social media users are driving the problem. even if wese forget platforms fr every single policy change that many of us would like to see, probably wouldn't move the needle a lot. jon: okay i hope i can push back on you later without okay we will get to that read i hope you're not letting him off the hook and not. chris: no absolutely not. it. jon: these conversations tend to be kind of scattered like a lot of things these days, people use one word and they think it means one thing but other people in the country argument because mature the water part. i think that everyone for clear about what exactly a social media. obviously there's lots of different kinds one of the kinds of matter in our polarizingan features of it, is a tiktok is rented, youtube, what matters.

's. chris: were in the early days. you know, radios and cable tv, we have seen the sudden surges in differences in the way that we think about things like the public to some degree technology makes the idea public possible rated because were able to encounter each other into virtual settings. sleazy thing for me is that it allows the staff conversations with lots of different types of people may be broadens this caliber conversation and publishing the case of our conversation but recently i think that as you said, i'm old enough to remember platforms like myspace, which many younger people never heard of. social media is evolving and i thank you so premature to say exactly what it is the unique characteristics for me is and it allows virtually anyone to enter a conversation about politics and that is the potential for

good but also potential for a lot of bad. jon: so you're focusing on the political and socialist back in the key is it allows two people to talk to strangers about politics. okay. so one of the things to ask about, i have been studying. i am focused on the effects it's had on mental health, my book, the emergent mind so i've been focusing on how it seemed to drive people crazyn or into depression is the feature of generated content and then that users weights like why did they like her picture more than mine. so p it's that important or is t just a product of meeting and having conversations. chris: absolutely, think that single greatest driver of political authorization on social media is a rapidly growing gap between real-life and social media. i think we all know the people

who would say something online but not in person. i think the pandemic is the norm has become too reliant social media to understand each other so the two that innate i called myth book "breaking the social media prism" is because i think social media is distorting the way we understand each other and ourselves. it's really accelerating part of human nature that if you say, we do things like status seeking especially among people are social outcasts but also make moderate seem almost completely invisible and together, i think those do make us all feel more polarized. more than we really are. jon: yes, that is really something that i've been observing on campuses and studying what is happening on campus as we just gone into so many other institutions and especially the creative industries. and into high school. toys in the case that extremes

of the most angry people are the loudest. but then once social media spreads, it is like to go way off the people like site keeping her head down. i'll never forget a student who said to a friend of mine, she said her mono is silences safer. it is horrible for a college student that's her mono going to college. so it is a prison, perceptions of reality and it distorts that in the pattern of who can speak and who's just being silent. okay, let's be clear about the harm. you mention polarization in your title. one of the harms that you're interested in are the harms done by these kind of social media platforms. chris: it is today, status seeking extremists. and let's talk about extremist

for ang minute. we just blow your mind with one statistic jon, 73 percent tweets about politics are made by only 6 percent of twitter users and what surprise you do know that e various same use. so each time you logon and we encounter somebody on the other side, were not seeing a typical person pretty were seen in extremist one of the things that we did it in the spot was we were able to trace people online using the tools and data science like hundreds of millions of tws and social networks but we also did in-depth interviews with people in kind of an experimental quantitative experiment. in the course of the research, we discovered how profound this gap between real-life and social media can be in the stories the sticks in my mind is the story of the sky and i can't read the book. and read when you begin in real life, when we spoke with him, he

will say things like he is the t polite deferential guy, goes out of his way to condemn racism and he likes is all these people on social media you know, they're just losers but they just live with her parents right in the head you could look rail line and ray is the most prolific political trope that i have ever seen in this like ten years of the stuff in each night this kind of doctor jekyll and mr. hyde of information sharing unspeakable things about alexandria cortez on nancy pelosi or barack obama. so the question that i thank you so really fascinating like what enables people to stay in these kind of to humbly different identities online and often what consequences does not have for the rest of us. so you're a sociologist and i'm a social psychologist. the idea that people would be one way in public and then

