Social Contagion Online -- Talking Tech w/ Ashley Merryman
Ashley Merryman is the best-selling author of Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing, and Nurture Shock: New Thinking About Children, and she recently wrote about how our President’s incivility can infect society like the flu (https://wapo.st/2HOT5IO).<br><br>She joins Brian to discuss what social contagion is, whether or not the internet and social media's making this worse, and what, if anything, social media companies should be doing to combat this? <br><br>More about Ashley: https://www.ashleymerryman.com/<br>More on our host, Brian: bit.ly/cdtbrian<br><br>Attribution: sounds used from Psykophobia, Taira Komori, BenKoning, Zabuhailo, bloomypetal, guitarguy1985, bmusic92, and offthesky of freesound.org.
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Transcript
Welcome to Tech Talk. Bye. CT. Tea.
Welcome to CDT's Tech Talk, where we dish on tech and Internet policy while also explaining what these policies mean to our daily lives. I'm Brian Wasilowski, and it's time to talk tech. If you spend a bunch of time online, odds are you've experienced some outrage and anger, especially if you are following our president's tweets. And that's regardless of your political views. So why is that? Well, there's an obvious reason for some. But even if you are a supporter, today's guest believes the science of social contagions can help explain what's happening. Ashley Merriman is the best selling author of Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing, and Nurture Shock, New Thinking About Children. And she recently wrote about how our president's incivility can affect society like the flu. Welcome, Ashley.
Hi. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure.
So tell me more about social contagions and just how sick are we because of our president.
Well, you know, I I I I wanna actually give a disclaimer for the conversation, which I'm really excited to have, but just as a warning to everyone, we may talk about experiences of instability. And instability is so contagious, just like the flu, that mere exposure to it makes us more likely to be uncivil ourselves. So I apologize in advance if I say something about, you know, as an example and people perceive it as unzulable, I actually like, my heart starts racing now when I start talking about examples of instability because I'm so sensitive to its awareness, it and its impact. And you're right. It's astonishing. Research has shown that merely reading anyone's tweet, that's all it takes, is enough to affect your mood. Watching a 45 video clip, Right? So if you log on to Twitter before you go to work, a forty five second video clip is enough to contaminate your entire day. Oh my goodness. As an experiment. Yeah. They did it as an experiment, and they had and they just emailed late. Why? Right? I mean, it's nothing you would consider to be invisible. But if it's more than that, people sort of know what the gig is. Right? So they have to do really straight. And but they sent people randomly assigned, you know, and maybe it was every other day, every couple days, these clips of miles and instability or a normal clip. And then they texted you throughout the day. Hey. How you feeling? What you doing? What's today like? And forty five seconds of instability in the morning contaminated people's entire day. They were more likely to perceive other people for being rude. They were less likely to focus on their goals, to feel like they were achieving and producing anything on their goals.
It was just literally contaminating. That's the the word the researchers used their entire outlook for the rest of the day. Wow. And, I mean, this is probably something a bunch of us have experienced even at night. I mean, I I have made it so that I don't I don't go down the Twitter hole at night. I make sure that I don't, you know, log in and look at different things. But your point about, you know, incivility, even just talking about it, when I was kind of reading that intro and I I I get to the president's incivility, I also tensed up. You know, what are what are some of the the symptoms that other people see when they kind of experience a sort of instability?
Yeah. Well, I mean, they've done experiments. Again, you know, in the lab, someone will come up to someone and, you know, the conf it's a confederate. They're staged, and they're intentionally late. And the supervisor says, you're late, you know, in a in a room of college students. You'll never get a job like this. Get out. Just witnessing that, and then they do subsequent tasks in the lab and not even realizing that was, you know, that was the that was the experiment. Right? Yeah. People experienced a decline in verbal ability by 86%. Wow. Their math skills went down 43%. Their working memory reduced, both in terms of the amount of things they could remember and how fast they recalled things. I mean, these are really tangible effects. We're not just talking about, oh, people should be nice because it's nice to be nice. No. I'm talking about nice to be nice, but these are far more tangible. Saying that. Yeah. I'm not saying you know, I would like to say, hey. It's the right thing to do, so you should do it for the right thing to do. But beyond that, they're real quantifiable effects,
and we should not discount those. Yeah. No. It sounds very grounded in science. I mean, our first example, we were talking about, like, the president's tweeting, or, you know, I guess we were just talking about his incivility in general. But do you think that social media, especially how we communicate today through it, magnifies this as making it worse, has a has a a greater impact than just, you know, the classroom example you gave? Or are they kind of part of the same problem?
