Jay Van Bavel is professor of psychology and neuroscience at New York University. His lab has published papers on how the Internet is an interesting mirror for extreme political views, why news media has a strong negative bias, why certain emotions spread online, why tribalism is fueled by online activity, and how the Internet How to impact people’s lives. Making us look like our worst selves. At the same time, Van Bavel emphasizes that many of the group psychology dynamics that may make social media seem like a dumpster fire are also at the heart of what makes humans such a special and ingenious species. We discuss the Four Dark Laws of Online Engagement and the basics of group psychology.
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In the excerpt below, Derek and Jay Van Bavel dive into the basics of crowd psychology and discuss how crowd psychology plays a role in social media engagement.
Derek Thompson: Jay, you and I are going to spend a good portion of this episode talking about your empirical research on how the internet, and social media in particular, is a mirror of the human condition, and why I think the motivational and engagement structures of social media really make Many people slowly become crazy. But first, how would you describe your job? What is the big question that you and your lab are trying to answer?
Jay Van Bavel: Yeah, I think one of the big questions that’s been bothering me in the last 20 years of research is about the nature of groups and identities and how they work. I first started studying the brain, studying how our brains respond to being in a group or seeing members of other groups. And then our brains, which are evolutionarily very ancient, have been thrown into this modern technological environment with social media and artificial intelligence. Now, I’m obsessed with studying how this all happens: how it’s manipulated, how we’re triggered in various ways, etc.
Thompson: Clearly, the brain is a very ancient machine. Group psychology must be a relatively old concept. Before the Internet, we lived in groups for hundreds of thousands of years. Is there a universal Psych 101 principle like “this is your group brain”? If I took Group Psychology 101, what would I learn on day one about how groups can change my own identity and my sense of what is true and false in the world?
From Pavel: Very good question. So maybe I’ll give you some principles. The first is: by simply tossing a coin, we can feel part of a group and begin to identify with it. So we study this in the lab. This is called a minimal group, and we simply flip a coin and put people on either the blue team or the red team. But if someone grew up participating in recreational sports, when you go to the gym and you’re randomly picked to one side for an hour or two, that automatically triggers a different mental state of mind. We suddenly become more fond, more attentive, more interested in even people who were strangers only minutes ago, and we are able and willing to work with them in ways we wouldn’t have if they were strangers.
This happens to us too if you go to a professional sporting event.If you’re a fan, you’re going to give a high five to the guy sitting next to you wearing a Yankees jersey, even though you might [have never known] They may never see them again in your lifetime. This is the psychology of all of us.
Another part that a lot of people don’t understand, but it’s part of the example I gave, is that it changes every minute. Again, I can create groups in my lab. You walk into the stadium with your jersey on and see everyone else wearing those colors. You have different identities. You turn on the TV, it’s election night, and you’re cheering for your party to win. Your country is at war. You are under attack. A broader, more inclusive identity is triggered. Or imagine you turn on a movie and are watching an alien invasion. In this case, only all mankind can fight against the alien invasion. Therefore, depending on the situation we find ourselves in, we may be triggered to view ourselves as members of different types of groups or as members of different types of groups.
Thompson: It’s almost like a longing to belong. any Groups are pre-downloaded for us, so thinking outside the group seems to be the really key challenge. If we adopt group mentality so easily, then online everything is just a bunch of overlapping group mentality overlapping group mentality overlapping group mentality and the hardest thing is to try to “think for yourself” when we so have to think about whether we belong to these any one in the group.
So, after spending a few hours this morning and yesterday reading your papers from the past few years and thinking about them as a whole, I came up with what I now call “The Four Bad Laws of Internet and Social Media Engagement.” ” Because I feel like you and your lab have been studying group psychology and dynamics and how social media and the Internet affects us, and you found a way to lead to these four laws of bad engagement on the Internet. I’m going to read them out now, And then we’ll go through them one by one. I’ll repeat them at the end and then we can analyze them. But here are the four laws that I derived from your research.
The first is that negativity drives engagement. Second, extremism drives online participation. Third, out-group hostility drives online engagement. Fourth, moral and emotional language drives online participation. For our listeners back home, if you don’t know what some of these terms mean, we’ll definitely define them in a few minutes. But I want to explain with you during our time together where these ideas come from—because they all stem from your work over the past few years—and what they mean.
I want to start with a paper you published last year on negativity bias in the news.A randomized study of 105,000 headlines and 370 million impressions in a dataset of articles published by online news pharmacies respectable, you find that so-called “negative” words increase click-through rates by more than 2%, while the prevalence of positive words in news headlines reduces the likelihood that any headline will be clicked. In your own words, what does this paper show that is so important?
From Pavel: Yeah, I think one thing that psychologists are very familiar with is that bad things are more powerful than good things, and people pay more attention to or are motivated by bad things than good things. I’ll give this a little evolutionary explanation again: You can imagine your ancestors walking on the African savannah, and they were looking for food. So there is an incentive to look for food. But if they might see something that might kill them, then that’s even more important to their survival. Therefore, they must avoid some negative and risky things. Our ancestors did this generation after generation and were more likely to survive. So, instead of detecting rewards, our brains are able to detect threats and hyper-tune to them.
So this is often manipulated by the news. There’s a saying in journalism: “If it bleeds, it leads.” Of course, social media and internet sites have also hijacked this. Let me simply say that the data we have comes from classic websites that went viral online.It turned out to be from respectable.So we can access respectable Data archive.what else respectable Famous for A/B testing in the early days of the internet. So they would pick a news story and then try a headline on their site to see how many people clicked on it, and then randomly assign half of the other people who visited their site to see a different headline. That way, they test different headlines, look at the data, then pick the most popular one and keep going. They are pioneers in this area.
In fact, they were so popular at one time that their traffic volume was higher than New York Times. They went so viral that Facebook had to change its news algorithm because people were so frustrated with all the clickbait content. respectable Headlines, then let Facebook get it. So they do do that through data.So when we got that data set, we thought, “Okay, can we see that no their what theory is about what works; what we can see through their experimental A/B testing actually Get people to click through to an article. ” Of course, they’re more likely to click on negative content, negative headlines on the exact same story.
This excerpt has been edited for clarity.Listen to the rest of the episode here and follow simple english feed on Spotify.
Host: Derek Thompson
Guest: Jay Van Bavel
Producer: Devin Baroldi
subscription: Spotify