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Belonging: Maybe we need it too much

| August 19, 2021 1:00 AM

No matter your political persuasions, odds are that like most Americans, you wonder why we have become not just polarized, but more distrustful of one another.

With different backgrounds and experiences, humans will often disagree, but two or three decades ago we were better tapped into our basic connections. We could leave aside opinions — which were less far apart to begin with — and be there for one another regardless.

We felt more united, not so “us and them.” What changed?

A thought-provoking article in The New York Times last April consulted political and social psychologists for possible insights. In short, it could be because our values are changing. It seems it’s become more important to us to belong than seek facts with objectivity, they posit.

Almost like a regression to centuries earlier, tribe wins over common interest. Especially with social media.

Take rumors and misinformation (intentional or otherwise). We are drawn to them no matter how wild; if they mirror what we think, we tend to spread without first fact-checking. If we fact check and see reason to doubt, more people than admit knowingly spread anyway, reveling in the shocking headlines.

In a National Academy of Sciences paper, political science professor Brendan Nyhan writes about rising social and psychological forces which make people prone to believe and share misinformation. Not because more accurate and reliable information isn’t available as it always was, but because of “cognitive and memory limitations, directional motivations to defend or support some group identity or existing belief, and messages from other people and political elites.”

Put more simply, people become more misinformation-prone when three things happen:

  1. First and most important, when conditions in society make people feel a greater need for “ingrouping” — a belief one’s own social identity is a source of strength and superiority, and other groups can be blamed for their problems.

Sound familiar? In times of perceived conflict or social change we feel insecure, and survival instincts draw us to the perceived security of groups. So objectivity wanes and we — consciously or subconsciously — seek affirming information pitting our own righteous group against the believed-nefarious one. Anything in conflict with that simply can’t be true.

Once a nice neighbor who disagrees about politics; now a wrong-headed idiot out to destroy what we hold dear. Social distrust taking hold.

Such hostility in this more partisan, socially distrustful America makes people more susceptible to misinformation, clinging more tightly to partisan identities. In this “identity-based conflict” mode, we become even more desperately hungry for information that affirms it all.

  1. High-profile, dynamic political figures who encourage followers to indulge that desire for identity-affirming misinformation. Of course, that benefits the leaders by rallying their troops.

  2. Finally, social media, a powerful, instant-gratification outlet for consumers and creators of disinformation that multiplies the other two factors. It’s transformed the social and political environment, impacting our behavior.

“When you post things, you’re highly aware of the feedback that you get, the social feedback in terms of likes and shares,” Yale University social psychologist William Brady said in the article. “So when misinformation appeals to social impulses more than the truth does, it gets more attention online, which means people feel rewarded and encouraged for spreading it.”

With that affirmation need readily spoon-fed, when a fact-checker points out a potential flaw it’s little surprise the result is often to attack the fact-checker. And we go round and round.

That’s changed too; the gloves are off. We used to be more civil, even in disagreement, when we interacted with each other in person. It’s much easier to be less considerate and get more offended electronically.

In 2016, media scholars analyzed a data set of 300 million tweets from the 2012 election. Twitter users, they found, “selectively share fact-checking messages that cheerlead their own candidate and denigrate the opposing party’s candidate.”

And when users encountered a fact-check that revealed their candidate had gotten something wrong, their response wasn’t to get mad at the politician for lying to them. It was to attack the fact checkers.

Another study published in the March issue of Nature tracked thousands of users interacting with false information. Among test subjects who were shown a false immigration headline, 84 percent actually identified it as false. Yet when experimenters instead asked subjects to decide whether to share the headline, 51 percent said they would, implying more than a third are inclined to share untrue information knowingly.

That’s disturbing.

“The problem is that when we encounter opposing views in the age and context of social media, it’s not like reading them in a newspaper while sitting alone,” the sociologist Zeynep Tufekci wrote in a much-circulated MIT Technology Review article. “It’s like hearing them from the opposing team while sitting with our fellow fans in a football stadium. Online, we’re connected with our communities, and we seek approval from our like-minded peers. We bond with our team by yelling at the fans of the other one.”

In an ecosystem where that sense of identity conflict is all-consuming, she wrote, “belonging is stronger than facts.”

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Sholeh Patrick is a columnist with the Hagadone News Network who wishes we could all just belong to the human race. Email Sholeh@cdapress.com.