of hatred.
Then it becomes easy for journalists, bloggers, or random social media obsessives to compile all this negativity into a carefully curated grievance-bundle that makes someone—or some group, organization, subculture, or movement—sound very bad indeed.
Naive readers exposed to such grievance-bundles will see several examples of smoke, and conclude that there must have been some underlying fire.
My hypothesis—which is speculative, and untested, but, I hope, plausible—is that our evolved social-judgment heuristics are just not very scope-sensitive about social information when we’re judging the reputations or moral virtues/vices of people and groups. At least, not scope-sensitive enough to be very accurate when we’re judging reputations in the modern world of social media, which includes literally millions of very unhappy, hateful, resentful, and/or delusional trolls who spend a LOT of time, energy, and dark creativity trying to bring others down.
A secondary effect of this ‘social-reputation scope-insensitivity’ is that when the trolls see other trolls complaining about a particular person or group, their own social judgments get confirmed, through a combination of social proof, confirmation bias, and motivated reasoning. If they were alone with their negativity, they might doubt their judgment. But it is always easy, on social media, among millions of others, to find dozens to hundreds of others who share their negative views—which validates their initial judgment, and makes their grievance seem righteous and worth sharing even more widely. This can lead to a runaway effect, where once a critical mass of negative judgment coalesces around a person or group, more and more people dogpile onto the target.
This seems to have been happening a lot to Aella as an individual. It’s also been happening a lot to EA as a movement in the last few months. It is the social-psychological heart of cancel culture. And we should be very wary of it, just as we should be very wary of all scope-insensitive judgments.