What we’re reading

Welcome to our first “What we’re reading” post! Here are snippets of the news, research, or articles that have caught our eye. 

(Inclusion here doesn’t mean we endorse it, unless we specifically say so!)

Why The Past 10 Years Of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid 

Social scientists have identified at least three major forces that collectively bind together successful democracies: social capital (extensive social networks with high levels of trust), strong institutions, and shared stories. Social media has weakened all three. To see how, we must understand how social media changed over time—and especially in the several years following 2009.

In their early incarnations, platforms such as Myspace and Facebook were relatively harmless. They allowed users to create pages on which to post photos, family updates, and links to the mostly static pages of their friends and favorite bands. In this way, early social media can be seen as just another step in the long progression of technological improvements that helped people achieve the eternal goal of maintaining their social ties.

But gradually, social-media users became more comfortable sharing intimate details of their lives with strangers and corporations. As I wrote in a 2019 Atlantic article with Tobias Rose-Stockwell, they became more adept at putting on performances and managing their personal brand—activities that might impress others but that do not deepen friendships in the way that a private phone conversation will.

Once social-media platforms had trained users to spend more time performing and less time connecting, the stage was set for the major transformation, which began in 2009: the intensification of viral dynamics.

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What changes are needed? We must harden democratic institutions so that they can withstand chronic anger and mistrust, reform social media so that it becomes less socially corrosive, and better prepare the next generation for democratic citizenship in this new age.

Tanner Greer responds to Jonathan Haidt here, with further thoughts laid out here:

I offered three main lines of critique: first, social media (and Twitter in particular) cannot account for a societal wide decline in trust or a societal wide rise in radicalism and partisanship. The number of active twitter users is just too small. As Saturday Night Live understands, when Americans tells pollsters they are afraid to state their beliefs, it is in workplaces and over the dinner tables that these fears matter most, not on social media.

Second: the better explanation for declining institutional trust is declining institutional performance. Of course millennials and zoomers are radicalized; the formative political events of their youth were a string of national disasters. These disasters were presided over by the very forces of centrism that Haidt would like to protect. 

By focusing his ire on social media, Haidt elevates the procedural over the substantive. There is little evidence that changing procedural form this or procedural form that will make any difference on the long term. At best it will allow the centrist boomers to hold onto power a few years longer. But if the radicals cannot be openly confronted on the basis of their ideas, and if centrists cannot develop an emotional appeal and political vision as powerful as their opponents, then the center will not hold.

Third, what we call “cancel culture” is not a new feature of American life. It has always been with us. If current times feel especially fraught and censorious, it is not because Americans have suddenly become less tolerant of speech generally, but because there has been a titanic and sudden change in what lies outside the bounds of tolerance.

Folk Models of Misinformation on Social Media

Work on social media misinformation does not investigate how ordinary users - the target of misinformation - deal with it; rather, the focus is mostly on the anxiety, tensions, or divisions misinformation creates. Studying the aspects of creation, diffusion and amplification also overlooks how misinformation is internalized by users on social media and thus is quick to prescribe "inoculation" strategies for the presumed lack of immunity to misinformation. 

How users grapple with social media content to develop "natural immunity" as a precursor to misinformation resilience remains an open question. We have identified at least five folk models that conceptualize misinformation as either: political (counter)argumentation, out-of-context narratives, inherently fallacious information, external propaganda, or simply entertainment. We use the rich conceptualizations embodied in these folk models to uncover how social media users minimize adverse reactions to misinformation encounters in their everyday lives.

“Win The War Before The War?”: A French Perspective On Cognitive Warfare

Acting on information is only acting on the data that feeds cognition, whereas cognitive warfare seeks to act on the process of cognition itself. The objective is to act not only on what individuals think, but also on the way they think, thus conditioning the way they act.

Cognitive warfare is essentially, but not exclusively, concerned with command and control of operations to enable decision superiority. To achieve this, it is possible to identify three lines of effort.

The first concerns the need to guard against our own individual and collective cognitive dysfunctions. This requires the knowledge and identification, as far as possible, of the cognitive biases that precondition our mental patterns. According to the French philosopher Jean d’Ormesson’s beautiful formula, “To think is first to think against oneself.” As the late Robert Jervis also explained, “Decision-makers tend to fit incoming information into their existing theories and images.” Misunderstanding the ideas or values of the adversary, the presumption that he will see us as we see ourselves, and more generally the contempt for otherness, are all powerful contributors to instability in conflictual relations. [...] Education and training are therefore crucial to hedge against our own individual and collective “cognitive bugs,” requiring a permanent questioning and cross-examination of ourselves, buttressed by a social and psychological approach to conflictuality.

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The second line of effort concerns defense against permanent informational aggression and the opportunistic exploitation of our cognitive biases by an adversary, which can constrain or distort our decision-making process and paralyze us. Our major competitors have understood the vulnerabilities of our societies, to which our armies belong. During his hearing before Congress in April 2021, the American researcher Herbert Lin highlighted three challenges. The first concerns the limited rationality of actors. Our taste for contradictory and sensational narratives, or “cognitive treats,” as well as our propensity for systematic doubt divert our attention and impede our judgment. The second is linked to our societies: The “free marketplace of ideas” also comes with nefarious alternative facts and fake news in a post-truth world exacerbated by technologies. It is all the more problematic that a competitor can exploit at his advantage the porosity between institutional and foreign informational borders to deliberately spread malicious narratives. 

Offensive warfare in the cognitive domain constitutes the third axis of effort, even if it raises ethical questions that should not be evaded. Herbert Lin remarked with amusement during his hearing that the ethical constraints imposed by the Department of Defense had led to the paradox that, “It is easier to get permission to kill terrorists than it is to lie to them.” The conduct of true offensive cognitive warfare should not be free from careful ethical consideration, but it must also be strategically coherent. One of the challenges of cognitive warfare is therefore to rehabilitate cunning and surprise in strategy by first obscuring the adversary’s cognition. Consequently, the organization of command-and-control structures will have to evolve to promote better integration of effects in all domains, including cyber and information. 

Vast New Study Shows a Key to Reducing Poverty: More Friendships Between Rich and Poor

Over the last four decades, the financial circumstances into which children have been born have increasingly determined where they have ended up as adults. But an expansive new study, based on billions of social media connections, has uncovered a powerful exception to that pattern that helps explain why certain places offer a path out of poverty.

For poor children, living in an area where people have more friendships that cut across class lines significantly increases how much they earn in adulthood, the new research found.

The study, published Monday in Nature, analyzed the Facebook friendships of 72 million people, amounting to 84 percent of U.S. adults aged 25 to 44.

Researchers say economic connectedness is a better predictor of a community’s upward mobility than any other characteristic studied yet.

Bringing people together is not enough on its own to increase opportunity, the study suggests. Whether they form relationships matters just as much.

“People interested in creating economic connectedness should equally focus on getting people with different incomes to interact,” Professor Stroebel said.

“It’s a big deal because I think what we lack in America today, and what’s been dropping catastrophically over the last 50 years, is what I call ‘bridging social capital’ — informal ties that lead us to people who are unlike us,” said Robert Putnam, the political scientist at Harvard who wrote “Bowling Alone” and “Our Kids,” about the decline of social capital in the United States. “And it’s a really big deal because it provides a number of avenues or clues by which we might begin to move this country in a better direction.”

Photo by Justin Dream on Unsplash