How Social Proof drives what left political subcultures believe

Inverse Florida

How Social Proof drives what left political subcultures believe

The reasons why people believe bad ideas are primarily social - it's Social Proof all the way down.

Inverse Florida

Jul 10

9

More than anything else in politics, I focus on social factors, because it’s the thing that seems most important, and yet also the most ignored.

Most people aren’t really interested in understanding why their political outgroup believes stupid things, or they think the reason is basically unknowable. They usually boil it down to “They’re bad people, or otherwise blameworthy for their stupidity”. These aren’t real explanations. They’re more like emphatic statements of how much you condemn the other guys, or how much you aren’t like them.

But the actual reasons why people believe insane things when they join a political subculture are social. And specifically, when it comes to belief, we’re talking about Social Proof. And this goes especially on the cultural left.

In my last post, I talked about a video by Big Joel where talked about a popular, terrible tweet about the Ecole Polytechnique Massacre, where the mass shooter ordered all the men to leave and then killed the women. The OP of the thread had blamed these men for leaving and not doing something to stop the shooter, and placed the blame on a society that doesn’t value women’s lives. Commenters all over the video admit to initially agreeing with it because they felt like it sounded right and would be socially approved, and then later realizing when it was explained to them “no wait, this is horrible”. What’s actually happening is they’re sanewashing the explanation in their head, for something they feel they should already believe.

The reason they think they should believe it isn’t just because they’re stupid or bad - it’s social proof. And in leftist spaces, there’s a unique way that people are lead to be more vulnerable to social proof because of the actual underlying ideology of those spaces. And, also, because they want to be more social in the first place.

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Ethan Mollick @emollick

Our sense of connection is a vector for misinformation

People in China & US who are high in collectivism (valuing connection & fitting in) believed more in false claims & found vague statements more profound, as they are driven to find meaning in stuff found meaningful by others 

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1:03 AM ∙ Oct 11, 2021

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Here’s a study on people reading empty or meaningless claims, and later explaining them as being more profound or deep than they really are. To quote from the abstract, “People higher in collectivism are more likely to engage in meaning-making, generating explanations when faced with an empty claim, and having done so, are more likely to find meaning”.

Although there’s a lot of modern leftists (and progressives) who are explicitly against individualism for some reason, collectivism here focuses on the desire for connection and fitting in rather than ideology. Although, then again, is also often a modern leftist theme anyway - there’s a lot of fantasy about building communities and focuses on emphasizing the importance of preserving culture that goes unnoticed to people outside leftist spaces. You won’t have to look hard to find right wingers preaching against individualism, but they usually don’t preach a fantasy of an idyllic, hierarchy free, peaceful mutual aid gift economy community or vague paeans to Human Connection while they’re at it.

This isn’t exactly everywhere in Leftist Spaces, but it is an idea you’re going to run into, and it won’t be limited to tankies.

People who value connection and fitting in more, will be more likely to borderline confabulate some deeper, better meaning for a statement someone else made for the sake of that connection. When the style of that connection is based on holding people morally blameworthy (or “accountable”) for not already believing certain things, it’s very easy to imagine how powerful that can be.

What’s going on here is Social Proof.

The part where I explain Social Proof

Social Proof is when we change what we think or do based on what we see other people doing - this isn’t simple conformity, because what’s specific about social proof is it's informational, not normative. If you’ve ever seen a headline spreading around in a popular tweet, seeing some popular commentary on it, and because people you followed believed it and retweeted it, you took it more seriously - you’ve been influenced by social proof. Hell, if you’ve ever taken a book more seriously because it has great reviews, that’s social proof too. If you’ve ever changed your idea of what’s an acceptable way to behave or act about something politically because you saw other people doing it, that was Social Proof.

In 1935, Muzaher Sharif asked test subjects how many inches a point of light had been moving. It wasn’t moving at all. It was an optical illusion, like one of those ones with the big coiled snake spirals. Because the light wasn’t moving, it was kind of ambiguous in the first place how much it was moving by - but people could answer, and they gave an answer that was consistent for them, but different to everyone else.

A few days later, subjects were called up in groups of three. Instead of everyone giving their own answer, the groups came to a consensus - they all said they saw the light move the same amount. People were tested separately without the group afterwards and still gave the group’s answer. This wouldn’t have been your standard Asch Conformity test effect - even when the other group members were gone, people’s answer remained the same. Their actual beliefs about the light’s movement, what they could see with their own eyes, had been determined by the group - in a very real way, it had been socially constructed!

This is Social Proof. This goes especially when something’s ambiguous, but it also goes for things as simple as how funny a joke is - since people laugh harder at sitcoms with laugh tracks, no matter how much they say they hate them. Again - it’s informational.

