Reinforcing outrage

I got onto social media some years ago for two main reasons; to stay in touch with people I don't get to see frequently (which since the pandemic has been pretty much everyone), and to have a platform for marketing my books.

I'm the first to admit that I'm kind of awful at the latter.  I hate marketing myself, and even though I know I won't be successful as an author if no one ever hears about my work, it goes against the years of childhood training in such winning strategies as "don't talk about yourself" and "don't brag" and (my favorite) "no one wants to hear about that" (usually applied to whatever my current main interest was).

I'm still on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, although for me the last-mentioned seems to mostly involve pics of my dog being cute.  It strikes me on a daily basis, though, how quickly non-dog-pic social media can devolve into a morass of hatefulness -- Twitter seems especially bad in that regard -- and also that I have no clue how the algorithms work that decide for you what you should and should not look at.  It's baffling to me that someone will post a fascinating link or trenchant commentary and get two "likes" and one retweet, and then someone else will post a pic of their lunch and it'll get shared far and wide.

So I haven't learned how to game the system, either to promote my books or to get a thousand retweets of a pic of my own lunch.  Maybe my posts aren't angry enough.  At least that seems to be the recommendation of a study at Yale University that was published last week in Science Advances, which found that expressions of moral outrage on Twitter are more often rewarded by likes and retweets than emotionally neutral ones.

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons "Today Testing" (For derivative), Social Media Marketing Strategy, CC BY-SA 4.0]

Apparently, getting likes and retweets is the human equivalent of the bell ringing for Pavlov's dog.  When our posts are shared, it gives us incentive to post others like them.  And since political outrage gets responses, we tend to move in that direction over time.  Worse still, the effect is strongest for people who are political moderates, meaning the suspicion a lot of us have had for a while -- that social media feeds polarization -- looks like it's spot-on.

"Our studies find that people with politically moderate friends and followers are more sensitive to social feedback that reinforces their outrage expressions,” said Yale professor of psychology Molly Crockett, who co-authored the study.  "This suggests a mechanism for how moderate groups can become politically radicalized over time — the rewards of social media create positive feedback loops that exacerbate outrage...  Amplification of moral outrage is a clear consequence of social media’s business model, which optimizes for user engagement.  Given that moral outrage plays a crucial role in social and political change, we should be aware that tech companies, through the design of their platforms, have the ability to influence the success or failure of collective movements.  Our data show that social media platforms do not merely reflect what is happening in society.  Platforms create incentives that change how users react to political events over time."

Which is troubling, if not unexpected.  Social media may not just be passively encouraging polarization, but deliberately exploiting our desire for approval.  In doing so, they are not just recording the trends, but actively influencing political outcomes.

It's scary how easily manipulated we are.  The catch-22 is that any attempt to rein in politically-incendiary material on social media runs immediately afoul of the rights of free speech; it took Facebook and Twitter ages to put the brakes on posts about the alleged danger of the COVID vaccines and the "Big Lie" claims of Donald Trump and his cronies that Joe Biden stole the election last November.  (A lot of those posts are still sneaking through, unfortunately.)  So if social media is feeding social media polarization with malice aforethought, the only reasonable response is to think twice about liking and sharing sketchy stuff -- and when in doubt, err on the side of not sharing it.

Either that, or exit social media entirely, something that several friends of mine have elected to do.  I'm reluctant -- there are people, especially on Facebook, who I'd probably lose touch with entirely without it -- but I don't spend much time on it, and (except for posting links to Skeptophilia every morning) hardly post at all.  What I do post is mostly intended for humor's sake; I avoid political stuff pretty much entirely.

So that's our discouraging, if unsurprising, research of the day.  It further reinforces my determination to spend as little time doomscrolling on Twitter as I can.  Not only do I not want to contribute to the nastiness, I don't need the reward of retweets pushing me any further into outrage.  I'm outraged enough as it is.

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I was an undergraduate when the original Cosmos, with Carl Sagan, was launched, and being a physics major and an astronomy buff, I was absolutely transfixed.  Me and my co-nerd buddies looked forward to the new episode each week and eagerly discussed it the following day between classes.  And one of the most famous lines from the show -- ask any Sagan devotee -- is, "If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, first you must invent the universe."

Sagan used this quip as a launching point into discussing the makeup of the universe on the atomic level, and where those atoms had come from -- some primordial, all the way to the Big Bang (hydrogen and helium), and the rest formed in the interiors of stars.  (Giving rise to two of his other famous quotes: "We are made of star-stuff," and "We are a way for the universe to know itself.")

