It’s been a long time since my last journal… In fact, I just checked the date of my last one and it was back in December… But I haven’t been unproductive! I’ve finished reading The Righteous Mind (right before starting to write this journal), conducted surveys for our January midterm, etc. I will be sure to properly update my website eventually as soon as this fiasco of a Junior year allows me to do so.
For a quick link between Journal eight and nine, the goal of this journal is to establish a new “theory” (As of right now, I am unaware of other studies and not attempting to plagiarize in the chance some ideas overlap) based on the knowledge I’ve absorbed from Haidt. After multiple fruitful discussions with Mr. Bott, we’ve decided to focus my theory on a social media angle and determine how it affects The Moral Foundations Theory.
For right now, we’re calling this the “Theory of False Validation,” or more affectionately known as “The Alan Theory.” I don’t have a fully polished working definition of this theory yet, but the goal is to further refine the contents that I am about to convey.
Here is what I think to be (as of right now) the core idea of this theory: Social media effectively amplifies polarization—especially in today’s political atmosphere—between different moral matrixes, hence rapidly changing our moral foundations when compared to previous generations. This is because social media makes it much easier for humans to become “groupish,” a natural tendency where all humans feel a desire to be part of something bigger—your team (for example, a political party). Through the use of social media, we can effortlessly and instantaneously connect with virtually anyone who has access to the internet. As a result, people with similar moral matrices tend to form together into online teams. Instead of perhaps knowing only ten people in the real world who share their beliefs with you, now you can easily connect with hundreds and thousands of others online who do. This further strengthens your iron-clad belief in your own moral matrix due to the this increased online presence facilitated by social media, which is further affected by the insurmountable confirmation bias. It is human nature to seek out evidence for your preconceived belief and when you inevitably find an online community who shares your beliefs, the notion that your moral matrix MUST be correct and the opposing one WRONG (for example, Democrats vs. Republicans) is drastically furthered, hence blinding you to other moral truths and polarizing our society.
As a result, our moral foundations are CONSTANTLY being molded by these near-unlimited amount of online exchanges. For example, Liberals tend to place more emphasis on care/harm while Conservatives are more evenly spread across the six moral foundations. For example, if you are an active Liberal on social media and you find your online team, your emphasis on care/harm can only increase in importance, while your emphasis on loyalty, purity, etc. can only further decrease, cementing you on one clear side that is not easily prone to change. In contrast, your moral matrix could potentially waver due to online propaganda (which again, is easily accessible through social media), shifting the amounts or values of each of your moral foundations. These are just two brief examples but social media does indeed seem to be able to comparatively mold our moral foundations like butter compared to an era without it, which brings up another interesting aspect of this theory:
Digital immigrants (adults who lived without social media but have grown into this age) vs. Digital natives (teenagers and young adults who were born into an age with internet and social media). Are digital natives more susceptible to the moral-molding powers of social media? Are adults able to more easily resist the confirmation bias since they lived in an era where information and ideas weren’t as easily accessible? This is an interesting proposition and I’m not sure how if I would be able to gauge/test this.
In summary, social media amplifies nearly every human groupish tendency that Haidt wrote about in his book. So though groupish tendencies were successful evolutionary adaptations in history, their amplification by social media today is a major cause to our divisive society. To quote Haidt: “Morality binds and blinds” and social media definitely plays a big role in this.
Whew. I think this is my longest journal yet. But before I sign off, I have some closing words: I think this theory is definitely an interesting take because when Haidt published The Righteous Mind back in 2012, Twitter—arguably the most influential platform of social media today in 2019—wasn’t nearly as popular. Again, I do not know if other moral psychologists or even Haidt himself has done a follow-up investigation in regards to social media. Plagiarism is not my intention when I call this “my theory.”
Comments