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It’s, uh, usually not this blatant when people are operating off social proof, but credit for the honesty.

Normative social influence is when you do things just for people to like you, to take you more seriously, to fit in better - and most people buy this as the default explanation for the cause of most leftist behaviour, hence the popularity of the term “Virtue signalling”. But I think the people most attracted to online leftism are people who really are, sincerely, motivated by a sense of moral feeling, of a desire for capital J Justice, and aren’t just signalling for acceptance. They’re doing what their social environment has told them is the right thing to do, and they believe it as well. There’s not enough focus on how informational social influence is working here - how social dynamics change our beliefs.

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This goes way deeper than you might think. For example - why do you believe humans cause climate change? We do, and if you believe that you’re right, but what caused you to believe it? Odds are you’re not a climate scientist who deeply understands atmospheric systems, chemistry, physics, and the data. Odds are you wouldn’t have known how to argue against scientifically informed climate change skeptics. The odds are really, really good that you saw the legitimacy of people who signed onto it, the institutions who did, and the people around you who did, and you inferred from there it must be true. And you learned that those experts had legitimacy by the social proof of how other people treated that legitimacy. You were right by the way, it is true. But it was still social proof.

Everyone’s politics are impacted by it - mine included. So if no one's immune, why do I single out leftists on Twitter about social proof so much? To start with, we saw how people who value connection and fitting in more will be more likely to sanewash insane things that they hear from sources they value - and people like this will definitely be more attracted to leftism than ideologies that seem colder to them.

But more uniquely to leftists, they tend to hold two ideological beliefs that make them uniquely vulnerable to social proof - Listening To X Group, and Toxic Solidarity.

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"Listening to x group" is basically the idea that believing people in x group is a moral imperative. "Listen to x people" in leftist discourse is typically combined with "Stay in your lane". Basically - X-group opinions are valid because they come from X-group. This idea seems obviously silly to normal people at first, but if you’re in this political subculture, it actually looks like an incredibly prective theory!

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Volumes of online feminist discourse are actually, legitimately insightful, first person accounts of female experience, with a connection to larger social trends. These posts will make predictions about “Women have secret experiences you don’t know about” to men who read them, like “Actually sexual assault is everywhere and it’s on women’s minds so much more than you know”, and then reality will confirm those predictions (The MeToo movement ends up happening). Leftists will say “Cops can’t be trusted”, and then Ferguson will happen.

It’s very easy for that central idea of Listening To X Group about Centering X Voices or Deferring To The Discourse In X Spaces to look super powerful in light of how, unironically, Listening To X Group can be really informative. The problem is of course, “Which members of X Group should I listen to?” is an objection the whole train of thought can’t answer. And the question rarely comes up to people adopting these ideas out of Social Proof, because you either get the impression that there is this massive, pre-existing consensus out there because you’ve been told there is, or you’re just focused on what you’re being told.

But the people saying Listen To X Group don’t give it any thought either. They really mean “Listen to people saying what I’m saying”. They already think the voices saying things different to them are invalid in some way. Or they might just be saying Listen To X Group out of social proof as well. This is a moral call to action, not something that’s really based on how accurate Listening To X Group will be. The purpose is to Empower X Group to control the narrative about X Group, to make X Group feel heard. That’s the origin of it, that’s the meaning of it, and that’s why doing it overpowers concerns about “What if the people I listen to are actually wrong about X Group?”, or “What if some people will overstate the harm they face as a member of X Group?”

Sometimes when the topic of “truscum vs tucute” comes up, people will say “Just listen to trans people”. The people saying “listen to trans people”, invariably, mean the ones who say that truscum are bad... but, truscum are all trans people.

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I can’t think of a better example of the breakdown of this entire idea, because it clearly only serves to uplift exactly one set of trans voices at the expense of others, but under the illusion of uplifting All Trans Voices. The implication, ironically, being that the others don’t count as legitimate trans voices.

But to put this another way, leftist spaces online make social proof an explicit part of the ideology! Adopting an opinion because people around it who seem to know more than you - social proof - is enforced. Listening To X Group is following social proof. And social proof may not be about normative influence, but there’s absolutely no way that the moral pressure of these scenes doesn’t have an effect on whether or not people believe it. If you’ve never felt persuaded to believe something more because someone you want to like you retweeted something that condemned people who disagreed with the take, then you’re either made of super stern stuff, lying, or you’re really really really good at curating your feed. (Or maybe you don’t use Twitter, in which case, good work.)

