Aggression and Adaptation

A new working theory

So I wrote my dissertation on the psychodynamics of online aggression. It was published in early 2017, just in time for the Trump Twitter phenomenon to start taking over the conversation about the power of social media to influence people. I was focused mainly on adaptive development.

My modest research showed a few interesting things:

Thing 1: If you agree with the premise that we are wired for adaptation (See the Freuds for defense mechanisms and George Vaillant for modern research on adaptation), then aggressive online discourse (arguing in the comments) may have a more significant developmental role, on both an individual and social level, than we have attributed to it.

Thing 2: At least in my sample at the time, which consisted of three discussions of a fatphobic YouTube video within the body-positive community (on three platforms), there were a lot of moderate distortions like projection and displacement, a smaller but significant amount of mature or adaptive behavior, and a statistically insignificant amount of psychotic behavior. In plain terms, many people wanted to argue about whether it was okay to be mean to fat people, but my sample of 150 comments across three platforms only included one violent comment. Given the attention paid to trolling and violent online behavior at the time, I concluded that we needed to pay more attention to adaptive behavior, as it was more significant and pervasive than truly maladaptive behavior.

Thing 3: This was the most experimental of my findings, but one pervasive theme that emerged from my analysis was the projected fear of death. People seemed motivated to predict fat people’s early demise to lessen their anxiety about existential realities like their own eventual demise.

Thing 4: (and this is where I just had an aha moment) There was a basic epistemological contradiction between a psychodynamic interpretation of online aggression and a sociological one. From a psychological perspective, people distort reality to partially, rather than fully, deal with it. Their psychological strength and experiences dictate how much they do this. Over time, they tend to distort less and deal with reality more as they grow in ego strength and experience.

On an individual level, displacement (projecting a quality onto a group of people) is more adaptive than projection (projecting a quality onto a single person) because it is more diffuse and less individualized. It’s less distorted. But from a sociological perspective, it seems like just the opposite. Prejudice is a pernicious bastard, and done en masse, it erodes society.

At the time, I couldn’t figure out how to reconcile these opposing viewpoints. How can what is good for individual development be shit for social progress, and vice versa? I’m more adept with developmental psychology than social psychology, so I just kind of sat with it and went, “huh.”

But the seven years since I finished my dissertation have been absolutely bonkers in terms of how the internet has grown, the growth of online communication, the spread of misinformation, and the sheer power of online discourse to affect the world. The weaponization of misinformation in this era has been breathtaking in the worst possible way. And in a truly frightening, chaotic era with both very real and imagined threats to our existence, many people have retreated behind the virtual walls of citadels of misinformation. A phenomenon that, from a psychodynamic perspective, looks like mass psychosis.

We are trying to grapple with pandemics, catastrophic climate change, and violent social unrest. Meanwhile, vast swaths of people are instead blaming vaccines instead of using them to protect themselves and others, targeting trans kids and their parents with harmful and fully debunked claims, and passing legislation to make teachers cease teaching anything that upsets middle-aged white men — and that’s just in the US.

So yeah, things have changed a bit since I wrote my hopeful, chirpy little dissertation. However, I’ve started to see some synergy between how societies develop and how individuals develop. There’s a saying in organizational studies, “Culture eats change for breakfast.” In organizational terms, that means that just because you hired a shiny, fancy CEO who made another company a lot of money, he or she may not be able to make shit happen at your company because the culture dictates what is and is not discussable and, therefore, executable. This is a thing I learned from my org development master’s, which I completed in 2007. When I was working on my Ph.D. I became rightly suspicious of a lot of the literature I’d studied in my previous program because it was super self-justifying of capitalism and mostly ignored any hint of structural inequality. We did not study Marx and grapple with the fact that capitalism is designed to extract maximum labor at minimal cost and pass the profits up to shareholders and executives. No, we sure did not do that thing. So while I still teach some organizational theory, I’m pretty sparing as I think a lot of it is willfully blind to how exploitative most industries are.

But back to “Culture eats change for breakfast.” What if it wasn’t just organizational cultures that did this? What if national cultures and ethnic cultured and religious cultures, and pop cultures did this too? What if social systems had enormous power to push or hinder individual development? I mean, it seems obvious now that I’m typing it, but what if we get stuck in a displacement loop, and we can’t break out of it because nobody around us can, and alternate viewpoints become undiscussable, just like they do in organizations?

So it’s the 1930s in Germany, and people are suffering after a grueling war, and there are these centuries-old, normalized (inaccurate) prejudices against Jews that turn into crazy conspiracy theories that make people feel like if they just follow the screaming mustachioed guy, all their suffering might go away because it’s easier to blame it on the Jews than deal with poverty and the horror of modern warfare?

Or it’s 2020, and the thing scientists said was going to happen any minute happened, and we have a worldwide pandemic that’s killing thousands of people a day. Still, it’s easier to blame the Chinese and Scary Jews and ignore established science than to wear a mask and wait for a vaccine and deal with how little power we have over the forces of nature that we have been fucking with at our peril. So our emotional immaturity leads to echo chambers of misinformation that feeds our immaturity and keeps us from working together to change for the better.

In the 1960s, Martin Luther King Jr. wasn’t successful at securing the right to vote for millions of Black Americans because he was a good orator. He forced white Americans to watch black children being savaged by police dogs and peacefully protesting Black men and women being beaten to death until white America had to face their prejudice and its impact on Black citizens and feel ashamed enough to support change. He and other activists disrupted the culture of white displacement (prejudice), at least partially, allowing for new laws and an end to some of the worst aspects of the Jim Crow era. Of course, prejudices still simmer under the surface and bubble up when people need someone to blame, but culture can be changed. It can push us back into our hindbrains or toward something closer to equity.

The internet is many things, and the one thing I have always believed is, like religion and governments and art, it is us. It is humanity doing human things. But I think I underestimated how networked mass communication changed things. I think the internet was disruptive, like the printing press or the wheel was disruptive, and we are still pretty fucking disrupted. I have no idea how this all falls out and how long it takes. I don’t know if we do ourselves in and the planet dramatically cuts our numbers down to a manageable level or if we figure out how to work together on a more inclusive, global scale. I know that the internet aids compassion and solidarity in many ways, just as it aids division. But I think it’s time to take a systems perspective on human development and recognize that while we are working on our individual development, other systems are working on us.

Our belief systems come from our cultural influences, which can determine whether we see another person as a sibling or an alien. I hope, for all our sakes, that we can break down some of the current mass displacement and projection and start to connect. But it will take courage. The courage to be uncomfortable, to feel guilt and shame, and to recognize that we are flawed. It will take the courage to make amends and then make more mistakes and make amends for those too. It will take the courage to stand up for those who are marginalized to those who have power. We can’t afford to hide behind easy-to-digest prejudices and misinformation anymore. We don’t have time.