Full Transcript for Why Your Algorithm Might Be Acting Like a Cult Leader

resilience that has to do with having connections. And so Alex: Yeah. Heather: the more disconnected someone feels, probably the less resilient they're going to feel as well. Alex: Hmm... Heather: Because resilience does have an aspect of having the social resources available to you. So, I mean, honestly, if you're talking about, you know, getting a better connection with your congressional representatives, that's Alex: Hmm. Heather: very essential. Alex: Hmm. Heather: Being able to feel like you have a connection and Alex: Hmm. Heather: that there are resources that you can reach out to, whether it's a congressional representative or a friend or relative or a pastor or a teacher or a colleague, Those connections I have been finding more and more are essential for people to be able to cope with change, with trauma, with uncertainty, with conflict. And so those connections are really essential. The strength of those is what can make a difference between someone feeling like they have those connections and someone feeling like their connections aren't really resources to them. Alex: Yeah, Heather, think polarization is like, it's a word that a lot of people know and think that they feel and see. But I think the way that most people would describe their understanding of polarization is Republican versus Democrat. Like it is something that is simple in language, but really not in the idea. What do you actually think people are observing when they see that divide? What is that polarization, really? Heather: polarization in the broadest sense is when differing views entrench so much in their views and have increasing disconnect with the other view that they draw themselves further and further into the extremes of those Alex: Yeah. Heather: if you're thinking about like a polarized magnet, and take it back to physics, a magnet has two polar ends. Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: And if you try to put those ends together, they repel each other. Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: And so that's sort of what polarization is doing there at such extreme ends and they're so entrenched in their beliefs. that it becomes more more difficult for them to meet each other in the middle. Alex: So it's one side interacting with another makes them retreat more into their own camp. Heather: It's not that the interaction, actually, it's sort of the opposite. They were so Alex: Interesting. Heather: far apart from each other that they Alex: Interesting. Heather: no longer have an ability to meet in the middle. Yeah. Yeah. Alex: So the lack of interaction really is what's happening. Yeah, that makes sense. Heather: No. another aside is that we do see increasingly that people feel like there is a disconnect from the common person in Congress. Alex: Hmm. Heather: that lack of connection could be related to that as well. But one example that I think is really helpful, and Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: this is something that I have read about and heard about numerous times, is people who are in extremist groups. And they, have managed to find a way out of that extremist mindset and out of that extremist group. over and over and over again, we are hearing that it's because someone reached out to them. Alex: Mmmmm Heather: Someone made themselves available, someone outside of the group connected on a regular enough basis in an unharming, unthreatening way Alex: Yeah. Heather: and listened to them. Also talked with and to them, but Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: more listened to them. And Alex: Hmm. Heather: I have heard so many former extremists say that if it hadn't have been for that person Alex: Right. Heather: reaching out, being there, being able to connect with them, they probably would Alex: Right. Heather: have never left the extremist group. Alex: I mean, in another extreme, think of like reading about different cults in some ways that's like looking at how people escape cults is like really so vast in so many ways, but one of the ways is like that same connection with their loved ones or other people outside of the group really trying to make an effort, which I think is such an important thing to remember. It's an important lesson from an extreme example. Heather: Mm-hmm. Alex: to take outside of it and say, if there's people in different camps as you, the way to move out of that is connection with people Heather: Mm-hmm. Alex: outside of your camp. Heather: that's one reason why my current research is exploring overlaps between cults, extremist groups, Alex: Mmm. Heather: and intimate partner violence as well. Alex: Whoa, wow. Heather: These also connect with catfishing and other online scams. They all actually feed off of the same things. They feed off of vulnerability, Alex: Yes. Huh. Heather: a need for connection. Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: need to feel heard and validated and seen. These Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: are all things that the recruiters, the agents pulling people into these are feeding off of. Alex: Yep. Heather: And the similarities are so... incredible that I started to want to bring Alex: Hmm. Heather: all that research together because they they've really been researched in silos but they're very similar and Alex: Yeah. Heather: I think this is a growing problem you know bringing it back to technology with a Alex: Hmm. Heather: lot of the online activity and Alex: Hmm. Heather: you know we've been seeing you know things about increased polarization based on algorithms and Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Heather: what's been going on with Meta and Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: Twitter and X and a lot of these other things that they are designed to silo people and Alex: Hmmmm Heather: to reinforce common voices that can pull people further and further into these. In many ways, these algorithms and these online tools are acting as electronic cults. They are doing some of the same things that leaders of extremist groups and cults commonly do and in Alex: Huh. Heather: intimate partner violence and in catfishing where Alex: Wow. Heather: they

