Kindness and the Internet

Have you ever noticed how much the internet seems to have changed the way people treat each other? It's as though the internet has granted anonymity to everyone, so much so that they don't feel responsible for the way they treat others. Every blog or article seems to receive more than its share of downright nasty comments, and in a way that I don't believe they normally would without the ability that people have to hide behind an online screen name that one can distance from one's "real life" personality.

I'm not talking about disagreeing with people - in fact I love differences in opinion. I cannot imagine how dull and dreadful the world would be if there weren't different ideas and thought processes and moral codes, especially because interacting with people who differ from us in their beliefs allows us to intellectually and critically examine our own beliefs and to challenge ourselves to grow as people. What I am talking about, though, is the tendency that people have to determine that a difference in opinion means that they can neglect the rules of common courtesy. This is a dangerous behavior pattern, especially at a time when our interactions with others happen increasingly online and less and less in person.

It's not exactly a big secret that I'm pretty darn liberal. I often hear people, on either end of the political spectrum, say things like, "I could never be friends with a Republican/Democrat," depending on their own leanings, and I think that there was a time in my life when I felt the same way, whether I'd have admitted it or not. For the most part, all of my friends were liberal, and with those who weren't it was as if I would look at them in wonder, thinking, "So-and-so is so smart and nice; how could she be a Republican!" I was making instant value judgments about all Republicans - that they were less intelligent and less compassionate than I, even when faced with direct evidence to the contrary. It was only once I got to college that I began to see that each group was composed of all kinds - smart people, not-so-smart people, kind people, mean people, rich people, poor people, etc., and just about in equal measure as well. Over time I stopped getting quite so emotionally upset when people would disagree with my views, and I learned that it really was nothing more than that: a difference of opinion that didn't have anything to do with that person's merit.

There are exceptions of course - I still cannot deal with people who are racist, homophobic, or otherwise intolerant, and maybe that is my own form of intolerance. In my book, though, if you're going to blatantly discount someone's worth because of some superficial quality like their ethnicity or their sexual orientation, then you've lost the right to ask others to treat you with respect. Right now our world is teetering on the brink of disaster, and I may be naive and simplistic, but it seems that a lot of it is because of intolerance; intolerance of different religions, skin colors, cultures, and beliefs.

I think I've mentioned before that I'm a doctoral student studying psychology, and one of the phenomena in which I'm most interested is the formation of prejudice and intolerance. A lot of it is actually routed in the way people attribute blame. Most people are predisposed to blame others' shortcomings on internal factors - "She's just a mean person," or "Wow, he's really stupid," instead of realizing that someone else may just be having a bad day or be tired. We also ascribe others' successes to external factors - "His mom must have helped him get a good grade." Yet when it comes to our own shortcomings, we immediately write them off as being caused by external factors and proudly claim our successes as being caused by nothing but our own greatness. In reality, it's usually an equal combination of both of these things - with each "failure" there are external factors that led us to where we ended up but also choices that we made. The same is true for our achievements. Yet it seems much easier to unconsciously do our best to elevate ourselves to great heights and to put others down. And of course, once we ascribe a negative attribute to someone, the next step our silly and oh-so-flawed human brains unconsciously make is to generalize that negative trait towards everyone else like that person. This is going to seem silly, but a while ago someone whose blog I only haphazardly follow received a rather judgmental comment from someone who said that she was a psychologist. So what did the blogger (and many subsequent commenters) do? They started trashing psychologists, saying that they're all the most f*cked up of all, that they always screw up their kids, and so on and so forth.

I will truly never understand how people don't realize how dangerous that is - that is EXACTLY how prejudice, stereotypes, and intolerant behavior start. We certainly don't need to wrack our brains to recall examples of how treacherous that is: simply look back to the Holocaust, or slavery, or the systematic destruction of Native Americans, or the genocide in Rwanda, or thee current genocide in Sudan, and on and on and on.

I can't help but wonder if people feel compelled to respond to criticism this way because they can't think of a way to respond that rationally disagrees with the other person without being cruel, or if it really is just a desire for vengeance. I don't know which is preferable.

Sometimes I feel like we should all behave as though we were debating in school. Not that we shouldn't have fun and do so in a less restrictive way than would happen in an academic or professional setting, but if you're going to disagree with someone, do so courteously. I can't imagine anyone's teacher approving of his or her student saying, "The fact that you think that makes you a moron," so I don't understand why we feel so comfortable behaving that way once we've left school. After all, anyone could be reading what you're writing - your teacher, your mother, your grandmother, and, perhaps scariest of all, your kids. If we really want to make this world better for those who come after us, isn't the best thing we can do to teach them to be respectful to each other in a way that will discourage the sorts of needless conflicts we've endured?