I think all of that is true. Okay. And actually, in my conversations about, civility, I'm really sensitive now to the false choice. Most of these are all yes and. So researchers did a study of every political tweet since the inception of well, not the inception of Reddit, but the creation of political categories within Reddit. And they also looked at a representative sampling of any general tweet or any general Reddit post. So it could have been about someone's knitting or whatever. And they did and they tracked them, and it was around 6,000,000 comments altogether through the hundredth day of Trump's presidency. And they concluded that political discourse was the worst it had ever been in the ten years that they could track. Wow. So and they actually correlated it pretty closely along the election cycle in terms of whether it was a primary, whether it was a general, what you know, where is there a debate, and you could see fluctuations, and they did attribute this to the to the Trump effect. That's what they called it. Oh, interesting. So I think he is definitely having an effect. There is other research that's sort of looking at your specific question. Does, does instability or aggression in one context stay in that context? Is the Trump is the tweet troll nice in the rest of
their life? I suspect no. But
Well, I mean, it's it's an interesting question. Right? And or does the tweet troll affect your rest rest of your life, or is it contained in a particular media? Mhmm. And the research is pretty clear, no. It it isn't contained. And in a couple of different ways, they've looked at the willingness of consumers of uncivil social media and uncivil social media you have, the more approving you are of instability in other contexts and the more willing you are to use that instability. So we have some direct evidence in that way. And then we also have experimental tracking, which, you know, finds that, again, that one tweet, that one insult to and the, you know, the argument you had with your boss or your coworker, you take that home with you. Sure. Sure. No. And and, actually, that's if you think about how it operates, that's fairly predictable because one of the reasons instability and aggression are so powerful is because we don't know why it happened. Right? I mean, you spend most of the time why did you why would you do such a thing? What what did you think you were accomplishing? Oh my
god. We've all had that. Yeah. That's so relatable. Yeah. Where you're stewing over something and you you just can't let it go, and a lot of it is that why question. You're exactly right. Exactly. And because of it, that's the trigger for all of those cognitive declines because you're spending time thinking even subconsciously,
what just happened? Maybe maybe I misunderstood because that couldn't possibly be who it ain't meant. Right? So you're trying to fix it in your brain, but you can't. And whether we're talking about a troll you don't know or a politician or your boss, you may not feel comfortable or able to directly confront it, so you can't fix the problem. And that's what makes it so angry making, but that's why it's so easy to have it spill over. Yeah. Right? I can't yell at my boss, so I'm just frustrated all day. But that means I'm gonna yell at the Uber driver Yeah. Or the pedestrian or my spouse.
Right. Right. No. That all makes a lot of sense. Can this work in reverse, though? You know, can positive cues or more positive messaging have the the same sort of effect? Is it the same sort of reinforcing cycle, or does negativity and incivility trump that for lack of a better word? I know. It's not weird.
Again, it's a yes and. The, the research does show that anger travels in social media faster than happiness. But think about how many happy cat videos you've watched. Couple of countless. And there were 5,000,000 other views before you saw it. Before you saw it. Right? Right. So, yes, positive feelings are more are are contagious. If I'm nice to you, if I do a favor for you, you will probably do a favor for me. You don't necessarily do the research is sort of ambiguous in terms of that whole pay it forward idea. Okay. There's less support of that. It's it seems to be more within the circle of people who actually were generous to you than just complete strangers. But, yeah, the research definitely shows that positive contagion you know, there is such a thing as a positive social contagion. Enthusiasm is contagious. Confidence is contagious. So we don't have to just accept that, you know, we're basically stuck. And they and, again, they're self reinforcing. There was a study Oh, interesting.
Wow.
Now, for me, I'm just gonna contagion.
Oh, interesting. Wow.
