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Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

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Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#231

Post by torginus »

0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

In-group dynamics are further ingrained as the group gets bigger. If you have 4 friends in a group, their opinions aren't as strong. If you have 40 friends in a group, not only are their opinions stronger, they'll fight vigorously to defend the group's commonly accepted beliefs. So a growing social circle does reinforce the group dynamic. (this is well established by lots of studies) But increased polarization around…

I think it's the case of 'monkeys beating the one trying to climb the ladder' - small social circles have informal rules set by the preferences and common values of its members, while larger ones have ossified, and ritualistic rules and canonized 'sacred' beliefs - and you sometimes even have people who appoint themselves to enforce these.

You can see it in small friend group Discords vs large public ones

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#232

Post by kjkjadksj »

bicx wrote: post #70

I’m more interested in how people determine who they trust, and the parameters by which humans decide to trust someone. I would wager that people are shit at determining trustworthiness based on limited information (like social media representations). In the old days before social media, you got to know people in person, and decades ago, most of the people you knew were likely people you grew up around. You knew that…

Parasocial relationships are more analogous to the old priestly/shamanic to tribesman relationships. A person more or less removed from the direct social experience that has their own hidden motives and meanings, as well as strong incentive to maintain their position in the group dynamic as someone to look up towards.

Funny how humans evolved such to have such a predilection for finding these few charismatic people to uplift and throw their whole lot behind damned any other logic. While also having a small subset of people preferring to take the reins themselves and be the charismatic leader either for good or ill intent. And it has been that way in our species since long before recorded history.

Almost like queen bee to worker bee dynamics in terms of population structure but perhaps less rigid. The mutation rate of charismatic leaders vs followers happens to be “just right” by some mechanism. Too many of either case and group dynamics fall apart.

If we think of the whole population as a meta organism up a few levels of abstraction from the genetic level, but still bound by its laws generally, some mechanism must have evolved to carefully regulate dosage of these varying neurotypes in the population much like how genes evolved downstream, upstream, or midstream dosage control mechanisms to modulate protein levels in the cell for biological function. Perhaps social structure is self reinforcing through incentives and entropy.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#233

Post by JulianChastain »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #227
JulianChastain wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It seems salient to ask the follow up question of "Why aren't men getting laid and/or married?" Actually finding the root cause may be much less simple. Your response seems as hand wavy to me as saying "Most of the loneliness epidemic is really an epidemic of people feeling lonely"

Because if the problem was "everyone is feeling a bit lonely", then that's something that points at actual problems, that aren't self-inflicted, and need fixing. If the problem is "The absolute worst men you know no longer can get laid by being the only available option", then whatever, who cares, it's self-inflicted.

As far as I can tell all the data on loneliness points to equivalent rates between genders

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#234

Post by bee_rider »

Ratelman wrote: post #176
bee_rider wrote: post #161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think longer is… possible, at least? The internet has allowed me to keep in touch with friends from elementary school. I’m, unfortunately, approaching 40 more quickly than I’d like, so these are around 30 year friendships. Although, I’ve also got some college friends that I’d consider close. So that’s more like 15 years. Also online mostly at this point.

What makes you consider them close (aside from length of friendship)?

The main things that help me know a friendship is close are: I’m sad when I don’t see them, but not worried that we’re drifting apart.

I dunno. It isn’t well defined I think. We come with built-in accelerators for social interactions, right? It runs some weird proprietary language I guess, the rest of my brain can’t make heads or tails of it.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#235

Post by roenxi »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #222
roenxi wrote: post #203

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do the multiple elections contested not count any more? MAGA clearly don't endorse insurrection, their basic strategy to control the government is to win lots of votes and come back to try again a few years later if it doesn't work (they're impressively persistent). Which has involved broadening their support base into low-wage minorities in US society and trying to prise the Black and Hispanic votes away from the De…

> MAGA clearly don't endorse insurrection Come on, a lot of people in MAGA outright support J6. That is the dividing line between far right and right.

Yeah but not the riots, the standards in US politics generally demand that people separate mostly peaceful political protesters from smaller numbers of rioters who happen to be involved. The Democrats identified the riots as a major tactical blunder (although realistically I think they badly overplayed their hand, they seemed to spend a lot more time talking about J6 than developing compelling policy positions, and managed to get democracy voted out which is quite impressive - I'm hoping they disband and let someone else contest the next election) and MAGA as a whole seems to agree with them given the lack of any reoccurrences.

If you want to put that the dividing line between right and far-right as militantism for today then that makes sense. But the MAGA movement hasn't been using militant tactics, and they'd be more alt-right than far-right under that standard. They've been pretty consistent at working to win power through increasing their vote share and base of popular support. They've been dumping vast amounts of time, money and effort into it.

For the sake of argument, say that J6 riot was a planned thing. Compare the logistic efforts to get a crowd settled at a major Trump rally to the organisational support that resulted in an insurrection with less than 100 armed people. The oomph just isn't there.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#236

Post by eru »

bawolff wrote: post #149
crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

> average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. Seems like median would be the much more relavent measure for this.

Or just graph a rough picture of the distributions, no need to boil it down to a single numbers.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#237

Post by [deleted] »

crazygringo wrote: post #15

> "Despite minor differences between individual surveys, the data consistently show that the average number of close friendships rose from 2.2 in 2000 to 4.1 in 2024," says Hofer. If true, this is an astonishing social transformation, because it goes against everything we here about the loneliness epidemic getting worse . Or have people redefined what they consider to be "close friends"? Or are people actually genuin…

[deleted]

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#238

Post by lynx97 »

watwut wrote: post #206
lynx97 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Same for "far left", those can't be trusted either. However, what strikes me as interesting: Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Because I have a feeling, many people don't. Why do I think that? I recently read on Planet Debian: "Conservatives tend to be criminals". That sentences struck me as the core of the problem. People seem to fail to see the difference between a person with conservative va…

> Do you actually destinguish between right and far right? Some on the right are far right, some are not. Many people on the right will prefer far right over center and vote accordingly. They just do not like the aesthetic and historical associations. > Because I have a feeling, many people don't. That is because right radicalized itself much more then left. And moderate right spend too much time excusing, enabling t…

That is probably a US specific phenomenon, as we in Europe don't have so much dislike towards communism as you guys over there seem to have. However, I could draw the same conclusion as you did regarding left leaning people. People with progressive "values" rarely object to far left values, although they are incapable of having a useful conversation with center people. So.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#239

Post by VagabundoP »

JadeNB wrote: post #209
VagabundoP wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah I'd like to see a follow up with the depth of friendships compared with pre-social media ones.

How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?

I'd assume this was measure previously, maybe im wrong, but it seems like something you could and would have been measured in the past.

Re: Study finds growing social circles may fuel polarization

#240

Post by JadeNB »

VagabundoP wrote: post #239
JadeNB wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How could one compare depth of friendship of even two current friendships, let alone of current friendships with historical ones that are only accessible through people's mutable memories?

I'd assume this was measure previously, maybe im wrong, but it seems like something you could and would have been measured in the past.

But how can you measure except subjectively, and how can you compare subjective measurements when the whole point is that people's very idea of the meaning of phrases like "close friendship" have changed?
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