Online, everything you like becomes proof of which team you are on
Your jokes, faith, and clothes stop looking like personal taste and start looking like proof the other team is evil.
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell · The Internet is Worse Than Ever – Now What?Online, the things that make us individuals, like our jokes, faith, and clothes, get squeezed into rival identities.
Researchers argue that our minds sort people into teams by worldview. The mechanism once helped small groups cooperate, but on social media it misfires because strangers share no everyday ties.
Offline, shared local teams and places of worship kept disagreements small with neighbours. You might dislike someone's politics yet sit beside them at a match or a service, and that common life kept the difference in proportion.
Online, disagreement itself becomes the stranger's identity. Researchers describe a process called social sorting, in which we bond closely with people who share our views and trust their opinions uncritically, while believing bad news about the other side uncritically.
Anger is the most engaging emotion, and platforms are built to hold attention, so they show the worst disagreement possible. The mind then assigns those worst opinions to everyone on the other side.
The result is that a debate about how to run society simplifies until opponents seem willfully making the world worse. In the researchers' phrasing, they look almost evil, "beyond convincing with rationality, facts or civil discussion."
That loss of shared life is especially bad in the United States, where two major parties make team thinking easy and dislike of the rival party stands at historic highs. The researchers' question is stark: "If we think our neighbours are evil, how can we live together?"
Questions people ask
Is this just the filter bubble, where we only see opinions we agree with?
No. Studies of what people actually view find little evidence of ideological isolation online. The research finding is that extreme filter bubbles are rare, and that people constantly meet views that differ from their own online. The issue is the quality of that disagreement.
What is social sorting?
Social sorting is the brain's habit of grouping strangers by worldview into teams. Researchers use the term to describe something broader than tribalism, because it folds many separate traits into one identity. Once sorted, we trust our side too easily and distrust the other side too easily.
Why is this especially bad in the United States?
Politics built around two major parties makes it unusually easy to divide everyone into two camps. When many different issues map onto the same two teams, dislike deepens. Negative views of the other party have reached record highs.