Tesco
Why Good People Turn Bad Online
Article

Why Good People Turn Bad Online

Meet the scientists finding out how we can defeat our inner trolls and build more cooperative digital societies.

Gaia Vince
Mosaic, 2018
Read the article

Read or listen offline

автоматическое преобразование текста в аудио
  • 0.5×
  • 0.75×
  • 1×
  • 1.25×
  • 1.5×
  • 1.75×
1×
автоматическое преобразование текста в аудио

Editorial Rating

9

Qualities

  • Innovative
  • Applicable
  • Hot Topic

Recommendation

Picture your ancestors. Living in small communities, they interacted face-to-face with the same people every day. Social consequences were immediate. Bad behavior could lead to ostracism from the community and the loss of long-term survival advantages. It paid to be agreeable, so humans evolved to be agreeable. Now contrast that scenario with today’s online environment. Where one led to cooperation, the other has led to trolling and tribalism. getAbstract recommends writer and broadcaster Gaia Vince’s overview of how algorithms prompt the worst in human behavior to all Internet users.

Take-Aways

  • Using “public goods games,” researchers have demonstrated that humans have brains wired for cooperation; their first instinct is to use resources to benefit the group.
  • Public goods games also show that people will override their instinct for pro-social behavior when repeatedly exposed to corruption and selfishness in others.
  • Social media algorithms favor emotional content because it increases engagement. Extreme online echo-chambers are ubiquitous for the same reason. 

About the Author

Gaia Vince is the author of Adventures in the Anthropocene: A Journey to the Heart of the Planet We Made.

Comment on this summary or Начать обсуждение