There’s this episode of classic Star Trek called “Day of the Dove”. The episode itself is not very interesting, but the idea behind it is. Kirk & company square off against the Klingons, who are running amuck aboard the USS Enterprise, fighting with swords and rapidly escalating to all-out war, for no good reason.
Behind the scenes, an alien – some kind of coherent energy vampire – is manipulating their minds, keeping everyone pumped with hatred, because it is feeding off their emotions. The creature is literally drawing strength from everyone’s fury and madness. It’s only when the Enterprise crew and Klingons dial it down, lay down their swords and pat each other on the back and laugh at the creatures that it flees the ship.
Uncle Scott submits that we are, all of us, living that Trek episode now.
NPR’s Hidden Brain podcast sheds some light. In the recent episode “Screaming into the Void”, host Shankar Vedantam deep-dives the clashing of swords aboard the USS Facebook.
Vedantam’s premise is that the perpetual outrage and polarization that is rapidly redefining our culture is pervasive for a singular impetus, one that doesn’t not spring readily to mind: we enjoy it, he says; we indulge and embrace our faux outrage because – well, because it makes us feel good, like a compliment or a backrub or a diddle.
As always, Vedantam brings in knowledgable, insightful experts to comment. Yale psychologist Molly Crockett sees our outrage as an artifact of evolution – a once-useful mechanism for maintain cohesion within our tribal communities. In Crockett’s narrative, human tribes were relatively small, but so mutually dependent upon one another for survival that it was essential to keep everyone on the same page. Group punishment of bullies and cheaters was good for everyone – and came to produce a positive brain response:
“There's a sort of visceral satisfaction in doling out punishment,” she told Vedantam. “And this is corroborated by the brain imaging evidence, which shows that when we decide to punish, we see activation in brain areas associated with reward.”
Specifically, “When people decide to punish somebody who's behaved unfairly, we see activation in brain areas associated with reward, including the striatum and the medial prefrontal cortex.”
Crockett vetted this idea through experimentation. She and her team asked volunteer participants to play a “punisher” role, penalizing cheaters when they observe behavior that is unfair. In one experiment, the test was the inequal division of a pot of money: when the punisher was someone cheating in this manner, taking more than their share, she had the power to punish the cheater through confiscation.
Two variations add some insight. In one, the punisher not only compensates the person who was short-changed, but pays them even more – meaning the cheater has achieved the opposite of his goal; but he doesn’t know it. And the punisher nonetheless registers satisfaction.
“The only reason why I would punish you when it's in secret,” she explained, “is if I get some personal satisfaction from knowing that you, as an unfair person, end up with less money.”
In the other variation, the compensation to the victim comes from the punisher’s own pocket, demonstrating that punishing a wrongdoer is not only emotionally satisfying, but something we will make sacrifices to achieve.
“Outrage, in other words,” Vedantam summarized, “has been so valuable in our evolutionary history that it operates like other important biological functions. It gives us pleasure.”
The big problem with all of this, Crockett continued, is that this model of social punishment emerged in a very different time in human history, under very different circumstances. “It evolved in an environment where we interacted with people face to face, in small groups, in situations where we're going to repeatedly interact with the same people.”
“In this context, outrage produced benefits, but it also came with costs that prompted people to be judicious about it,” Vedantum added. “If your neighbor Agh stole someone's food and you vented your anger at him, it might feel good, but it could also be dangerous. Agh could get mad at you, punch you in the throat. You would have to judge when and where and how much it made sense to express outrage.
“What happens,” he then asked, “when we take an emotion, carefully calibrate it for small-led groups and give it a global platform?”
"It's not very well equipped for the environment in which we find ourselves now,” Crockett responded, “where the audience is much, much bigger than it traditionally has been.”
“Now I can be angry at total strangers half a world away,” Vedantam observed. “And my physical costs of expressing that outrage? Close to zero.
“Given that the psychological benefits are high and the physical costs are low, there are few checks on outrage anymore,” he went on. “This is why many of us today feel surrounded by outrage. It's nearly impossible to escape. Most of us underestimate how powerful this brain circuitry can be, how vulnerable we are to the psychological rewards that come from feeling, really truly mad about something and then seeing our outrage amplified by others.
It’s not just the reward we receive in our brains when we dole out a punishment; when we put someone in their place online, we receive the social approval of those who agree with us. Our punishment gets Liked. Crockett noted that this is very much a part of the mix:
“Social rewards are just as powerful, if not more powerful, in driving learning and decision-making than chocolate or money, right? The approval of our peers is, like, the most potent reward you can get for social beings like us.”
“Social media platforms take our love for this kind of approval and pour rocket fuel on it,” Vedantam added.
Vedantam also spoke with Jay Van Bavel, a psychologist from New York University, who noted that tweets containing moral/emotional words get retweeted 15 to 20% more than those that do not, and even higher if you know what you’re doing. Most of us have observed that personally.
“And you can, you know, jam a lot of words that have moral emotions in them in a single message and increase the likelihood your message is going to be shared by 60 or 80 or 100%.
“Twitter is weird because, you know, there's a level of outrage,” he went on. “Then you have people who are outraged about the outrage because it's the wrong type of outrage. Then you have people who are outraged about that outrage. And then you have another group of people who are outraged that you're not outraged enough (laughter). So you have these four forms of outrage going on at any given time, and it just cycles through issue after issue on a 24-hour basis."
Where does this leave us?
If we want the energy vampire to flee the ship, we must do as Kirk and his crew did with the Klingons: become self-aware enough of our own outrage to realize we are not accomplishing a thing with it, and then lay down our swords.
We can take note of recent events in the news, where liberal celebrities are seen in public sitting next to conservative politicians, and realize that it is only very recently that this has become newsworthy – even consorting politely with someone from the other tribe is considered a punishable offense. How did we get here, from where we started?
We can practice the art of spotting our outrage in the moment it is fomented and take charge of it, never letting it move us to type and post, never progressing to ‘reward’ - and we can, when opportunity presents, disarm the fomenting of others with calmer, more inclusive and constructive responses.
These are little things, of course, but the entire social media ecosphere is constructed entirely out of things exactly this little. And every positive click makes that energy vampire a little less powerful.
If we don’t chase the little fucker out of the ship, we’ll be doomed to the fate it tried to visit upon Kirk and the Klingons: the USS Facebook will fly on, and we’ll be hacking each other to pieces throughout eternity...
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