What the internet tells us about human nature

It's not exactly what you think.

Photo by A A on Unsplash

I recently sent my sister and sister-in-law a video of a baby penguin who needed a hug. Oddly enough the absurd cuteness of penguins got me thinking about human nature and how the internet both mirrors and amplifies that nature.

It also got me thinking a bit more deeply about the importance of agency for how we think about and channel our own human nature in big and small ways every day.

Human Nature: A Deeply Mixed Bag

Back in the day, Aristotle famously argued that humans, among all other animals, were capable of incredible virtue and worse-than-animal vice.

Aristotle’s point, made throughout his moral and political writings, is that human nature is neither good nor bad. In fact, human nature itself is a great example of why radical moderation - the principled rejection of binary thinking - is so important.

Human nature isn’t one thing. It’s a bundle of tendencies, interests, goals, instincts, values, and predilections. It’s about universals, yes, but just as important is the variation within those universals.

Political theorists and theologians and political parties tend to focus on human nature as either simply good or simply bad because it’s easier to construct an ideological box around a clearly defined nature than it is to construct one around “well, it depends.”

But it really does depend.

The oxytocin-induced euphoria I felt when my newborn was placed in my arms is part of human nature, just as the rage produced by tribalism and in-group/out-group biases is.

Even those instincts aren’t beautiful or awful on their own. The love I feel for my kids can easily be channeled into obsessive control or nepotism. The desire to help one’s in-group can create tight communities that support each other through disasters.

We can’t label any part of human nature “bad” and another “good” because we need to understand the broader four dimensional landscape to understand how any particular manifestation of our complex nature affects everyone else.

It’s also not just about social versus selfish aspects of human nature, as I sometimes see it categorized. That’s a false dichotomy too.

A lot of social cooperation is actually quite bad for humans writ large: think organized crime, human trafficking rings, and the incredible cooperation and ingenuity that marks the global arms trade.

What we really want to focus on is how to channel human nature into avenues that support human flourishing and minimize coercion. After all, human trafficking rings aren’t ultimately held together by shared values and sense of purpose. Their sociality - such as it is - is held together by profit and the threat of violence.

But let’s get back to the internet.

The Interwebs and Deep Pessimism

"You will never find a more wretched hive of scum and villainy. We must be cautious"

I often see comments on the internet like “the world would be a better place if humans disappeared” or “humans are the worst.” These usually crop up on social media posts relating to animal abuse or some kind of horrific bombing of vulnerable people somewhere in the world.

And it’s true that humans do some awful things.

As we know via any anonymous internet comment section that the internet amplifies that awfulness in unique ways.

That amplification, in turn, breeds a certain kind of pessimism that I worry about a lot.

I see this pessimism all the time in university life, not just among my students, but among faculty as well. In many of our liberal arts classes, there’s an overwhelming focus on the problems facing humanity - climate change, race relations, poverty, and so on - and very little focus on what’s actually going great or what we’ve improved on in the last 50 years (and there’s a lot of great things, it turns out).

The result of all this is that many of us look at the internet or at human nature broadly and think humanity is not salvageable and we should stop having children or just burn it all down.

The problem with viewing human nature as fundamentally bad is the same as the problem with viewing the internet as fundamentally bad.

When we lose perspective like that, we lose motivation, we lose creativity and ingenuity, and we lose the perspective needed to identify priorities and actually improving things.

Now, we know that pessimism is related in large part to availability bias give how algorithms make funnel us toward stories that elicit strong emotions, usually negative.

Humanity’s Super Powers: Agency and Choice

Making systems-level reforms to negativity bias in media and algorithms is important and thankfully there are a lot of smart people doing work in this area.

But for you and me, the average Joes and Janes of the world, we don’t have a lot of control over Facebook’s algorithm or what TikTok is doing with our data.

But we do have one super power and that’s the power of human agency. For my purposes in this post, there are two primary ways this agency is relevant for radical moderation and prosocial behavior broadly.

Human Agency and Content Consumption

I’m a reasonably well-read person and I’m not ignorant about the Dark Web or how awful humans can be to each other.

