Hivemind

Sarah Rose Cavanagh, Ph.D., “Hivemind: The New Science of Tribalism In Our Divided World,”  Grand Central Publishing, 2019, 251 pp.

This is a psychology book concerned with the much more personal issue of what happens when you take an ultrasocial animal, with all of its hiveish proclivities and deep desire for human connection, and you give it a slim, handheld screen that conveys the thoughts and emotions of all of its social partners, accessible day and night.

Cavanagh explores the notion that human beings are not so much solitary individuals but are profoundly social creatures, perhaps, like honeybees, “at least partly a collective species.” And that's not a bad thing. We are born with the ability to tune into the feelings of others, particularly in face-to-face encounters, and we develop that ability through the telling and, more recently, the reading or writing of stories, all of which makes us more likely to empathize with other human beings and members of other species rather than seeing them as “other.” Now, “with the advent of social media and smartphones,” writes the author, “we have a new medium through which we can connect, synchronize with, and influence one another.” Rather than isolating individuals, as popular opinion might suggest, social media gives us “an ever-present awareness of our friends moving through their separate real-life space, eating and creating and thinking and feeling.” Though Cavanagh doesn’t overlook the possibly detrimental effects of new media, which include political polarization and the proliferation of conspiracy theories, her general outlook is hopeful. She grounds her more abstract speculations in particular examples, from her experiences and those of others, in a way that makes her ideas easy for readers to grasp. After raising questions about forms of technology we take for granted, she offers sensible, workable suggestions as to how we can navigate the gap between the individual and the collective in everyday life.

My Notes:

Pg. xiif:  Our deeply entrenched sociality has always been with us, but the advent of both smartphones and social media may be sharply escalating our synchronicity.  We are at a watershed moment, for these new technologies have not only allowed us to access a world of information and communication but have also ushered in a revolution in our social functioning.  We are now able to access the thoughts and emotions of our social partners at all hours of the day and night—even if they live on the other side of the world. 

The Internet was born into a world where many people had already lost their sense of connection to each other…our obsessive use of social media is an attempt to fill a hole that took place before anyone had a smartphone.  The author argues in this book that the true disconnection is not the screens we hold between us but our overemphasis on the individual over the collective, ambition over altruism, personal pleasure over human progress. 

Pg. xvf:  …the mind lives in perpetual conversation—we spend at least part of every waking hour either conversing with social others or imagining future conversations in our minds. 

Pg. xix: …if there’s one thing I know from studying wicked problems and reading the great writers who wrote into existence our world, it is that a smart person avoids certainty.  One of the central messages of this book is that our attraction to false binaries, simple stories of good and evil, and quick fixes are among the most dangerous aspects of our hivemind.

Pg. 4f:  In David Eagleman’s book “The Secret Lives of the Brain” (I reported on this book in 2011) he argues that the brain operates like a democracy of rivals, with multiple subsystems and tendencies, each grappling for control at any given time.  Alcohol may dampen one set of selves, the controlled and cautious ones, and allow other prejudices and base desires and selfish impulses to wrest control of behavior.  But neither set of tendencies is more or less you—each represents different sets of neural circuits.  Eagleman likens the dethronement of the conscious mind to Galileo’s discovery that the Earth was not the center of the universe.  “To know oneself may require a change of definition ‘to know.’  Knowing yourself now requires the understanding that the conscious you occupies only a small room in the mansion of the brain, and that it has little control over the reality constructed for you.”  The reality constructed for you by unconscious aspects of perception and predictions based on past experiences, that is—the consensus story of reality handed to you by the hivemind.

Pg. 13f:  Meme.  Meme is short for the word mimeme, an ancient Greek word meaning ‘to imitate.”  Evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins coined the term to explain tiny particles of culture (like genes, but for ideas and practices) that are replicated and passed on from one person to the next, across space and over generations.  He thought that, like genes, pressures similar to natural selection operated on these ideas, with some spreading and having a lasting impact and others sputtering out quickly.  The internet age quickly adopted the idea for often-Photoshopped visual images that represent common ways of looking at the world.

Pg. 27:  While we have our own immediate experiences of the world, the larger weight of our reality is carried by our cultural context.  Not only do we synchronize and unite into a collective experience in group settings, but our sense of truth and how the world works is formed socially, not individually.  We absorb these shared understandings through parenting, conversation, formal education, and consuming online media. 

