but echo chambers are cool in a way that goes beyond politics. it provides perceptible feelings of unity, belongingness, and validity to those that seek them. apes together strong kind of deal.
and since politics is about social issues, I don’t see why not.
Given the hyper-stigmatized, hyper-partisan approach to… well, a lot of things these days, not just US politics, engaging with those you politically disagree with is likely to not just produce calm disagreements but sharp, even vicious statements that your entire worldview/lifestyle/culture/ethnicity/whatever is literally the stuff of pure evil, and you are an absolutely terrible person for adhering to it. No nuance, no consideration, no empathy.
On a different tack, consider that strong rejection/disagreement is shown to activate the same centers in your brain which are associated with sharp physical pain. To your brain, being slapped in the face conversationally and slapped in the face physically produce extremely similar results.
With these two points in mind, consider: Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
Unfortunately, the current palette of social media options don’t really offer spaces for nuanced, thoughtful discussion which doesn’t begin with people screaming their hostility to what they disagree with. It’s a big of a chicken-and-egg question whether that’s a cause or an effect, but the net result is creation of an environment which our pain-avoiding brains guide our choices away from people we disagree with.
Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
People commonly have a framework where they think of the slap as having kind of, occurred beforehand, right, and then they see themselves as slapping back whenever they respond, which is another part of why political discourse is so polarized and bad faith basically at all times.
That’s a fair point too; if you go in anticipating a conversational slap, you’re in a defensive posture from the start.
This reinforces my feeling that setting out to specifically create that no-slapping environment from the start is critical, but it also adds in another twist and problem: There’s increasing evidence that political “language” between various groups is diverging. In other words, ~20 years ago people used the same words to mean the same things, even when they disagreed. Now people on different sides of an issue use identical words to mean totally different things - including some that can be perceived as a verbal slap.
not american.
but echo chambers are cool in a way that goes beyond politics. it provides perceptible feelings of unity, belongingness, and validity to those that seek them. apes together strong kind of deal.
and since politics is about social issues, I don’t see why not.
Going to build on this to highlight something:
Given the hyper-stigmatized, hyper-partisan approach to… well, a lot of things these days, not just US politics, engaging with those you politically disagree with is likely to not just produce calm disagreements but sharp, even vicious statements that your entire worldview/lifestyle/culture/ethnicity/whatever is literally the stuff of pure evil, and you are an absolutely terrible person for adhering to it. No nuance, no consideration, no empathy.
On a different tack, consider that strong rejection/disagreement is shown to activate the same centers in your brain which are associated with sharp physical pain. To your brain, being slapped in the face conversationally and slapped in the face physically produce extremely similar results.
With these two points in mind, consider: Why would people choose to expose themselves to environments which promote something their brain interprets as actual, physical harm?
Unfortunately, the current palette of social media options don’t really offer spaces for nuanced, thoughtful discussion which doesn’t begin with people screaming their hostility to what they disagree with. It’s a big of a chicken-and-egg question whether that’s a cause or an effect, but the net result is creation of an environment which our pain-avoiding brains guide our choices away from people we disagree with.
People commonly have a framework where they think of the slap as having kind of, occurred beforehand, right, and then they see themselves as slapping back whenever they respond, which is another part of why political discourse is so polarized and bad faith basically at all times.
That’s a fair point too; if you go in anticipating a conversational slap, you’re in a defensive posture from the start.
This reinforces my feeling that setting out to specifically create that no-slapping environment from the start is critical, but it also adds in another twist and problem: There’s increasing evidence that political “language” between various groups is diverging. In other words, ~20 years ago people used the same words to mean the same things, even when they disagreed. Now people on different sides of an issue use identical words to mean totally different things - including some that can be perceived as a verbal slap.