pull the person in by connecting with them, validating them, making them feel special. and valued and then they entrench them by further pulling them away from any other group that might do that. Alex: Hmm. Heather: And by doing that, they make themselves the only resource that those individuals have. And Alex: Hmmmm Heather: we are seeing that similar pattern in the way that these algorithms and these tools function to keep reinforcing something that you've engaged with to where you start to see it more and more and more, and that becomes your feed, and that becomes your world and your universe and what you Alex: Right? Right? Heather: see and associate with. And if your offline world is mimicking that or is not providing any alternative, then it's very easy for people to get pulled into these mindsets where they are becoming more more polarized. Alex: Right, right. I remember in your lone wolf article, you talked about how some of the lone wolves can feel complete isolation in real life with their communities, but feel really the complete opposite online with their communities. Like that Heather: Mm-hmm. Alex: is where they seek their community and validation. And that is where they receive support and sense of self and all of these things. Heather: yeah. And that can sometimes be a really beneficial thing. There's Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: some groups, I know that there's been studies of people who are autistic or on the spectrum or neurodivergent have had a much easier time finding healthy connections online. Alex: Right, right. Heather: But they are also just as vulnerable to being pulled into an unhealthy environment. Alex: Absolutely. Heather: because they actually function very much the same way to bring you in. But the difference is that those who bring you in to polarize you, and that is their aim, will go to great lengths to make sure that you don't go outside of their circles. Dan: I remember hearing Ralph Nader when I was in college and he was talking about well why do we only have three networks? Why do we only have four? Like there's all these different all these Technology now we don't we don't need to restrict ourselves to that. And I think people fell into a trap where it's like, okay, well, you can always get another viewpoint if you if you watch a conservative show and you want to hear the other side, you just go to the other side and it sort of ignored human behavior, which is Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: that you stay Alex: Mm-hmm. Dan: on you stay on one channel when you're hearing that kind of stuff. And it Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: used to be that you had to hear it on the same channel. Heather: I come from a journalism family, three generations Alex: Hmm. Heather: of journalists. And my dad was with UPI for over 30 years. And yeah, so I've seen a lot of changes in media. And I know how People have lost the ability to deal with difference and to think constructively through problems and conflicts. And yes, people

will go to their comfy place. with everything else going on in people's lives, when they go to turn on the news, they sort of want to do what they do when they turn on the TV in general. They want to sit on the sofa and just sort of take stuff in. They don't want to be doing the work of, your homework assignment tonight is to watch CBS News and then analyze how they're talking about this and then go watch Fox News and analyze how they're talking about that and then trying to make some distinction between the two. Nobody wants those homework assignments when they go home. Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: And that's sort of what we're being asked to do these days. Alex: I'm wondering as a researcher in what you've seen work, in terms of bridging people, who you think sort of has more of a responsibility to show different sides? Do you think that there is a journalistic responsibility to keep the fairness doctrine that Dan talks about, where is it that people are going? Maybe it's not the news, but where are people going where there could be impact? Heather: This may sound like a bit of a cop-out answer, but I will describe why I say this. It's everybody's responsibility. It really is. So I think journalism, broadcast journalism especially, because that's reaching the largest audience, it's reaching those who are just sort of wanting to just sit back and absorb. They need to bring back that balanced reporting. But I also think it's with our politicians and they are increasingly being driven by the ballot box rather than by actually helping their constituents to work through these things and see Alex: Yeah. Heather: how these things work. We have some of the highest representatives mimicking division Alex: Mmm. Heather: and making it okay. And you know think there's a lot of onus on the politicians to do something about that. But I also think it's on the everyday citizen. especially during all the COVID in the past few years and all the increasing polarization that's been going on, I've had neighbors and friends and family members who have just completely blocked people off. They've just like locked off half of their friends on Facebook. They say, we don't communicate with them anymore. We're not Alex: Yep. Heather: there. And they see that I still have some people on my Facebook that are incredibly polarized from where I am. Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: And they're like, how can you do that? Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: And I say, because I may be the only connection they have to someone who is different than them. Alex: Yep. Heather: And being able to stay connected to them also helps to keep me balanced. To Alex: Absolutely. Heather: see them as people and for me to see them as people. And for them to see me as someone who is willing to listen and see them as a human being. I've had conversations with people who said, well, how can you have conversations with these people? just, cannot do that. I can't stand Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: being in the room with these people. And I said, I might be the only connection that person has to something that is not extreme or polarized or agitated. Alex: Yeah. Yup. Yup. Heather: And I think more of us need to stop siloing ourselves Alex: Mmm. Heather: in those ways. Dan: I there was this person I I he w who, like you had said, had lost I think he was recently divorced, it was a 30 year marriage that got dissolved. Heather: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Dan: I I think you mentioned the article. And he and he becomes isolated. He doesn't have that he's his outlets and his resiliency has become you know, at risk. And Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: he goes out and he goes to a a softball game for people who aren't familiar with DC, they have this very large they're they have a lot of softball fields. And one of the members of Congress, who I think is he's a prominent member, I th Steve Scalise, I think it was. He's from Louisiana. was shot. And and when they I'm basing this on your article. Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: So they he he had reached out to his member of Congress a bunch of times and never got anything. Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: He went, he was working within the system. For Heather: Mm-hmm. Dan: years he was working within the system and he wasn't heard. Heather: I think our increased numbers just in general, our population, we're a lot more people than we were many decades ago. The structure that we've worked with for all these decades in terms of congressional outreach probably worked a hundred years ago. And it's just no longer feasible. There's just too many of us and it does need to be broken down. And I think many town halls become platforms more than dialogue Alex: Yup. Heather: A dialogue is a back and forth. It's an engagement. It is listening on all participant sides. We need more guidance and education on dialogue. One of the things I'm trying to work on now is how we can bring that into elementary schools and start teaching Alex: Hmm. Heather: it at a much earlier age so people become skilled and practiced in it so that when they start getting into these more dynamic conversations, these more divisive topics, things that they are more invested in as older students and as adults, Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather: that they are now more practiced in how to have actual dialogue. Dan: you have an example of a conflict resolution where people do walk through it? Heather: many, yes. I know that one of the things in Rwanda that was happening post-genocide was there were some missionaries who had gone over and were working on rebuilding. And one of the things that they did was on a regular basis would walk around the village and visit different people in different houses and talk to people and listen to them. as they were talking to people, they would start to try and bring people together to talk And very much in line with what I was saying earlier in the podcast about how people in extremist groups talk about that one person who reached out to them, that one person who saw them as Alex: Mm-hmm. Heather:

human and who listened to them. There have been stories of people, some of these missionaries who would go and sit and listen and talk with people and hear their stories. Alex: Hmm. Hmm. Heather: And those people felt that connection and Alex: Right. Heather: started to integrate with the community as a result. And by Alex: Right. Heather: integrating with the community, they started to let go of the polarized feelings that they were having. And they started to see their neighbor as not the former enemy, but as their community member. that outreach is critical in helping to bridge those gaps. How we do that on the scale of the US, we're talking about activities that have been done in much smaller countries. And how do we upscale that to the scale of the US, which is massive? Alex: you know, I was in school a few years ago and the thing we looked at the most recently was Indian boarding schools sort of got their own reconciliation act passed. And Joe Biden, when he was president, had a formal and public apology to Native American communities for boarding schools. And our professors at the time were like, that is the most recent of quite a bit of history of what you will look at as government scale US reconciliation. Heather: Mm-hmm. Alex: which is a three minute apology. Like there's really so little to look at that scale in the US, but outside of it, there's great models. Dan: I'm just sort of curious if you have any pre-conflict examples that you can think of. Heather: not coming up with for major conflicts any examples. And I think I can reflect back on some of the things I've described to people in terms of the difficulties of studying US mass violence. We're starting to learn some warning signs, but even those warning signs are hit and miss. of the cases that I had studied leading up to my paper is around 250 some cases since 1903. And we know the billions of people who have existed in the US since 1903. So it's Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Heather: less than a fraction of 1%. It's Alex: Yeah. Heather: a minuscule amount of people who will get to that state. Dan: can representation itself be a form of conflict prevention? Heather: It could be. if we start to reshape that representation and how it functions, it's very possible to make that something that is a