Now, some of you might be going, well, I'm the 20% here, and it must be I would be one of those people. The research actually shows the remaining twenty percent are even more susceptible emotional contagion. And if you think about it, look at your Twitter feed, how much of it are you coming with original content? And how much is a repost or a retweet or a response? And the more angry, the more angry you are. And what's really interesting, if you post an angry post, your subsequent t tweets that you see are 5% more angry. If you post a positive tweet, your subsequent tweets are 5% more positive. I don't know if that is something in a Twitter algorithm. Oh, that would be interesting to find out. Like to I I yeah. You maybe you know this, but I don't know if it's a Twitter goes, oh, you like angry. We'll give you more angry. Oh, no. Or or I I don't know. But it also could simply be if I posted, I hate them,
well, my friends are gonna reply, I hate them too. Yeah. Yeah. No. I know what you're saying. That makes perfect sense. I think we have a great question for Twitter after this. I have lots of questions for Twitter.
Oh, yeah. So So I do think that, you know, they they can be self reinforcing and and we need to actively start policing ourselves at a minimum. I have ideas on policing others too. We'll get to those. Like, write treacherous words, but, you know, it was interesting. I yesterday, I was, on a Twitter conversation, and I obviously am trying to be really civil. Yes. And everyone who I reply to, I say, sir and ma'am, all due respect,
but I don't know. I'm still at an age where I don't like to be called sir. I'm right on that line where it's like, yes. I'll embrace it or, you know how old someone is in in Twitter That's true. That's true. Is.
Again, I think it's appropriate to air on being extra civil and extra respectful. I like that. And, oh, another one of one of the things that you were saying in terms of the enforcing and dialogue, it's not just positivity. Research looks and finds that, you know,
comment, if I post a civil comment, people respond to me in kind. That's great. No. I actually once wrote a little article on the cdt.org blog, about unfollow all the mean people. And I found that that was actually a really fun exercise to go through and people who, if you look at their Twitter feeds, are only negative, you know, whether it's even a a person you might agree with. But if they only communicate in negative ways, it did put me in bad moods, so I unfollowed them. And I like my Twitter feed much more than I used to. This was pre Trump. So, you know, maybe that's not the case anymore, but I still like it a bit more. So let's get to solutions. Let's get to solutions. Totally. But research says you're totally right. Oh, yay. I love being backed up by science. Yeah. This is good. Well, let's think about what more folks should do because I'm sure, you know, in doing all looking at all this research, thinking through it, you probably have a lot of ideas or, you know, concrete thoughts here. You know, I see it kind of as something that we could do in our personal life, our professional life, and then also probably things that tech or Internet companies should be doing, especially those with social platforms. So let's start with kind of, you know, the individual. What should we be doing professionally and personally to, counteract these social contagions, especially the negative ones? Mhmm.
Yeah. The the positive social contagions, we don't need to counteract. Yeah. No. We wanna magnify those. Right? We can reinforce those. Good point.
We don't I just don't wanna take anything for granted. Yeah. I think that
individually, one of the main things, Christine Porath wrote, is a Georgetown professor who studies instability, and she actually has a book out called Mastering Stability. Oh, great. But one of Christine's main things, especially for social media, is reduce your intake of uncivil content.
Ah, I love it. I'm gonna read this book now.
Yeah. So limit the amount of exposure. That means do not check Twitter every day. That means deselect Twitter notifications and, you know, monitoring very closely when and turn off the uncivil screaming pundit matches. Do not watch that. Do not share the pundit arguing match. Good advice. Because and to me, I think about it and, like, okay. Would you have, as an adult, go to a schoolyard and it and kids are screaming at each other, would you yell fight fight fight? Wow. Because that's what you're doing on the Internet when you share Yeah. A clip of pundits arguing.
I agree with that. Yeah. No. That's good advice. I actually tell a lot of people if they want to be more sane in life and think the world is better, don't watch cable news. So when you, you know and that goes it doesn't matter which, political leaning you have. It's just that's kind of what television is right now. And then when you magnify that on social media, it makes it even worse because you've taken then, you know, perhaps a longer thoughtful conversation and boiled it down to a probably one minute clip, and that gets even worse.
And it's the worst, least informed and informative part.
Right. Good point. Is about the angry making. And even if there had been an hour of substantive information, you don't know that. Yeah. Good point. Good point. And all of that, again, is really, destructive. And research actually shows that not only is anger faster at traveling, people who are angry are looking for information that confirms the view they already have. Yeah. The confirm confirmation bias piece. Yeah. It's well, it's even a particular kind of confirmation bias because we just generally wanna know we're right, but angry drives it even more. Oh, fascinating. As opposed to someone who's anxious, someone who's anxious genuinely wants to know the answer. So they would look for more sources of information and aren't necessarily going to be looking for confirming what they knew because that may just increase their, yes, you're right to be terrified. Well, I don't wanna know that. Give me something
else.