Since Sagan's tragic death in 1996 at the age of 62 from a rare blood cancer, astrophysics has continued to extend what we know about where everything comes from.  And now, experimental physicist Harry Cliff has put together that knowledge in a package accessible to the non-scientist, and titled it How to Make an Apple Pie from Scratch: In Search of the Recipe for our Universe, From the Origin of Atoms to the Big Bang.  It's a brilliant exposition of our latest understanding of the stuff that makes up apple pies, you, me, the planet, and the stars.  If you want to know where the atoms that form the universe originated, or just want to have your mind blown, this is the book for you.

[Note: if you purchase this book using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

Hand-in-glove

One of the more fascinating bits of biochemistry is the odd "handedness" (technically called chirality) that a lot of biological molecules have.  Chiral molecules come in a left-handed (sinistral) and a right-handed (dextral) form that are made of exactly the same parts but put together in such a way that they're mirror-images of each other, just like a left-handed and right-handed glove.

Where it gets really interesting is that although the left-handed and right-handed forms of biologically active molecules have nearly identical properties, they aren't equivalent in function.  Nearly all naturally-occurring sugars are right-handed; amino acids, on the other hand, are all left-handed.  No one knows why this is, but having evolved with this kind of specificity has the result that if you were fed a mirror-image diet -- left-handed glucose, for example, and proteins made of right-handed amino acids -- you wouldn't be able to tell anything apart by its smell or taste, but you would proceed to starve to death because your cells would not be able to metabolize molecules with the wrong chirality.

Chirality in amino acids [Image is in the Public Domain courtesy of NASA]

Molecular chirality was used to brilliant effect by the wonderful murder mystery author Dorothy Sayers in her novel The Documents in the Case.  In the story, a man dies after eating a serving of mushrooms he'd picked.  His friends and family are stunned; he'd been a wild mushroom enthusiast for decades, and the fatal mistake he apparently made -- including a deadly ivory funnel mushroom (Clitocybe dealbata) in with a pan full of other edible kinds -- was something he never would have done.

The toxic substance in ivory funnels, the alkaloid muscarine, is -- like many organic compounds -- chiral.  Naturally-occurring muscarine is all left-handed.  However, when it's synthesized in the lab, you end up with a mixture of right- and left-handed molecules, in about equal numbers.  So when the contention is made that the victim hadn't mistakenly included a poisonous mushroom in with the edible ones, but had been deliberately poisoned by someone who'd added the chemical to his food, the investigators realize this is the key to solving the riddle of the man's death.

Chiral molecules have another odd property; if you shine a beam of polarized light through a crystal, right-handed ones rotate the polarization angle of the beam clockwise, and left-handed ones counterclockwise.  So when an extract from the victim's digestive tract is analyzed, and a polarized light beam shined through it splits in two -- part of the beam rotated clockwise, the other part counterclockwise -- there's no doubt he was poisoned by synthetic muscarine, not by mistakenly eating a poisonous mushroom.

Turns out there may be a way to use this hand-in-glove property of biological molecules not to solve a murder, but to detect life on other planets.  As with Dorothy Sayers's synthetic muscarine, organic compounds not produced by a living thing would almost certainly be a mixture of the two chiralities, right- and left-handed.  Because organisms here on Earth are all so incredibly specific about which chirality they need (or create), it's a fair guess that living things on other worlds would have the same choosiness.  And now a technique has been developed to detect molecular chirality in the light reflected from a forest from two kilometers away, by a spectropolarimeter on a helicopter flying at seventy kilometers per hour.

It only took seconds for the detector to tell the difference between light reflected from a living thing and light reflected from something inanimate, like a rock face or an asphalt road.  Now that we're becoming increasingly good at seeing the faint light reflected from the surface of exoplanets, looking for rotation of the polarization angle of that light might be a quick way to see if there's anything alive down there.

"The next step we hope to take is to perform similar detections from the International Space Station (ISS), looking down at the Earth," said astrophysicist Brice-Olivier Demory of the University of Bern and MERMOZ (Monitoring planEtary suRfaces with Modern pOlarimetric characteriZation).  "That will allow us to assess the detectability of planetary-scale biosignatures.  This step will be decisive to enable the search for life in and beyond our Solar System using polarization."

