Jonathan Haidt: How Social Media Drives Polarization | Amanpour and Company – Transcript

00:00In a time of heightened political tension, our next guest has an idea of what's driving this polarized atmosphere around the world. Jonathan Hyde is a social psychologist and co-author of The Coddling of the American Mind, and he believes that social media has so transformed in recent years, becoming an outrage machine spreading anger and toxicity.

00:22Our Harry Street of Us has sat down with him to discuss how it all happens and what he thinks the solutions are. Jonathan Hyde, thanks for joining us. Thank you, Harry. You recently wrote an article that looked at kind of the intersection of technology and psychology and how social networks and social media are changing, are both collective psychology and individual ones. Lay it out for us.

00:46Sure, so I'm a social psychologist and I study morality and how our politics is based in our ancient tribal us versus them circuits. And I've been studying political polarization since about 2004 and watching it get worse. In the last few years, beginning before the 2016 election, it got so much worse. And weird stuff started happening on college campuses and then weird stuff started happening in other institutions and in other countries. And I started thinking,

01:14what's going on? Why does it seem like things are going haywire at the same time, different areas of life in different countries? So examples of the weird stuff. Well, so on college campuses, beginning in 2015, we suddenly had students with these new ideas that we could not understand about fragility, students asking for trigger warnings, safe spaces, this idea that speeches, violence, words are dangerous.

01:36And at first, we thought it was something strange we were doing on campus. And my friend, Greg Lukianoff, and I wrote an article in The Atlantic called The Coddling of the American Mind, we thought it was something we were doing on campus. Well, years later, we realized no, we were wrong. Gen Z arrived in 2015. And so then we started thinking, well, how did kids born in 1996 and later, how did they change? But in more recent years, we realized it's not even just Gen Z. It's all of us, all of our institutions

02:04are malfunctioning, not all, but many are going haywire in a way that suggests some common cause. And the recent Atlantic article is about that common cause, the changes in social media that happened between 2009 and 2012 that most people don't understand. Okay. What are some of those changes? How did they happen?

02:21So you got to put yourself back in the early days of social media, 2003, 2004, you get Friendster and MySpace and The Facebook. And these were pretty nice places. It's just, hey, look at me. Here are the bands I like. Here are the links to all my friends. Okay.

02:38That's what it was for the first few years. There was no way to spread outrage. It was not destructive. It was not toxic. The bid change happens in 2009. Facebook introduces the like button. And now for the first time, everything can be graded and ranked. And now everybody is rewarding or punishing everyone else with a single click.

02:57It's a popularity contest. Popularity contest. Exactly. So now speech isn't just, you know, you and me talking. It's you and me talking in a way that I can get the most likes for what I say, and you're just a tool I'm using to get more likes. Twitter at the same time introduces the retweet button. And now the things I'm saying that you're liking tend to be the things that are going to make people upset or angry, emotional, and then you or anyone can press retweet and spread that. So now my anger can go to thousands

03:22or even millions of people within a day. And then the third big one is that Facebook takes the news feed and algorithmicizes it. It used to be just chronological. Now it's optimized for engagement. The things that make people engage are the things that go to the top of other people's news feed. Put these three things together and what you get is a transformation of social media from, hey, look at me and who I like to, I can't believe

03:47he said that and I'm angry too. And so we created this, we, the social media platforms got converted into an outrage machine, we call it, in this article that I wrote with Tobias Rostockwell, who really understands social media from the inside. Before I worked with him, I didn't realize how everything changed between 2009 and 2012. And then the next step is that the news media, mainstream media, has to adapt to this new world in which people aren't getting, they're not

04:17going to the New York Times site as much, let's say. They're getting links from Facebook. So once you get everything wrapped up together, we're in a fundamentally different informational structure and news structure than we were in 2008. So that the mainstream media is watching social media to see what's bubbling up and then all of a sudden it's on the news and then back on social media.

04:37Exactly. So it used to be the news would talk about big things that would happen and you wouldn't cover a fight between two kids in a school in Peoria, but now maybe a video comes out of something that someone said somewhere in the country and people spin it, they manipulate what it was, they make it more outrageous and that spreads virally on social media. Now all journalists are on Twitter at just about and so they pick up things

05:04and oh well that might get me, if I write an article about that, that might get me in the most emailed list. So the journalists are looking for interesting news stories so then something can bubble up, be covered on the news and then of course there's all kinds of social media about the news story. So we are now immersed in a cycle of conflicts about trivial things, trivial things, a word that somebody used typically, things like that and it's filling our minds and

05:30distracting us from thinking about more important issues. Look I can hear activists behind my head saying hey what about the actual moments of transparency that social media has enabled, the you know outrageous behavior by authorities in different places in different ways and we were captured on and now it's actually getting the light of day that it should have, right?