another way may have anonymity makes a lot of sense and of course if you are friday and that sort of obvious guardian largely passé but we both share things in common. a social psychology and sociology really share an approach. and yes you have this great quote, please the living off world but now we live in mark zuckerberg's world. keeley slain that and in case the audience doesn't know who god is pretty. chris: yes he was way ahead of his time in the 1960s, he was sociologist who really wanted to understand it why we do this weird human thing like we all care so much about creating identities and we care compared to say dog or we care a lot about identities in each day, he discovered h this rich ethnographic, each day was kind of a face permitting with our identities and trying on a

different version of ourselves and looking at how other people reacted to that and more cultivating those identities that make us feel good about ourselves. and so we have done this forever. and certainly social psychologist taking this up as well to wonderful places. the interesting question that i think this how to social media reshape this fundamentally human process. i think there's probably two ways in the first as you mentioned this earlier jon, it allows us to be either fully anonymous or a selective account of who we are free to be of palette to experiment with our identity. then on the second point, we have powerful release more efficient of tools to monitor what other people are thinking about this. we get likes and we get those follows they were talking about earlier that create that endorphin buzz. and of course, were not asking

the important question like who is liking is and why am i doing this sum is automatic. see elephant not the writer. jon: so thank you for putting it into those very psychological terms. have been thinking a lot about behaviors in psychology have these and go back a hundred years commits behavior versus freudian is him and godzilla versus moth or something like that gigantic theory. and i would explain them and then show them how they talk about them but my god, social media has really brought that back because skinner ever to the psychology course, famous videos of him training pigeons to move in a circle all he does is he wait until the pigeon turns a little bit to the left and the clicks and they know the click means a little grain of rice or food. and he would wait until the pigeons are smart and that he

would reinforce them as i think what you put it is that we have always gotten to try things on but now you get to try things on and within a few minutes, you get either lots of pellets of grain for nothing. deafening silence or nasty comments made so behavior is very powerful for training animals if you can if you feel like you don't get to report people, and when reports are delivered minutes later, they don't work. it's really kind of getting the first time in human history, were all at their is saying that world, trying to make. shape my behavior. and this is completely disastrous. i'm sorry, i'm passionate about this. that's why love your book so much because i think that we don't understand it the many

ways that this is changing the basic fabric of society in such a way that nothing works right anymore. tell us mother harmful outcomes. you talk about the extremes and what else are you concerned about pretty. chris: so i totally agree with you on the one hand, the skinner analogy, we are kind of looking for that but not everyone. this is the key point. it like i'm not arguing that everyone house the potential to turn into this doctor jekyll and mr. hyde. in fact, the average social media user never talks about politics and their basically invisible. in the story in the book really stuck out toca me is the woman that i call sarah and sarah you know is an interesting character. she leans conservative but free she is from new york city and she's half puerto weekend internet is a cop into into an ivy league school. she's got a nuanced view for conservative and very open to liberal ideas.

like you will never hear her talk about them on social media. why, we asked everyone to tell us about the last time you used social media. she does this amazing story and something like this. well youma know, when my kids to sleep him a few months ago and my husband owns a gun and goes who can read and you know, and ra put out some posts we support americans rights to invent something innocuous and she retreats at hand replies a little bit to admit within minutes, she's getting these replies from people who have limited or twitter profile benefit she had kids and a posting that we kids find a gun and shoot you. and unfortunately, this kind of stories all too common in our data. in fact, leading research firms out there recently put out a study that suggested the number one reason that the people are getting harassed online this for their politicalh views. so the story is really concerning. i think it even more effective

of what i call the social media prism as they can make people like sarah who desperately need to bring this conversation back to the middle feels invisible. okay, so the harms are extremism, silence, making people afraid, so we got a variety of democracies hand mr. talk about declining trust. there's been a long d declining trust in institution and also have each other and i don't know the dataa on it. and i may vary from country to country so first tell me what you know about declining trust. and then justin briefly talk internationally, do they all have the same problem are just the americans pretty. >> comparative question is fascinating we don't yet have the data points that there's variations here. a lot of countries are going down in polarization like in germany but, one thing across countries is the tendency for social media to drive

polarization. it is almost built into the human tendency to exaggerate the idea logical extremity of the other side and minimize the idea logical extremity of the far side. then give you survey and research the looks of things i trust and outcomes, one of the number one predictors is false want to beon i number one predictors of false polarization a social media usage across ten countries in recent study read it does seem to be that one of the effects here to kind of these projections and ideas that we have about each other and in the thing heret is that we actually have that we can correct misperceptions and then another line of research says that it does build trust. jon: how about cross-cultural comparisons because i know the study are you referring to that germany is going on from that one study, they were looking at polarization as party polarization.