Interesting. So what else can we do? When you're watching those angry clips Yeah. You're teaching yourself over time to actually the research shows constant exposure to instability makes you less trustful, less open minded, more hostile, more likely to believe that other people are insidious and have to get you. So another thing to do, especially for leaders or whether you're talking about political leaders or supervisors in an office, the one bad apple really can ruin the barrel. And you need to address incivility immediately and clearly. You need to remove that person from the company. Don't transfer him. Don't tell everyone, oh, it's not a big problem. We'll just work around him. Because what you're actually teaching everyone is there are no consequences to instability.
Oh, interesting. Yeah. No. It's too often you hear that's just the way they are. You know, that's their style, and that's that's not always great. That's clearly not always great as you're saying right now. It's
it's really true. The opposite. Yeah. And and if that the uncivil person is promoted, then you're actually teaching people that incivility is the way to be successful here. So research really has shown that both the passive leader who does nothing and the leader who encourages instability both have huge dramatic effects throughout an institution. So we really want to respond to it. If you're on the end of instability and you don't know what to do, it's really hard. Ninety four percent of us say that when we experience instability, we're going to retaliate.
Wow.
And that's actually the people who actually I mean, those are amazing numbers to me because Yeah. Normally, we don't wanna admit we are gonna do something bad. Right? So if 20% had said, yeah. I'm gonna retaliate. I would've There's probably another 20 to 20 or 30 who probably are, but we don't wanna tell you that. Right. Right? But instead, 94% of us said, yeah. We're gonna do it. Wow. Another another another study in the workplace found that seventy percent of people admitted to being the targets, but also the perpetrators of workplace aggression.
Sure. So
we really need to if we're on the receiving end, and most of us are in some way, some random thing, really own that feeling. But rather than lash out at that person or other people, then we need to again, another, professor Porra's suggestion, decompress, remove yourself, concentrate on calming down, realize that that really did affect you. Yeah. I mean, that's to me, like, I knew I I was angry after watching people yell at each other, but now I'm realizing the effect of that feeling I'm having. So I don't wanna spread it around. Just as if I was sick, I wouldn't go into the office and sneeze on people. Yeah. No. That's If I'm angry, I need to disconnect
and calm down before I give it to other people. No. That's some great advice. So let's we don't have too much time left, but let's I do wanna hear your thoughts on what kind of the social media companies should be doing because, obviously, they play a a big role or they have the potentially could play a big role in addressing this.
Mhmm. I absolutely think they do, and I think we need to do institutional as well as individual efforts. To me or, companies like Twitter or Facebook and I know there's this sort of, oh, we can't censor blah blah blah. Well, they're private companies. First amendment doesn't apply. Right? So I'm a lawyer too.
That is legally correct. Yes.
