“Two people can see the same thing, disagree, and yet both be right. It's not logical; it's psychological.”
- Stephen Covey
A study published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology proposed that, when given the opportunity, people tend to censor those who post online content that conflicts with their beliefs.
This study was carried out by a team of eight researchers, led by Ashwini Ashokkumar from the Department of Psychology at the University of Texas.
With the events that have taken place over the last few years, it’s safe to say that Americans are more divided than ever. While it’s well known that people tend to gravitate towards neighborhoods and occupations in which they’re surrounded by like-minded individuals, a similar phenomena occurs online.
People often seek out online communities that support their pre-existing beliefs and whose opinions they endorse. As a result, these individuals can often acquire a warped sense of reality.
Unsurprisingly, when confronted with online content that opposes their beliefs, they may have a strong desire to silence the author of this content. Dr. Ashokkumar and her team designed a series of experiments to learn more about this phenomenon.
At the beginning of the experiment, participants were asked to share their views on abortion rights (i.e. pro-choice or pro-life). Those who reported having a neutral opinion on the issue were dropped from the study.
Next, participants were asked to respond to surveys further assessing their opinions about abortion rights. Two weeks later, the participants were contacted again by the researchers, regarding a seemingly unrelated “comment moderation task”.
In this task, participants were informed about a new blog that was designed to encourage discussion about current issues. However, the blog had experienced a surge in inappropriate comments and the researchers needed the participants help deleting such comments.
Then, participants read 40 comments that were taken from real online blogs and forums. Of the 40, 15 were pro-choice (e.g. “I love that even though Norma couldn’t herself get an abortion – because of the terrible world we live in – she fought so hard to make sure other women could”).
15 were pro-life (e.g. “I love that Lily didn’t have an abortion even though she didn’t want to be a parent. She hadn’t planned a baby and wasn’t ready for it, but she didn’t get an abortion”). The remaining 10 comments were irrelevant to the cause.
The researchers were also concerned that some participants may delete comments because they included offensive language, rather than because they conflicted with their beliefs. In order to account for this, five extra participants (two pro-choice, two pro-life and one neutral) were asked to rate each comments offensiveness.
The results revealed that participants censored online comments more when the content conflicted with their beliefs. This tendency was higher among supporters of the pro-life cause.
Participants whose identity was strongly intertwined with the pro-choice or pro-life cause were also more likely to selectively censor online content that opposed their beliefs. Interestingly, this tendency was driven by their intolerance for opposing comments rather than their affinity for like-minded comments.
In the next experiment, the researchers tested whether their results would remain consistent when participants were shown comments about gun rights, rather than abortion.
For this experiment, half of the comments were pro-gun-rights while the other half were pro-gun-control. In addition, the researchers created offensive and non-offensive versions of each comment (i.e. the content was the same, but the offensive version contained a few offensive phrases).
All of the pro-gun-rights comments were attributed to a single user, while all of the pro-gun-control comments were attributed to another single user. After evaluating whether each comment should be deleted, participants were asked whether they thought each user should be banned from the site.
The researchers found that participants tended to delete offensive and inoffensive comments that opposed their views on the gun rights debate. This effect was amplified for participants whose identity was strongly intertwined with supporting gun-control or gun-rights.
The researchers also found that gun-control advocates (who tend to be left-leaning) engaged in censorship more than those who supported gun-rights. Recall, in the previous experiment, censorship was more likely to occur amongst pro-lifers (who tend to be right-leaning).
This suggests that the willingness to censor others may depend on the political context (e.g. level of threat faced by the cause) rather than political ideology (right or left).
Overall, these experiments revealed that people have a tendency to censor others who post content that conflicts with their beliefs, especially if their beliefs are strongly aligned with their identity. This tendency likely depends on the context of the issue, rather than an individual’s political ideology.