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There’s more going on with this post than you might realize if you’ve never used Tumblr. 56,000 notes is basically 260k likes in Twitter numbers. But on Tumblr, whenever someone reblogged a post, it’d appear with an entire reply chain on your dashboard. It was super common to see a post with a chain of discourse underneath, reblogged so that the last post in the chain was clearly the one being endorsed… only to appear on your dashboard reblogged by someone else, again, with a new last post in the chain arguing something completely different. This post blew up so much because it was honest about the social proof that made people accept the discourse at the time - how much more explicit can you get?

By the way, note the date as well, 2015. That’s the era of Tumblr that the term “discourse” originated from. This was back when Tumblr was basically creating the brand of online leftism we know now, and it started with adopting a sense of humour about the past brand. Online, left wing, political arguments between “SJWs” who were on the same side in theory was one of the most common post types on Tumblr, and eventually, people felt comfortable parodying this style of post or their more academic equivalents. “The discourse” was a pretentious way this type of intra-left argument would be referred to in academic circles, so when I first found out that Discourse was used this same way in professional pundit Twitter as well, I was pretty surprised - even as someone whose main writing topic is “Tumblr invisibly built modern politics”.

The mental habit of Listening To X Group, of deferring to some sort of authority, doesn’t stay limited to when you listen to a specific x group. This mindset of just deferring to certain posts that show up on your timeline isn’t something you magically turn off when you read posts that aren’t first person accounts of minority experience - nor are you ever actually told it’s just about first person accounts, because you’re also told that it’s about things like how you should feel about Harry Potter, or how you should relate to your family.

Toxic Solidarity.

Solidarity is a key, pillarized concept in leftist spaces. The impulse for solidarity is something anyone can feel - after all, if you had the opportunity, would you want to show solidarity with Ukraine? That’s normal. But in leftist spaces, it’s a (claimed) bedrock fundamental virtue.

The expectation of solidarity is something that can be abused, and the way you inspire it can be negative. The focus on solidarity can lead you back to the idea of people who value connection sanewashing things that are meaningless, for the sake of that connection. And the consequences of solidarity can just be more generic, social bubble ingroup formation. TERFs, after all, would say they’re showing solidarity with women around the world. In fact, I’d argue it goes even deeper than that.

Toxic solidarity is about adopting beliefs or positions to show solidarity, for moral purposes, no matter what those beliefs are, because you have to - or you’re a Bad Person. It’s definitely tied to the Listen To X Group Idea. It's not virtue signalling, because it's about a sincere sense of moral idealism, and not just outward acceptance. Leftists don’t inspire this with a call to higher ideals, but with a condemnation of The Bad Kind Of Non-Ally.

In leftist spaces, there's been an enormous amount of background discourse you might never have seen about what bad, fairweather allies who don't Know Their Lane do. Generally, these allies get called Liberals, especially if they have normie opinions about civility, or respect, or free speech. Comparisons are always made between them and the White Moderate from the MLK Birmingham Jail letter.

The way toxic solidarity is inspired is by illustrating this bad kind of Liberal White Moderate non-ally, emphasizing how Actually Nearly Everyone Is Like This, drawing a model of what a good ally might look like (while insisting that nobody should expect to be accepted as one, and don't look for brownie points), and then you've got a model of what NOT to do, and the power of Social Proof and Listen To X Group backing up why you should take this model seriously. A negative model is drawn of something to avoid, which inspires you to think "Oh, I don't want to be like that. Am I like that?”

Pretty much every call to action in leftist spaces is made by negative feedback, not by positive reinforcement. People aren't rewarded for doing the right thing so much as they're punished for doing the wrong - and solidarity is shown by joining in on the same punishment. Which, for the record, explains the whole concept of cancelling a la ContraPoints.

I want to emphasize again, Toxic Solidarity isn't about signaling - a lot of the elements of Toxic Solidarity are about preventing signaling, because performative signaling makes you a bad ally. There is a right, acceptable way you can learn to perform, but if you appear to be focusing on it, then you’re a bad ally. Fundamentally, this is about personal, moral idealism.

And genuinely - most leftists who aren't part of X Group but consider themselves allies, no matter how vile they might behave in some cases, are idealists. They want to do the right thing, and not just the socially normal thing. They want to show solidarity with people in X Groups! This desire to show actual solidarity doesn't just lead to adopting takes, but adopting perspectives - if someone posts a long thread about how something affected them and evokes a lot of sympathy, people will want to show solidarity with that sort of thing!

And when the group norm for showing solidarity is to punish people who go against or don't show solidarity... you can see where this is kind of going.