So I I there was there's no state actor. You can you can pick and choose whomever you want to speak on your platform. Yeah. But I to me, I mean, I sort of respect the idea that we want, you know, the the bigger pool of voices. On the other hand, that doesn't mean we should be helpless. And I actually have been intentionally exposing myself to some of the most hateful things I can find on the Oh, gosh. That must be hard. It is hard, but I want it you know, I'm writing about it. I'm covering it. I wanna know what I'm talking about, and I report them. And I have reported to Twitter so and so is impost an impostor. Twitter replies to me, we have confirmed that so and so is an impostor. And I said, great. And guess what? That person's profile wasn't taken down. Wow. I've gotten an email saying, yes. We've confirmed that that, Twitter person is advocating violence or suicide. I said, great. Went to the account. Not taken down. So they obviously aren't even enforcing the things that they're doing. But then you also have this sort of idea that idea that Twitter said repeatedly. Well, yes. We would kick Trump we would kick you and I off for saying something, but we wouldn't kick Trump off for saying the same thing because he's powerful and he's newsworthy. And so here's here's my response. If people are or accounts, but let's just say people, are regularly uncivil and people are regularly saying and and I have a test for instability. We can go to that in a second. But if they're regularly uncivil, not one shot. We can all have a knee jerk response. We can all have a bad day. I get that. But if you're regularly uncivil, then your account gets a permanent, whether that's six months permanent or permanent permanent. I don't know. But you get a red check right next to that blue check where you get a red box that appears around every single one of your subsequent t tweets for a period of time. So that everyone who sees them because you had to pick and choose who were the mean people. You had to expose yourself to mean people in your Twitter feed to figure out who were the mean people. Twitter should tell you beforehand. This person is regularly uncivil. The research shows that when I warn you of incivility, it has less of an effect. That's why I did it at the beginning. And it also is a context thing. Right? If I go to a football game, if I go to a baseball game, I'm gonna expect trash talk. It's not gonna hurt quite as much. Someone may cross the line. Right? But I'm prepared for it. Right. I'm not necessarily prepared for it on Twitter unless the reputation of Twitter is just embraced. Yes. We really are about instability and not, you know, instability and that's the primary. So I think that Facebook, Twitter, and, again, not on their profile page, but every post should be flagged. I also feel like traditional media, we have, ratings for TV violence, but violence only includes physical acts of violence. It doesn't include verbal aggression. It doesn't include any other kind of relational aggression. And I'd like to create a I rating for instability. And currently, the TV ratings and producers themselves identify their work as violent currently. There's no government actor. There's no one doing this. But I'd like to add an I in writing. There's currently an exemption for news in sport. Obviously, that should end. Mhmm. And I think that that same rating should not just carry on to the actual broadcast of the show, but should be included when you post a clip.
Interesting. These are a lot of great thoughts and ideas quickly, as we are about out of time here. Tell me what your kind of checklist for civility is. What what counts as uncivil actions?
Well, I went with the ones that I thought were the most easy.
Okay. That's good.
I really did. Advocacy of violence. If you advocate violence, you're uncivil. That's yeah. Blaring profanity. And I don't care if you say, well, that's how I talk. Well, that's a lot of people, but no. It's still uncivil. Personal attacks, dehumanizing someone, relying on characters as stereotypes, and presenting false facts as truth.
Oh, great. Yeah. And cumulatively,
they're all the more and more in civil war. I think any one of those, obviously, could be considered unsavable. But, you know, on the flip side, respecting someone's point of view, saying, oh, you know, that's a really good point. I hadn't thought of that. That is civil. Right? Pretending someone has is just innately bad and everything they have, that is uncivil. And it's dangerous, and it's also shortsighted. I think that a lot of people think that, you know, we gotta play to our base. Research studies surveyed those who did not vote in the number November, and six out of 10 of the people who didn't vote said part of the reason they did not vote was because the candidates were uncivil. Oh, wow. That's incredible. Really yeah. 42% of Americans say that they and this was a year ago, so maybe higher, said, yeah. We're gonna stop watching on civil news. We can't tolerate this anymore. We aren't gonna look at social media anymore. We can't deal with this. And so the people are saying, oh, we've just gotta fire up the base more and more and more are losing
the people who are genuinely undecided, the people who genuinely wanna know the facts and wanna know what's going on. And, hopefully, the majority of people when you really get down to it. I mean, the base often when you really look at the numbers is so small. The base is I'm air quoting, which folks can't see. But
And the people who are so upset that people are screaming are probably the people who actually care. Yeah. Now these are all great points. Yeah. So I think it's really important and, again, it's not just, you know, I I feel at the moment like I'm trying to be the nation's mother and I just wanna carry her on a diaper note. But I'm I'm really trying to show that it's not just saying, okay. Let's be nice. There are real consequences to it, but there are real concrete steps that we can take, again, individually, institutionally to make a difference. Yeah. I know that your numbers, your stats, your research really resonated with me to to hammer home the concrete reasons to be more
civil. So, hopefully, listeners will take some of that away and this starts an important conversation or just gets people thinking about a little bit more what they're saying and how they're acting. Because science backs it up, you know. Incivility breeds more incivility. So that is bad. Ashley, thank you so much for joining Tech Talk. Oh, thanks. It was an honor. That's it for this episode of Tech Talk. For the very latest on what CDT is doing to shape a vibrant digital future, follow us on Twitter, like us on Facebook, or visit cdt.org. I'm Brian Wasilowski. Thanks for listening.