05:49No that's all true. So with each new revolution of technology you get a lot of good things happening, you get a lot of bad things happening and especially with sexual harassment, just low, especially low level stuff that we'd accepted or you know high level even rape that was covered up. So it's great that that's now being exposed and of course part of those changes will be painful for some people, that's all to the good. But to the extent that

06:13democracies are now I think much more likely to fail, fail, that is a very serious downside and so we've got to optimize, we've got to figure out how do you let, how do you, how do you encourage what we call, I study business ethics, how do you encourage a speak-up culture that people don't paper over real moral offenses, how do you encourage a speak-up culture without moving all the way to what's called a call-out culture in which

06:39we're all afraid of each other because anything we say can be taken distorted and made to shame us. How do we connect what's happening on social media to this other idea that you're talking about democracies failing? Get me past that gap. So you got to go back to the very beginning of this country when the founding fathers were thinking what kind of system should we have and they were very good historians with their limited libraries and they were

07:04excellent psychologists and they wanted something like democracy but they knew that democracy is inherently unstable. They read Plato, they read Greek political theorists and they knew that the Greeks thought that democracy inevitably decays into tyranny because a demagogue comes along, inflames the passions, the people especially if there's instability or war want

07:28a strong leader ensweeps the tyrant and so the founding fathers were thinking how do we stop that from happening and their big fear was faction so in the Federalist papers James Madison writes about faction or division and in a fascinating passage which really is the crux of our article Madison is musing on the fact that faction has destroyed almost all previous most previous democracies, somebody will inflame passions and then they don't care about the common good,

07:57they just want to fight the enemy but he says in a very big country such as ours, you know the 13 colonies with vast distance, someone could start a fire in one place but the country is so big, so big that it couldn't spread to all the other states by the time news got there passions would have cooled. Well fine but what if we get this new technology that allows passion to spread instantly, completely instantly and it goes through an

08:24almost Darwinian evolutions that the most outrageous versions of the story are the ones that spread and so the founding fathers fears about democracy are all coming true and the mechanisms they devised to cool things off to give us more time to reflect to use a reason a bit more those are being bowled over by the passions and powers and mob mentality of social media. So is the mob online so to speak is it representative of the will of

08:53the general body politic? Not at all not at all and so there is in fact it's very hard to know what people think. One thing I've learned from traveling around talking a lot of schools a lot of industries is that the great majority of people the great majority of Americans are really reasonable but the dynamic has changed so that saying reasonable things can get you in big trouble and so if you have extremists on on both sides politically are the ones with the

09:19megaphone and they have this new ability to shame you to call you out to call you terrible names people just silence themselves as one college student said to uh Deb Maschik who runs heterodox academy a site that argues for more viewpoint diversity at universities this student said to her my motto is silence is safer and this is a terrible motto for college college student because if you just don't say anything you won't get in trouble and you won't learn

09:47anything either and you won't learn anything and your friends won't learn anything because if they say something that's politically appealing and and wrong people are afraid to say well wait a second what's the evidence for that in parallel or combined with that it seems that we are losing the ability to disagree agreeably whether it's in that workplace setting in that academic setting in college how does that influence the policy debates that actually need all of

10:12these different points of view it's devastating to that process so if you think about about humans in any society we're really good at competing and conflicting but also making up forgiving coming back together we do this in our families all the time if you have a long future with someone if we're tied together we live next door whatever it is we might fight and argue but there's a lot of pressure on us to keep it within bounds because we're going to be together for a long time

10:38that's normal human relationships on social media it's lots and lots of interactions with people that you may never see again some of them don't even exist a lot of them are using fake names there is no future there are no bounds and most most dangerously it's not real communication on twitter you see people having these discussions sometimes good things happen i don't want to overstate it but mostly it's what's called moral grandstanding each of us are just

11:06using the other as a as a platform to show off how committed we are to our side's politics and so if we're not actually an example that suppose somebody on the left were to say something nice about someone on the right to say you know i disagree with him on almost everything but you know i i think he's brave on this point or i think he's you know i think they're right about this you know it's always that's always been a little hazardous to do but that's almost

11:34a definition of courage to be able to say something like that well now you will be called the worst sins by people on your side so fast so there's a lot of pressure to not say anything good about the other side that means there's no nuance there's not much room for compromise to say well you know we can give on this and you give on that um partisans have to be more set in their ways and more focused on the script of battle negotiation compromise politics should be a positive

12:02some game but if it's all conducted in the glare of social media and instant negative reactions people are going to dig in their heels and the the benefits we expect from politics politicians working things out those are harder to realize is the solution then getting off of social media or what what how do you how do we go about at least on an individual basis playing our part in trying to repair this well i think the heavy lifting is going to be done