Which is really cool, although as an aside someone needs to explain to whoever is in charge of MERMOZ how acronyms work.

In any case, the whole idea is brilliant, and the possibility that we could detect living organisms on a distant planet just by analyzing the reflected light polarization is mind-boggling.  It's long been the stumbling block in the search for extraterrestrial life; if a planet hosts life, but the living things there are pre-technological, how would we know they're there?  After all, as little as two centuries ago, intelligent aliens would have detected no radio signals coming from Earth, and (of course) we wouldn't have had the capability of detecting any they sent us.

But now, maybe we can tell if there's something alive out there without it having to communicate with us directly.  Like Dorothy Sayers's intrepid detectives, all we have to do is see if the light twists in only one direction, and it might well be case closed.

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One of the most devastating psychological diagnoses is schizophrenia.  United by the common characteristic of "loss of touch with reality," this phrase belies how horrible the various kinds of schizophrenia are, both for the sufferers and their families.  Immersed in a pseudo-reality where the voices, hallucinations, and perceptions created by their minds seem as vivid as the actual reality around them, schizophrenics live in a terrifying world where they literally can't tell their own imaginings from what they're really seeing and hearing.

The origins of schizophrenia are still poorly understood, and largely because of a lack of knowledge of its causes, treatment and prognosis are iffy at best.  But much of what we know about this horrible disorder comes from families where it seems to be common -- where, apparently, there is a genetic predisposition for the psychosis that is schizophrenia's most frightening characteristic.

One of the first studies of this kind was of the Galvin family of Colorado, who had ten children born between 1945 and 1965 of whom six eventually were diagnosed as schizophrenic.  This tragic situation is the subject of the riveting book Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, by Robert Kolker.  Kolker looks at the study done by the National Institute of Health of the Galvin family, which provided the first insight into the genetic basis of schizophrenia, but along the way gives us a touching and compassionate view of a family devastated by this mysterious disease.  It's brilliant reading, and leaves you with a greater understanding of the impact of psychiatric illness -- and hope for a future where this diagnosis has better options for treatment.

[Note: if you purchase this book from the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to support Skeptophilia!]

 

An exercise in futility

I'm going to ask a question, not because I'm trying to lead my readers toward a particular answer, but because I honestly don't know the answer myself.

To what extent are we ethically obligated to confront strangers on social media who post immoral or offensive claims?

I ask this because this morning I saw a post by a friend of a distant relative on Facebook stating that "the origin of homosexuality is in pedophilia."  First of all, this is factually wrong; there probably are some homosexuals who are pedophiles, but they're no more common among the LGBTQ population than they are among the cis-heterosexuals.  But worse, this is vile homophobia, implying that there is an equivalence between a loving, committed relationship between two adults of the same sex, and a person of either sex harming or abusing a child.

So I wrote, "this is bullshit."

The response came back almost immediately: "Typical libtard excuses for the immorality that is destroying America."

I answered, "You want research showing that there's no connection between homosexuality and pedophilia?  I can provide it."

The response: "Why would I be convinced by pro-gay atheistic scientists?  They are hand-in-glove with the queers anyhow."

At that point, I gave up.

This is troubling from a plethora of angles.  Not only does this person espouse ugly bigotry, she has decided that anything contrary to her views must be a "libtard" opinion motivated by a desire to destroy America's moral fiber.  She's successfully insulated herself from ever discovering she's wrong.  About anything.  Further, this enables her to write off anyone who disagrees with her as a dupe at best and actively evil at worst.

So the argument I got into was an exercise in futility, which I knew it would be from the outset.  Someone who would post what she did isn't going to have their views changed by a nasty exchange with a total stranger.  All it did was raise both of our blood pressures and leave us more firmly entrenched in what we already believed.

But does that mean we shouldn't try?

[Image licensed under the Creative Commons David Shankbone creator QS:P170,Q12899557, Anger during a protest by David Shankbone, CC BY-SA 3.0]

That doesn't set well with me, either.  If you don't challenge evil when you see it, what good are your moral convictions?  It also bears consideration that my antagonist is not the only person who saw the back-and-forth.  Presumably a lot of people read what we wrote -- and interestingly, not a single person, including my (very conservative and religious) cousin, decided to weigh in.  It may be that one of them was on the fence, and seeing his or her unexamined views expressed in such a blatantly vicious fashion caused some level of reconsideration.