in america we have two parties and so in europe they have lots of parties. so i had a conversation with mark zuckerberg and is reaching out to lots of people. he really goes reaching out to get various views. and i said look this is causing all kinds of polarizations. and this was a year ago. and he said his theory was if you look at that the polarization the political party's conduct, mostly in the countries that have murdoch and "fox news" and so he is saying well, it's trump, is not social media is "fox news" and that sort of stuff ready and it did fit with that study. so is it social media or in sync with other things.

this just brought in volunteer what is going on pretty. chris: absolutely think everybody's kind asking is it driving it, don't face quite pretty do weia know the polarization is surging long before facebook and twitter came on we can point to things like the southern strategy of the democratic or republican party. appointive market segmentation of news creating perverse incentives extremism for small markets pretty cance you point o the soviet union and the cold war which probably provided a common enemy. there is a lot of driver so i don't think that is too productive predict we can explore an alternative reality where a it doesn't tents but i o think it's contributing to the problem that i do think no matter what the answer that question will be left with the following question because given that we b are not going to leave social media anytime soon, how can we make it less polarizing. jon: 's icy that stockwell is in the audience here read so i'm a

social psychologist who doesn't know a lot about this presages that it says that seems to be te cause of all of these bad things and we wrote an article together in the atlantic and as to how these essential social media platforms change radically. between 2009 and 2012 and you mentioned it myspace. that was not polarizing, that was just a presentation. and with their heads together and are serious that when facebook introduces the like button twitter and then the company each other and suddenly is much more engaging and meaning in emotions and especially anger that's when we get we call an outrage machine. so first you agree with that. the timing and give us clear if you do agree, will then what can we do our how can we like let's say it is this outrage machine.

we should look at the questions from the audience for about five minutes or so. chris: is a great question i do think that we need to have top-down solutions and fundamentally rethink how algorithms for example rank content in our feed. i have a variety of ideas how we can fix that but i think the if we really want to move the needle come there if we need to work on is bottom up, ourselves. the data are pretty clear now but even if we did make these changes, we would still be very polarizing still some incentive for people to be terrible to each other. andle so at least given structue of the current conference so i think we need to learn how to see that social media prism and understand theow gaps between social media and reality. we need to both learn how to avoid extremist but also missed moderation. we need to find better ways of talking across divides. but you know that one thing that

i think it's really important and i know that you and i share thise vision, it's easy to say that we all need to be more aware and we need to reach across the aisle nothing is easy predict when this kind of confusion of social media and things are flying all over the place. how do we create this and that's where i think technology comes back in and now that we have diagnosed the human drivers polarization, we can do things like an polarization plant .com we've created a suite of users can use to do things like identify and avoid extremists. what do other people see about politics pretty they can class a class are you p and bipartisan ship order which rewards people not for getting engagement from their own side but forgetting engagements from both sides. and retreat people on this bipartisan leaderboard and other hashtags were republicans and

democrats can be talking about the same things in similar ways. we can use technology in other words, is it a focusing on the small minority of actors, which is where all our attention is now. fighting misinformation, trolling, the veryen best religions seem to have minimal compact and counterproductive impact. but we've done very little on boosting the ability in moderation so i think that from if we are looking at where we can create the most i think a lot about this the most important. jon: so here's what i get to disagree with you. if we think about all kinds of public health issues, smoking, overeating, and we psychologist have forve a long time been saying, okay, people are designed for life in savanna were sugar is rare and it defined, if you find that you are, and simmer art you're surrounded by competent man is a hard to get people to not over