If you’ve ever noticed how many leftist arguments against people who disagree just appear to be moral condemnation, or appeals to how obvious or common sense something is, it’s because they think these ideas are just the obvious moral option. They actually do think that by saying “Oh you’re against this? You also would’ve been against Brown v Board of Education” that they’re making the right point. It’s not a good argument, but they’re appealing to the kind of moral shame they think you should feel for not being blessed with the ability to see the obvious moral choice. Social proof has caused them to believe it’s the obvious moral choice, of course.

This stuff doesn't just stay limited to social issues, but it extends to economic issues as well. The social ones just explain why leftism is uniquely vulnerable to social proof. Once you've been trained into finding it normal to accept certain beliefs without being able to understand them, with listening to one part of a group and treating it as The Whole Group, it doesn't actually stay limited to that.

Most people who are leftists now began as normie liberals before. They became leftists by being introduced to leftism through a process of social proof, and most of them years ago on the topic of social issues. They adopted economic opinions and FoPo ones as time went on too, just like you probably adopted your first political opinions - and, in all likelihood, a lot of your current ones as well.

Once you're placed inside a social circle where total adherence to group norms is necessary for acceptance, and stepping outside the bounds or questioning things based on your own understanding gets punished, and your someone who values connection and fitting in... you will probably invent more sane explanations or meanings for inane statements. You’ll sanewash them to justify the things you were going to believe anyway. Or you might never bother to learn the justifications, and just accept it due to social proof - which is what the core of the leftist ingroup ultimately does. And you definitely won’t restrict it to social issues.

When other people start talking about economic things, and you see a bunch of headlines, and people sounding smart explaining about it, and it feeds into your existing normie liberal anti-business sympathies, you'll believe it in the same way, for the same reasons. You probably only need to see three headlines about something before it starts getting a false sense of legitimacy - which is a kind of social proof in and of itself, but think about how the authority and legitimacy of the sources plays into this as well. This fundamental effect is definitely universal in politics.

Any leftist who became one online by actually reading theory and being convinced by arguments in detail that they had to understand deeply first is a minority. Most of them adopted socialist opinions not because they deeply understood them, but because everyone else seemed to. Anyone’s actual introduction to radical politics is a gradual process, where you learn to adopt the radical beliefs because everyone else around you seems smarter, and you see them bully the moderates so they sound hard to disagree with in your own head.

Worse, if their ideas are predictive, and you want to show solidarity, you’re going to be hit by the three-headlines illusory truth effect, and you’ll buy into it completely.

When you add in that capitalism, or imperialism, are commonly identified by people in some X Group as uniquely harming them, or being based *specifically* on their harm, then the social proof becomes even stronger. But most of all, you'll probably respond to the emotion everyone shows about these ideas - everything is taken as so straightforward, obvious, every misinterpretation of some opposing argument is taken as obvious truth, and stepping out of line is taken as an offense or proof of personal immorality.

In my first post, I wrote about sanewashing - making up a more moderate meaning of something people radical in your scene were saying, so you could defend your ability to still say the radical thing.

Why do people bother with that? Because they’re under a lot of social pressure to believe the radical thing in the first place. But we’re not just talking about people who claim to believe something radical while privately believing something moderate - most sanewashers actually do sincerely believe that they’re expressing the Real Meaning behind the radical or insane slogan they want to defend. Because they acquired their belief by social proof, and then have to invent an explanation of that belief.

When prominent right wing figures do this, it’s mundane cynicism or fear. You can’t call Trump out for what he is, so you have to lie or deflect. It’s so banal and familiar to anyone paying attention that it becomes the reference everyone uses for explaining other radicals who say insane things - it’s normal to see leftists held up as “grifters”, as lying for clout or money, but I think that’s very rarely true of most sincere leftists (but probably true of a decent amount of progressives - the difference is, leftists are sincere anticapitalists, and progressives are social democrats at most.)

But when most people on the left sanewash, I’d say the process is borderline unconscious. Some right wing media figure will be deliberate about how they pretend Trump isn’t nuts this week, but on the left I think this represents a way people develop sincere beliefs - they’re not just trying to convince other people, they sanewash things so they can believe it too, while claiming to be part of the same ingroup/codegroup as their more radical allies. They’re inventing explanations for things they already know they have to believe. It’s the same reason why people on subreddits will beg for arguments for political positions they believe in.

This isn’t a unique phenomenon. It’s just a result of acquiring beliefs by social proof.

Coda:

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Sanewashing, and how Defund The Police stopped meaning Defund The Police

And also "Okay, here's what Trump actually means".

Inverse Florida

Jul 2

11

2

No seriously - this might actually be The End Of Trump this time. Seriously.

It's actually, actually real this time.

Inverse Florida

4 hr ago

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