But I don't know.  I detest conflict, and am the last person who would seek out a battle just for the hell of it.  Also, I can say that when I've engaged in this kind of thing with a stranger, it has resulted in an exactly zero percent success rate of moving the person who posted the initial comment.  So was it worth the unpleasantness?

I honestly don't know.  It felt a great deal like tilting at windmills to me.  But like I said, with some things staying silent really isn't an option.

If anyone has any better perspective on this, I'd love to hear it, either privately or in the comments section.  Because right now, I'm feeling pretty despondent about ever convincing anyone of anything -- even when their views are immoral, unfair, bigoted, or demonstrably false.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is for any of my readers who, like me, grew up on Star Trek in any of its iterations -- The Physics of Star Trek by Lawrence Krauss.  In this delightful book, Krauss, a physicist at Arizona State University, looks into the feasibility of the canonical Star Trek technology, from the possible (the holodeck, phasers, cloaking devices) to the much less feasible (photon torpedoes, tricorders) to the probably impossible (transporters, replicators, and -- sadly -- warp drive).

Along the way you'll learn some physics, and have a lot of fun revisiting some of your favorite tropes from one of the most successful science fiction franchises ever invented, one that went far beyond the dreams of its creator, Gene Roddenberry -- one that truly went places where no one had gone before.

Polar opposites

A new study out of Michigan State University has confirmed what a lot of us sensed all along: the polarization between the Right and the Left in the United States is about as bad as it's ever been.

Zachary P. Neal, a professor of psychology at MSU, did a statistical analysis of bill sponsorship and support from members of Congress, from the 1970s to the present:

Claims that the United States Congress is (becoming more) polarized are widespread, but what is polarization?  In this paper, I draw on notions of intergroup relations to distinguish two forms.  Weak polarization occurs when relations between the polarized groups are merely absent, while strong polarization occurs when the relations between the polarized groups are negative.  I apply the Stochastic Degree Sequence Model to data on bill co-sponsorship in both the U.S. House of Representatives and U.S. Senate, from 1973 (93rd session) to 2016 (114th session) to infer a series of signed networks of political relationships among legislators, which I then use to answer two research questions.  First, can the widely reported finding of increasing weak polarization in the U.S. Congress be replicated when using a statistical model to make inferences about when positive political relations exist?  Second, is the (increasing) polarization observed in the U.S. Congress only weak polarization, or is it strong polarization?  I find that both chambers exhibit both weak and strong polarization, that both forms are increasing, and that they are structured by political party affiliation.  However, I also find these trends are unrelated to which party holds the majority in a chamber.

The last sentence is, I think, the most important.  It's easy for liberals to point fingers at conservatives (and vice versa) and lay the entire blame for polarization at the opposition's feet.  The truth, predictably, is more complex than that.  "In truth," Neal said, in a press release from MSU, "the only thing that is bipartisan in Congress is the trend toward greater polarization."

These results are discouraging, to say the least.  "What I’ve found is that polarization has been steadily getting worse since the early 1970s," Neal said.  "Today, we’ve hit the ceiling on polarization.  At these levels, it will be difficult to make any progress on social or economic policies...  We’re seeing lots of animosity in politics.  Although bills do occasionally get passed, they don’t stick around long enough, or never get fully implemented, and therefore don’t have lasting impact.  This kind of partisanship means that our democracy has reached a kind of stalemate."

[Image is in the Public Domain]

Neal doesn't look at cause (except the fact that the blame can't clearly be assigned to one party).  But I wonder how much of this is exacerbated by the rise of talk radio and partisan news channels.  When the goal becomes getting viewers (or listeners, or clicks), not accuracy and fairness, there's an incentive to play to people's basest motives -- fear, tribalism, resentment, retribution.  If you look at the rhetoric from people like Tucker Carlson (on the Right) and Ted Rall (on the Left) you'll find they do business with the same currency -- whipping up the righteous indignation of the people who already agreed with them.  It no longer depends on looking at the evidence in a dispassionate fashion, it has become instead a contest to see who can be the most outrageous and incendiary.

That, after all, keeps people watching, listening, and clicking, which pays sponsors -- who pay the commentators.

Until there's more of an incentive to report and analyze the news fairly, it's only going to get worse, as each party does what it takes to stay in power, which means keeping the voters convinced that if they don't vote the party line, BAD STUFF WILL HAPPEN.  The result?  We've tended to elect partisan hacks who don't care about anything but their own corporate sponsors, and the whole thing comes full circle.