eat. and we know, where limited in the solutions because we can head it junk food, we can't, you have a right to make thanks for unit cigarettes we were able to regulate but it took a heck of a long veryeg hard. and where we are talking about pleasure not biological pleasures of the elephants of my metaphor here. the mind is divided like a rider on the i elephant in the writers the reasoning in the elephant is actually bigger and smarter and you can't change things until you change the elephant brain it sounds to me like you've developed all of these great tools they will show the writer what he is doing that he will help the riders stay away from the extremists in the elephant loves extremist brightest attracted to them in six signing. and the other things were like food and physical pressure which is pretty addicting, but guess what. his sociald reputation blows it out of the water anything else. the concern is just so much more

powerful so if you are saying, because these platforms numerous about before 2009 and then got really really bad. and i you know what, we all have to start assert control. we need to e understand. i love your diagnosis. important to promote your book but not putting any money in your solution. chris: the top down and apart from changes into because they're like i'm naïve about the stuff. these are not going to in themselves going to create changes in polarization bulimic take your analogy a little bit further likes manyea of us wholo have benefited from the elephant in the writer but let's think about the environment that the elephant is navigating the sewer sociology in particular interesting. there are other elephants and sources of food. and that is where the top-down solutions really matter. so if we think about the landscape. and if it's about the platforms rating the playing field but we

are all playing. so if w they wanted top-down solutions we have to think about how we incentivize better behavior. and there's a few ways we can do this. it must comprehend immediately actionable ideas that i would love facebook twitter neither social media platform take up tomorrow so we can boost content that appeals to different types of people. so right now you're reported for just engagement. and easiest way to get engagement on minds negative about trump or people come out of the woodwork left and right. it is this moderates, the kind of content that that woman sarah like produced. there's no incentive. she has every disincentive that will make thanksgiving dinner weird and work hard and she's going be worried about her children. jon: i know, it is so awful. chris: so the question is how to be designed platforms with better and since this is where the top-down stuff gets me

excited to weakness social polarization lab, we worked a long time with platforms trying to get he sermons on these core design features of social media because anything about it, the crazy thing about all of this is that we never really considered having a concrete in pure way that what would be the best design of social media platforms would encourage stability and momoderation. we've been content to allow the platforms created for harvard undergraduates to read each other's physical attractiveness predict or arrange alcoholic gatherings. and these chaotically involving, it is not rated so that we would love to do is to say a facebook and twitter, let us tweet some things here like maybe try out this algorithm it did that i jut mentioned. an analytic andge controversy we academic research was kind of repurposed for copies to serve kind of malicious political had supported everything is been

shut down. there's glimmers of hope of fundamental research on the guts of social media, the design principle, is not apparently possible so what p we did in the polarization lab, his creator on social media platform for scientific research in the whole thing about this is that we can turn on and off different features of platform we can control who interacts with who we can hope to pin down what works and what doesn't. jon: to these are the tools we will need to do the research because we can experiment on the platform. chris: exactly. one of the solutions i know will surprise you jon is that we talked a lot about anonymity and i know when we first talk, you are suggesting that one of the big problems is that there's no social consequences for what people do in life. on line but on the

other hand, it does have some underappreciated to d do positie dimensions example, if were all trapped in this mentality in identity is just over information and then, when you think about it,th and amenity is always trumps identity out of the equation. we are no longer liable to our peers. i'm a democrat with concerns about defining the police. if i posted on twitter all sorts of there could be a source of negative things, i'm a republican concerned about the narrative about voter fraud it. it's going to create trouble for me if i post that community gives us the time to explore unpopular ideas without peer pressure. and it's a nice examples of this in the world like for example reddit, also asthma the most apprehensive matures and the internet, this is shining example i think of where political compromises are possible so we study we recruited a lot of publicans and democrats to create main up

media platform and we told them to help us test it. and we paired them with a member of the other party to talk about one of two rising issues we were pretty shocked to discover that people in this anonymous condition people write much more the people who did and especially the republicans i thank you so pretty going interesting. maybe that success in my view that the peer pressure on the republicans in the kind of pics spiraled in silence kind of dynamics where people were scared of sharing their unpopular views.s. maybe even an amenity is a very carefully designed forums could be one way out. jon: say you're referring your most famous study, the 2018 study and if people summa no no it's a new study is only described in the book right now. we just did it last year. the earlier experiment was one with the we pay people exposing