connection for people. But people need to feel individually connected to the larger picture. And that's with all the billions of people we have in the US. That's a huge task. So I think we need some Dan: Yes. Heather: sort of systemic shifts to happen Alex: Yeah. Heather: and we need some structural shifts to happen in order to make that possible. If I had one last thing to add to today's conversation, it would be that much of politics, marketing, media, social research works on statistics. They work on data looking at what is the mass, what is the sort of overall general picture. is one thing that I've tried to work against in my research on lone actors, because those lone actors are the people who don't make the majority comments on the survey. They're the people who fall off the survey. And Alex: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. Heather: I think we need to get back to recognizing that people are not a generic mass response on a survey. They are a whole bunch of individuals that all have unique identities. And the ones that we most need to reach out to are often those who are not going to be seen on the surveys. Dan: It it'd be a really interesting study to like how do you identify the the non respondents? Or the non, you know, or the people who are responding who are the outliers, right? It's a it's Heather: Yeah. Dan: it's an interesting that's a very interesting way to end this. That's yeah. Alex: Heather, I wanna thank you a lot for coming on here and really breaking down a large and complex topic, but making it. more accessible to people and really understand what big words that flash across news screens and phone screens mean, the weight that they carry and sort of how to approach bridging polarization, and really what that looks like at a small individual scale. I really I think a big takeaway for me was the question that I asked you about whose responsibility it is to do this work. And my answer automatically is like, it's someone else's job. It's, it's a journalist job, it's a governor's job, it's a someone else's job. I think that that is such a reminder that it is everyone's job, and it is not above or below anybody to be that branch for people. So thank you so much. We wind down all of our conversations the same way with our rapid fire questions, So the first one is, it can be related to your work or not, but what is one thing that you wish more people knew? Heather: would say that we are a whole lot more alike than different. Alex: How can people support your cause Heather? Heather: Money. Yeah. There we go. Yes. Dan: Ha ha ha ha. Alex: Yeah. We'll drop Heather's Venmo in the chat. No, 100%. Heather: Just honestly supporting the research is a big part of it. But I think taking those small acts on your own. Because the more we get the word around, for one, that these small acts work and matter, the more the research matters. But also, that's something that everyone can do right this moment. without waiting for research, waiting for institutions to change, without waiting for systemic change, without waiting for all the other things that we're waiting to have in place. Every single one of us can take a breath, take a moment and try and be more patient with everyone and be able to see other people around us as human beings. And when you see that person, angry when you see that person railing against something, when you see that person just acting out. Remember that there is a human being behind that who is probably hurting and suffering and going through quite a bit. Alex: Great reminder. What is one misconception that people have about your field? Heather: that we are all just a bunch of frou-frou woke people. Yes, yes, Alex: Just peace circle, fireside, holding hands, yep. Heather: No burning incense and beating drums. Alex: Hmmmm Heather: Now, while I have no issue with those activities, I think it's, this is real scientific hard research that is being done. Alex: Yeah. Heather: do try to listen to everyone. We do try to cross those bridges and cross those boundaries. And we really do want to hear from everyone. And we would love more people to be involved with this. Maybe not as a researcher or scientist, which I understand not everyone's really into that. I love research. But that they can reach out and they can be curious and that. they can see us as potential allies. Alex: last question, Heather, is what is one thing, or large, that has given you hope recently? Heather: So when we were moving out west, we drove. And we took a nice leisurely three weeks to do so, so we could stop and see a bunch of different things. And that meant being in some places that are probably more polarized than some other areas and being able to engage with those individuals, whether it's sitting at a cafe or talking to people at a bookstore and just being able to have those connections. And it wasn't contentious and it wasn't heated and it was very pleasant and we needed more moments like that. But the fact that those are still available and still possible, sort of like Dan, you were talking about how they were starting conversations with more, less polarizing questions. So what's on your mind today? And Meeting people in that space provides opportunities for more of those connections. so that's one thing that comes to mind. Alex: How much changes when you're in the room with someone? Everything, yeah. Heather: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Alex: That's great. Dan: That's great answer. Alex: Yeah, Heather: Thank you. Alex: Well, Heather, thank you so much for coming on. I really appreciate your voice and. Good luck pursuing the PhD. Heather: Okay. Alex: I'm excited to see what comes out more. I'm excited to keep following your work. You're doing great research. Heather: Thank you very much. Dan: Yeah, thanks for Alex: Yeah, absolutely. Dan: Thank you, Heather. Good luck with your work. It's important work and Heather: Thanks. Dan: thank you for doing it.