Is the internet full of porn and sex trafficking and snuff films and illegal activity and everything else?

Of course!

But it’s also the location of political resistance and baby penguin videos and local gardening groups and hilarious memes and people showing off their favorite obscure hobby.

The internet is where we can find nannies for orphaned elephants, Hans Rosling’s amazing data visualizations, the ever-relevant question: Are We the Baddies?, people dancing for fun and clicks, dull people sharing their love of deeply dull things, people building modular bikes that empower, optimistic TED Talks, BFFs Martha Stewart and Snoop Dogg, a place to get any obscure question answered, my favorite Amazon commercial (yes, I know I’m a sucker), and even places on the internet to celebrate the internet.

Similarly, my LinkedIn is a fun mixed bag of people desperately self-promoting (including me!) along with people working hard to build bridges, support non-profits, create better journalism, and make the world safe for democracy.

Human Agency and Perspective Shifting

Precisely because our nature is so mixed, we have an incredible amount of agency that we often overlook. It’s not just agency about our own behavior to others or on the internet; it’s agency about how we think about the world.

And that agency isn’t just a (false) binary choice about whether the glass is half full or half empty.

We get to think about the glass and what it’s made of and how much it holds, about what’s inside the glass, how we think about filling the glass or distributing the stuff in the glass, or we can just sit back and marvel at the existence of the glass itself.

It’s this perspective shifting, the zooming in and out, that allows for human innovation. But when we don’t use this agency, when we get stuck in negative internet loops of trolls and true crime and toxic politics and natural disasters, we lose not only perspective, but our own agency to make things better.

In the political world, when we talk about agency we often talk about people doing things: getting involved in their communities or running for office or going out to vote.

But there’s a much smaller and yet crucially important kind of agency we all possess that we often forget about: we get to choose how we look at and think about the world. We get to choose the media we consume, the perspective we take, and the way we approach the problems that face us. We get to choose what we think about our shared humanity, what we focus on, and how we think about the future.

And nowhere is that agency more obvious than on the internet itself.

What You Can Do

The next time you’re feeling desperately pessimistic, think about your own space for agency. What content are you consuming? What perspective are you taking? When you’re tempted to argue that humans should be wiped off the face of the earth, are you missing the forest for the trees?

And when you’re feeling hopeless about personal struggles or politics or work conflict, you can always do (at least) two things:

1. Choose to consume different things.

2. Choose to take a different perspective.

Just this week when everything was feeling terrible, my sister-in-law shared this absolutely genius “gentle parenting” take on national security failures. Watching it made me feel better. Not necessarily about current politics, but about human ingenuity and the incredible gift that is human humor. This video doesn’t improve our national security situation, it’s true, but I have zero control over how our government approaches national security. What I do have control over is how I react to it and how much control I give it over my brain, my mood, and the energy I give back to other people.

mrs.frazzled

A post shared by @mrs.frazzled

So the next time you read a comment on the internet that says the world would be better off without humans, you can be pretty sure that person doesn’t understand tradeoffs.

Yes, we’d lose a lot of terrible atrocities, but we’d also lose a lot of joy and hope and innovation and really funny things.

Same goes for the internet. If it disappeared tomorrow we would lose a lot of child porn and abuse and trafficking and horrible comment boards. But we would also lose Mrs. Frazzled and videos of baby penguins and easy-to-access local gardening knowledge and Monty Python sketches and parenting advice and opportunities to see friends’ kids grow.

I don’t know if the good outweighs the bad - either in human nature or on the internet - because that’s a meaningless question. The good and the bad are so mixed together that it’s a false binary to start with.

What matters is not whether humanity has been worth it in some grand scheme of things, but what you as an individual are doing with your humanity right now.

And the crucial part is that we get to choose. We get to choose how to channel our own unique bundle of human nature into prosocial channels and we get to choose where to focus our attention, our resources, and our time.

So if you’re feeling overwhelmed this week with everything going on, take a deep breath and exercise some agency. And if you need a place to start, baby penguins are always a safe choice.

Let me know what you think!

How are you exercising your gift of human agency today? Drop me a line below! And if you haven’t already, please subscribe and share.