Derek Thompson: Jay, you and I are going to spend most of this episode talking about your empirical research on how the internet, and social media in particular, holds a fun-house mirror to the human condition and why I think the incentives and engagement structures of social media are truly driving many people slowly insane. But first, how would you describe your work? What’s the big question that you and your lab are trying to answer?


A. the nature of groups and identity and how they work.
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So having spent several hours reading your papers from the last few years this morning and yesterday and thinking about them as a collective, I came up with, what I am calling for the moment, “the four bad laws of internet and social media engagement.” Because I feel like you and your lab have been—in researching how group psychology and dynamics and social media and the internet affect us, you found your way to these four laws of what it is that drives bad engagement on the internet. And I’m just going to read them out now, and then we’re going to walk through them. I’ll repeat them at the end, and then we can analyze them. But here are the four laws that I’ve taken from your research.

Number one is that negativity drives engagement. Number two, extremism drives engagement online. Number three, out-group animosity drives engagement online. And number four, moral, emotional language drives engagement online. And for listeners at home, if you didn’t understand what some of those terms meant, we will absolutely define them in just a few minutes. But what I want to do with you with our time together is to explain where these ideas come from—because they’re all derived from your work in the last few years—and what they mean.

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Van Bavel: Yeah, I think one of the things that psychologists are very familiar with is the idea that bad is stronger than good, that people pay more attention to or are more motivated by bad things than we are good things. And I’ll go back to a bit of an evolutionary explanation for this again: You can imagine your ancestors walking around the African savanna, and they’re looking for food to eat. And so there’s a motivation to try to find food. But if they potentially see something and it could kill them, that’s dramatically more significant to their survival. And so they have to err on the side of avoiding things that are negative and risky. And our ancestors who did that over generation after generation after generation were more likely to survive. And so we have brains that are wired to detect threats and super-tuned to them more than they are to detect rewards.