"The solution could be electing more centrists to Congress," Neal said.  "But that’ll be tough because centrists often don’t appeal to American voters."

So the sad truth is that we're probably in for more of the same, and things getting worse before they get better.  I can only hope that at some point, people realize that the members of the opposition party are their neighbors, coworkers, teachers in their schools, members of their churches, and they can realize that disagreement has a human face.  That, I think, is the only way this will ever change.

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This week's Skeptophilia book recommendation is a fun one -- Hugh Ross Williamson's Historical Enigmas.  Williamson takes some of the most baffling unsolved mysteries from British history -- the Princes in the Tower, the identity of Perkin Warbeck, the Man in the Iron Mask, the murder of Amy Robsart -- and applies the tools of logic and scholarship to an analysis of the primary documents, without descending into empty speculation.  The result is an engaging read about some of the most perplexing events that England ever saw.

[If you purchase the book from Amazon using the image/link below, part of the proceeds goes to supporting Skeptophilia!]

Political backfires

The good news from yesterday's post, wherein we learned some ways of fighting the backfire effect and convincing people to change their minds, was immediately counterbalanced by a new (and discouraging) study out of Denmark that showed that for politicians, the more data they have access to, the worse backfire effect becomes.

A team at Aarhus University led by Martin Baekgaard was studying motivated reasoning, which is the thought process we engage in when we are presented with information either supporting or refuting our prior beliefs.  In the first part of the experiment, test subjects were given test score data from two schools, A and B, and asked to evaluate which was more successful.  A different set of test subjects was given the same data, but one of the two schools was labeled "Public School A" and the other "Private School B" -- like in the United States, the relative merits of public vs. private schools is a topic of heated debate.

This first bit of research generated results that were unsurprising.  When the two schools were given anonymous tags, the data was evaluated fairly by both people who supported public schools and those who supported private schools.  When they were labeled, however, the backfire effect kicked in, and the test subjects' prior opinions skewed their analysis of the results.

So far, nothing we didn't already know.  But the second part of the experiment not only looked at the quantity of data provided, and compared the results of 1,000 test subjects from a variety of professions as compared to 954 career politicians.  And this gave some results that were, to put it mildly, interesting.  Let me give it to you in the authors' own words:

Does evidence help politicians make informed decisions even if it is at odds with their prior beliefs?  And does providing more evidence increase the likelihood that politicians will be enlightened by the information?  Based on the literature on motivated political reasoning and the theory about affective tipping points, this article hypothesizes that politicians tend to reject evidence that contradicts their prior attitudes, but that increasing the amount of evidence will reduce the impact of prior attitudes and strengthen their ability to interpret the information correctly.  These hypotheses are examined using randomized survey experiments with responses from 954 Danish politicians, and results from this sample are compared to responses from similar survey experiments with Danish citizens.  The experimental findings strongly support the hypothesis that politicians are biased by prior attitudes when interpreting information.  However, in contrast to expectations, the findings show that the impact of prior attitudes increases when more evidence is provided.

Yes, you read that right.  Politicians, like other people, are prone to falling into the backfire effect.  But unlike the rest of us, the more data they're given, the worse the backfire effect becomes.  Show a politician additional evidence, and all you're doing is making sure that (s)he stays planted even more firmly.

Baekgaard et al. propose a reason for this result, and I suspect they're correct; most politicians are, by their very nature, partisan, and have been elected because of strongly supporting a particular political agenda.  Since the backfire effect occurs when people double down on their beliefs because of feeling threatened, it stands to reason that politicians -- whose jobs depend on their beliefs being right -- would experience a greater sense of threat when they find they're wrong than the rest of us do.

But that leaves us with the rather alarming result that the people who are directing policy and making decisions for an entire electorate are going to be the ones whose response to the data is worst.

"The Great Presidential Puzzle" by James Albert Wales (1880) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

And, of course, this result is borne out by what we see around us.  Here in the United States, it seems like every time new studies are performed and new data generated, the determination of politicians to shout "damn the facts, full speed ahead!" only gets stronger.  Which can explain why any of a number of crazy policies have been implemented, ones that fly in the face of every rational argument there is.

But in the words of Charlie Brown, "Now that I know that, what do I do?"  And my answer is: beats the hell out of me.  As I said in a previous post, I think nothing's going to change until the voters wise up, and that won't happen until we have a more educated citizenry.

And heaven only knows what it'll take for that to come about.