Internet flamewars explained by SCIENCE!


Pinker first describes a study by Roy Baumeister where participants were asked to “describe one incident in which someone angered them, and one incident in which they angered someone.” Not surprisingly, people tell these kinds of stories in very different ways. Then:



Pinker calls this the “Moralization Gap.” And furthermore:

If revenge evolved as a deterrent, then why is it used so often in the real world? Why doesn’t revenge work like the nuclear arsenals in the Cold War, creating a balance of terror that keeps everyone in line? Why should there ever be cycles of vendetta, with vengeance begetting vengeance?

A major reason is the Moralization Gap. People consider the harms they inflict to be justified and forgettable, and the harms they suffer to be unprovoked and grievous. This bookkeeping makes the two sides in an escalating fight count the number of strikes differently and weight the inflicted harm differently as well. As the psychologist Daniel Gilbert has put it, the two combatants in a long-running war often sound like a pair of boys in the back seat of a car making their respective briefs to their parents: “He hit me first!” “He hit me harder!”

A simple analogy to the way that misperception can lead to escalation may be found in an experiment by Sukhwinder Shergill, Paul Bays, Chris Frith, and Daniel Wolpert, in which the participants placed their finger beneath a bar that could press down on it with a precise amount of force. Their instruction was the press down on the finger of a second participant for three seconds with the same amount of force they were feeling. Then the second participant got the same instructions. The two took turns, each matching the amount of force he or she had just received. After eight turns the second participant was pressing down with about eighteen times as much force as was applied in the round that got it started. The reason for the spiral is that people underestimate how much force they apply compared to how much force they feel, so they escalated the pressure by about 40 percent with each turn. In real-world disputes the misperception comes not from an illusion of the sense of touch but from an illusion of the moral sense, but in both cases the result is a spiral of painful escalation (pp. 537-538).