them to the other side for one month. [inaudible]. jon: that is right printed this is amazing study where you made up all of these interacted with people and they think there being exposed but actually not pretty. [inaudible]. let me be clear, iac have never criticized it amenity, so that i understand especially like facebook, force you have to have the people have known on minutes. been our point is there is a difference between zero accountability and a tiny bit of accountabilities will be want and what were proposing. and just to see if you think this makes sense as anyone can sign up for an account on these platforms to see what is going on. but if you want content, you have to verify that you are a real person and you're in a

particular country and arere ovr 13. facebook will see your driver's license but kicked out for another entity so the point is, that if you say terrible things, but if you make death threats, he beguiled. so that is our point. but because trolls are kind of nasty. the fbi can get a court warrant. if you actually planning shooting from synagogue or amounts, if you're making death threatss on twitter. so here is an amazing example. i hope the audience will really take this to heart and maybe when they tell people about this. it's irony. i don't know if you've noticed the chat. so just as we have been talking,

we've been trolled on. some jerk, just made of the most racist and nasty in open feel like it, things that he couldn't he posted it over and over again and because that, because of that, they had a disabling chat and so this is becoming like terrorism. ... .... >> is resonating across the

divide and then they will sink to the bottom of the device to the top. >> that's what i think the platforms need to do. stop focusing on content i want you to give me a switch or a lever on two things. one is a nasty aggression control behavior. the other is cognitive complexity. on the one hand this or that but if you never said that, want to make you disappearou. you can't see me i can't see you.wa

and if you want followers to be connected you have to stop being so nasty and have some nuance. >> i think so but i would add one little nuance that not everybody will do this. that this is a feature. we are splintering social media all over the place instagram for pictures why not a form for politics? we know most people could care less 6 percent posting on facebook is politics there is obvious disengagement but also most opinion trickles down opinion leaders a small segment of the population. those that want to share this so let's create a place for them to have productive debate ben rewarded nursing then models in technology thinking of what computer programs use to help solve problems they

get rewarded for status. >> so there are a number of investors in silicon valley who would like to do this. should have you diebold your ideas but it seems like if you team effort these venture capitalist you could create a rifle that uses a different plan is anything like that in the works? >> not with us. we are trying to build scientific infrastructure. so our goal is to make this platform something everyone can use. not just scientists but entrepreneurs. nobody like social media. nobody said i had such a good time on twitter last night. facebook gives me warm and

fuzzy feelings. okay there is some exception. [laughter] but overall public dissatisfaction is right. there is an appetite for something new especially looking at regulation every two or three years something new comes along. a year ago it was tiktok now it is clubhouse. nobody takes a scientific approach toro evidence. >> we were supposed to go between seven and eight now we are late the chat was interrupted but we have been redirected asking people to e-mail questions and i do see one or two that made it through so if you have one ready to go come in and read it or something there are two or three questions here.

go ahead. >> in my apologies for having to shut down the chat and thank you for sending and one —- sending in your e-mails. arlene says can you please address the official social media power on a micro or macro scale? can you clarify the difference in how to talk about that generally? >> the problem is we have the wrong model we wanted to be a competition of ideas it really is a competition of identities. that was probably predictable. we could argue if we have other really have had debates

in the media that when we go online think about the last time you encountered someone whose views you did not share on social media did you say that person has a point when they were calling aoc a communist or donald trump or racist? that's not the nature of the social media debate we are experiencing attacks and sophisticated defenses to defend our side this a is a social media is doing at the micro level we are learning this tactic those are horribly detrimental and that's why when you go outside the echo chamber we don't find that people focus on the moderates like david brooks or the

centrist people. know they focus on ted cruz and what he said the other day and even the enthusiastic parts to become polarized in just a month of exposure so there is no simple fix now we get toet the macro we can just flip a switch. that would be great but it's a two-part process it is emergent phenomenon so it creates that incentive structure but we are also participatingal in it even though we all know we are not changing each other's mind. by the way nobody thinks were are weg line so what doing? >> for two signaling. exactly. >> everyone underlined this point in the book and it is a point that is so much of our