Pg. 34f:  It turns out that as few as 25%  of people in a social group can have large impacts on shifting social norms, especially if they have elevated status in the group.  Notably, what was once acceptable can quickly become unacceptable, and vice versa, as is noted on American views on gay marriage, public smoking bans, and the legalization of marijuana as examples.  Anything below 25% did not do the job.  Also, your electric company may send you reports on how much electricity you are using compared to your neighbors, hoping they can nudge you into behaving differently by tweaking your perception of how your behavior fits in with the rest of the hive.

Pg. 40:  There are very few human traits or abilities that you can’t observe elsewhere in the animal kingdom, but the one exception is our degree of sociality, reciprocity, and understanding of one another’s mental worlds.  Sarah Hrdy takes issue with claims that we evolved to be violently tribal.  She points out that in times of sharply limited resources, it would have been much less costly for hominid groups to up and move than to engage in lengthy battles over land and other resources. 

Pg. 45:  Appraisal.  An appraisal is a little story you tell yourself about the meaning of an event or situation, your interpretation of its significance or novelty or impact on your goals.  For instance: does the length of your supervisor’s response on the ‘areas for growth’ section indicate her investment in your future or her contempt for you as a person?  The story we tell ourselves in such situations may be influenced by genetics—for instance, we know that personality traits like extraversion and neuroticism are highly heritable.  People with neurotic tendencies may be more likely to appraise the supervisor’s feedback as negative.  The hive mind plays an enormous role in the appraisals that we make.

Pg. 71:  “My grandfather always said that living is like licking honey off a thorn.”  Our hivemind narrative surrounding smartphones and social media is so focused on the thorn that we have forgotten that the honey exists at all. 

Pg. 77:  Group polarization is encouraged by a sense of loyalty to group identity.  Polarization is both more likely and more extreme if the group shares an identity, a common cause, and/or a sense of solidarity, as seems to be occurring in the US within our political parties.  The feeling that we’re dividing further into camps of right and left with nothing but animosity is backed up by polling.  In 1960 the number of people who would be displeased if their child married outside their political party was 5 percent for Republicans and 4 percent for Democrats—political views just didn’t weigh in strongly in terms of life values.  In 2010, those numbers had risen to 49 percent of Republicans and 33 percent of Democrats.

Pg. 107:  Over America’s history, the story of the Ku Klux Klan is one of waves.  The most recent waves were in the 1960s, commonly viewed as a backlash against the civil rights movement, and in the 1980s.  These most recent waves were poorly organized, highly emotional, and mostly about intimidation of outgroups rather than people collected tightly around an ingroup.  The 1920s Klan, on the other hand, was much more organized and focused, rising in prominence to a peak of four million American members in 1924.

Pg. 152:  Fear marks much of infancy, where the unknown is everywhere and separation from caregivers spells death.  Maturation into adulthood involves learning to inhibit fear, to stop worrying about enemies, to embrace the full spectrum of other emotions, and to consider the perspectives of others different from us. 

Pg. 184ff:  Research demonstrates that in America, Republicans and Democrats don’t just dislike but instead actually loathe each other, not so much based on policy positions but on social identity.  Our politics have become moralized, and when issues of morality are at play, people dig in their heels.  The leader of this charge is Jonathan Haidt, who sums up his perspective in his book The Righteous Mind.  In his book, he argues that liberals and conservatives are living in different moral matrices.  We live in entirely different universes, with different principles, facts, values, and perceived existential threats.  The reason for these contrasting realities is that conservatives and liberals have different foundations of their morality.  Most everyone agrees that three important moral values are harm/care, fairness, and liberty—that it is wrong to harm others and right to care for them, and everyone should be treated fairly, and that we should be free.  But conservatives have a few extra layers to their moral value system.  One is authority, submitting to external rules and people in charge.  Another is purity, which relates to conservative viewpoints on sexuality and reproduction.  And the third is loyalty, which one can see in the common observation that conservatives seem to be able to put aside differences and get behind one another, whereas the left is constantly nitpicking and splicing, and also in the liberal tendency to shy away from strong displays of patriotism because it feels like nationalism.  Put all of this together and you have one group of people who prefer tradition, respect authority, remain loyal to ingroups, are suspicious of people who betray social norms, and wish to keep the drawbridge up to keep their family and friends safe—and who are willing to sacrifice a small amount of harm/care and fairness in order to be sure to also respect authority, purity, and loyalty.  (I reported on Haidt’s book in 2012 and his ideas about human beings being 90 percent chimp and 10 percent bee).