Part 2 of 2: How Dopamine Drives Anger on Social Media, aka "The Joy of Hate"

Excerpted from Taming the Molecule of More, Chapter 11: Taming Social Media.

On social media, people are abstractions, and dopamine is what allows experimentation with the abstract. When people are abstractions, you can be as extreme as you wish to be. Humans with feelings become indistinguishable from bloodless ideas.

We start to think of an online opponent not as a person or even an avatar representing a person, but as a target that just happens to react. Except we’re not sword-fighting with disposable intellections. We’re tearing down other people as unlikely to disengage as we are.

This becomes a race to the bottom of discourse and dignity.

The nature of the dopamine system is a perfect match for the nature of the platform, and the result is a supercharged pursuit not of truth but of more.

Why is culture so coarse just now? When we fail to offer grace simply because others are human, civility, norms, and customs fall away. So we turn our guns on whatever irritates us in the moment, sometimes (and purportedly) in the name of justice, but to some extent just to get a dopamine hit by getting a rise out of people who disagree. It feels good to feel superior. Telling ourselves we are doing it to help some disadvantaged someone is an excuse, not a noble motivation.

Our at-a-distance encounters with other people add perpetual novelty to the mix—anything could happen, because people are capable of anything. One has to ask where the benefit lies in what we’re doing. We’re arguing with strangers and probing friends for personal opinions that don’t change anything for the better if they don’t go our way.

Usually the replies divide us, and the difference of opinion likely didn’t matter to either party until they knew it existed.

When you find yourself tempted to post or reply to a comment online, remind yourself: This exchange is probably just a reach for a dopamine hit.