In a new paper in PNAS, incoming professor of psychology Joshua Conrad Jackson and colleagues show that attention-seeking algorithms aren’t the only driver of online negativity. Another culprit is what psychologists call differentiation, the innate drive to stand out from one’s peers.
“Negative information is just much more diverse than positive information,” Jackson said. For example, he added, “If you’re talking about ‘The Odyssey,’ this new Christopher Nolan film, the top comment in a thread might be ‘I liked it’ — but then what else is there to say? If you want to stand out and say something new, you have to talk about something you disliked about the film.”
Jackson and his colleagues analyzed more than 2 billion comments from 2,150 Reddit communities and found that both threads and communities became more negative over time, and that semantic differentiation drove that trend — that is, negative comments were more semantically unique from what had already been said. They then replicated their observational findings with an experiment that showed that social media users who were primed to be unique posted more negative comments than users who were primed to conform.
We talked to Jackson about takeaways from the paper and potential implications for other forms of media. The interview has been edited for clarity and length.
Sky still blue, I see.