politics the gradual change from ideas or interest to identity a theme of the 21st century it's a lots of the way it is summarized. political parties used to be coalitions and interest groups and industries and then you can compromise we will trade this for that but after that was passed once we get these parties the people in the other party really are different. they dress different in that wasn't so true before the 1970s. so that national politics has shifted not even about material interest or money but much more about identity. trump made that much more so in biden isof doing a good job

to go back to a more democratic focus on the economy and working-class as opposed to culture war. this is what we see on campus and now it is blowing up in private high school trying to encourage people to think about identity some are bad and some are good at it is just blowing up cooperation trust in education i would urge our audience if you see this happening the shift to identity is really bad for diverse liberal democracy. >> the next question is we don't often think of google as a social media platform but a lot of the interaction does happen on google so we have seen promotions for

black-owned businesses. knowing about going to those what about a supporting those businesses in marginalized communities but to identify through the rich unintended consequences can this spring people more together or the ability to identify specific ethnic groups causing more separation? >> this is a fascinating question i think google is understudied which is criminal because we all use it youtube uses a 85 percent american facebook and 67 percent so in a way it's youtube as a social media platform but the interesting thing about this that this is the data privacy question but also fundamentally how we discover

each other with enormous strength and then if it is exposing ourselves to more diverse information technology can help us do that and it makes us more efficient people complain about the algorithm that can you imagine scanning through that we scan through all of this information? when well-designed and that is a huge caveat, that's the first point but the second is geographically and powerful new ways before trump and covid the geographical polarization was happening to suggest using high-resolution voter data that mimics google's resolution, most

democrats and republicans live in areas of the country they will almost never interact with a member of the other party. that is a stunning statistic and means for better or worse places like google are one of the few were not going bowling together anymore. we will have these conversations online so for me it's one of the most urgent questions we could be working on. >> the last one is a good one to end on. looking forward long-term weight is the best or worst case scenario? will polarization trend out? >> i think all of us and john

we all hope that this would be a watershed moment but in a way it is the perfect common enemy. it was a threat to all of us and required coordinated behavior for all of us to address it and i was finishing this book when covid hit. when of the interesting things i could do was revisit the characters from the book it was shocking to discover this prism was as powerful as ever talking about conspiracy theories with china and bleach the moderates were invisible. even though strong majorities in both parties were agreeing about social distancing and closing the border but in large part because ofbe social media. so with that current trend if we cannot conquer covid together i'm a little

pessimistic that but on the other hand as i said earlier i think we're early in the story of the social media we only ten or 20 years into this and we can learn a lot especially if we bring evidence to bear and especially creating opportunities for entrepreneurs to articulate had we make it better? these companies are competing against each other and there is some evidence publicly that they realize in their long-term interest that they are losing advertising revenue with these boycotts so in my opinion. i want to hear what john thinks but we are at a critical moment at a fork in the road i where we really go off the rails even more are we will see the blossoming of a new kind of technology. >> in the long run things get

better and with every previous technology there is disruption so 50 years from now things would be better and we will have figured this out. however the next ten or 20 years and the rest of my lifetime come i think what has happened is the tower of babel was destroyed between 2009 and 2012 god said let's confound their language so they can wasrstand one another it always difficult to find the truth come i think after 2012 social media made it possible to within every university and then to put that narrative fourth so i think we will never again i shouldn't say never again but in the next 20 years we will not find shared truth claim also despairing

that the research of the ability to agree even with the social sciences is compromised. so i would say to julie long-term optimism you have to be an optimist long-term. that short-term and very pessimistic maybe i should say short-term i am pessimistic that long-term itte will be great. [laughter] host: your book is wonderful i urge everybody to buy it and read it any last words quick. >> thank you for helping with this fantastic event and rolling with the punches today. [laughter] into the audience also thank you for rolling with the punches and joining us on zoom

if you missed any portion of the eventnt that will be available on our facebook page you can watch any portion that you missed we put the link in the chat. >> just a huge thank you please buy your book from the strand i have to say hi mom and thank you everybody to the audience this has been a pleasure and a real treat. thank you. >> have a great evening.

>> it afternoon welcome to our virtual event why it's okay to speak your mind i am president of the manhattan institute and i'm excited to talk today