Why the Internet Is So Polarized, Extreme, and Screamy

Subscribe to Crazy/Genius: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Play

In the early 1970s, the psychologist David G. Myers conducted a famous experiment on the power of groups. He divided several hundred undergraduates into two camps based on their attitudes toward feminism, creating a conservative cluster and a liberal one. Then he left them all alone to talk. When the groups disbanded, the liberal students had become much more liberal, and the conservative students had veered sharply right.

Today this effect is known as group polarization, and unlike other pseudo-phenomena in the field of psychology, it’s been. Spending long amounts of time with people who agree with you doesn’t just lead to groupthink, these researchers have found; it can also lead to the gradual silencing of dissent and the elevation of, and consensus around, the most virulent opinions. If you want to make people more extreme, you don’t have to threaten them or brainwash them. Just plop them in a like-minded group, and human nature will do the rest.