The medium of social media is both relatively new and socially challenging. But this doesn’t mean we can’t have healthy debates. In this sample from our Monday Patreon bonus episode, Derek investigates three areas of research about how—and why—we need robust and progressive debates on our platforms.1. Your brain on political arguments.2. How to become a master negotiator.3. Can social media be fact-checked? A new study offers one way of doing so.
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Hello, Matthew here from the Conspirituality Podcast Team.
The following is a sample of the bonus episode we produce every week for our Patreon subscribers.
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You probably know the feeling.
A rush of heat that assaults your entire body, your fingertips and forehead suffering fiery consequences of conflict.
Restrictions around your chest and throat that quicken breath as if your lungs can no longer draw in the required oxygen.
Ears on alert, biding time for a break in your opponent's rhetoric to let loose the torn of thoughts crowding your brain.
Of course, not everyone is an opponent.
You likely know the opposite as well.
The cool excitement of agreeableness, when the words in your head are returned to you from another being as if in a mirror.
Unconscious head shaking as your sense of righteousness is validated.
The warm exuberance of easy dialogue with a fellow tribe member, someone who you agree with and agrees with you.
In a digital age in which physical contact seems foreign and long past, we might have forgotten what it's like to agree, or debate, with someone in person.
Pandemics are temporary, while societies are, well, nothing is forever.
But we've outlived diseases before.
According to new research from Yale University, published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, disagreeing with someone takes up a lot of brain real estate, while finding a compatriot is a much less cognitively taxing endeavor.
For this study, researchers gathered 38 adults to ask their feelings on contentious topics like same-sex marriage and cannabis legalization.
They then matched each volunteer with people who either agreed or disagreed.
Every volunteer had their brain scanned with functional near-infrared spectroscopy during these face-to-face discussions, during which time they were given a total of 90 seconds to discuss a topic in 15-second increments.
Unsurprisingly, harmonious synchronization of brain states occurred when volunteers agreed with one another, similar to group flow, the coordination of brainwaves that hip-hop and jazz musicians experience when performing together.
Coordination exceeds the social into the neurological.
As the team writes, talking during agreement was characterized by increased activity in a social and attention network, including right supramarginal gyrus, bilateral frontal eye fields, and left frontopolar regions.
You can look those up if you want.
So, this contrasts with the argumentative behavior, and there are a bunch of brain regions there as well, which I won't get into, but that are pretty important.
Senior author Joy Hirsch notes that our brain is essentially a social processing network.
The evolutionary success of humans is thanks to our ability to coordinate.
And we all know that dissonance is exhausting.
Overall, she says, it just takes a lot more brain real estate to disagree than to agree, comparing arguments to a symphony orchestra playing different music.
As the team notes, language, visual, and social systems are all dynamically intertwined inside of our brain.
For most of history, yelling at one another in common sections was impossible, so arguments had to occur the old-fashioned way, while staring at the source of your discontent.
This leads us to an interesting question.
Do the same brain regions fire when you're screaming with your fingers on your Facebook feed?
Given the lack of visual feedback from the person on the other side of the argument, likely not, as it is unlikely that many people would argue in the same manner when face-to-face with a person on the other side of a debate.
We are generally more civil in real life than on the screen.
The researchers point out that seeing faces causes complex neurological reactions that must be interpreted in real time.
For example, gazing into someone's eyes requires higher order processing that must be dealt with during that moment.
Your brain coordinates to make sense of the words being spoken and pantomimes being witnessed.
This combination of verbal and visual processes are generally associated with high-level cognitive and linguistic functions.
While arguing is more exhausting, it also sharpens your senses, when a person is present at least.
Debating is a healthy function of a society.
Arguments force you to consider other viewpoints and potentially come to different conclusions.
Just like with physical exercise, which makes you stronger even though it's energetically taxing, disagreement propels societies forward.
In this study, every participant was forced to listen to the other person.
That is key.
As this research was focused on live interactions, it adds to the literature of cognitive processing during live interactions and offers insights into the cognitive tax of anger.
Now even anger is a net positive when it forces both people to think through their thoughts and feelings on a matter.
As social animals, we need that tension in our lives in order to grow.
Yelling into the void of a comment section?
Well, that's not nearly as helpful.
And I hope we can one day understand that these mediums that we have are really separating us and making us a lot more angry and a lot more tense than we need to be.
