Cancel Culture in Evolutionary Perspective
Cancellation is famously painful. Evolution helps us understand why.
(geralt/Pixabay)
The list of celebrities and other public figures who have fallen from grace seems to be increasing. Under modern conditions, people talk about cancel culture which is essentially an approach to treating mis-steps and transgressions with public shaming to the point that someone who is canceled is, essentially, treated as if they don’t exist. Someone who is canceled is essentially an untouchable.
When people cross certain lines, it makes sense that they might be cut out from the lives of others. And of course, there are all kinds of ways to transgress against others. And the story of the broader human experience is replete with transgressions. People do all kinds of bad things! People lie, cheat, and steal. People say things that they are sure to regret. People let their emotions get the better of themselves and are capable of doing all kinds of harm to the emotions, bodies, possessions, family members, etc., of others. In short: People are, as is true of all organisms, imperfect.
Cutting people out of one’s social circle (or one’s life) is a common response to being trespassed against. This is why there are so many estranged relationships in the world. Perhaps publicly canceling someone to the point of ostracism can be thought of as a large-scale estrangement.
Estrangements are on the Rise—and They Hurt
In research related to this topic, my team found that on average, young adults have about four people in the world that they report being fully estranged from (Geher et al., 2019). When we look at ghosting experiences, which comprise a form of estrangement that is relatively novel as these experiences largely depend on social media, young adults report, on average, about 16 people whom they have ghosted or who have ghosted them (Di Santo et al., 2022). Based on these data, it seems that social media access seems to increase the number of estrangements that people experience.
I’d say that this is a pretty big problem when thinking about the modern human condition. Estrangements of any kind tend to correspond to all kinds of adverse psychological and social outcomes, such as emotional instability, borderline personality tendencies, insecure attachment, depression, perceptions of low social support, and life dissatisfaction, just to name a few (see Di Santo et al., 2022). A simple implication of all this is as follows: As the prevalence of estrangements in people’s lives increases, we can fully expect mental health concerns to increase as well. And, especially among adolescents and young adults, this is exactly what we have seen in the age of social media (Twenge, 2019).
The degree to which estrangements are at the root of increases in mental health issues is unknown at this point and will certainly require further research. That said, at the very least, there is undoubtedly a connection.
Estrangements in Evolutionary Perspective
An evolutionary approach to any psychological phenomenon seeks to understand that phenomenon in terms of our evolved psychology, often considering how ancestral human environments, that our minds evolved to exist in, may shed light on why the phenomenon exists in the first place.
For the lion’s share of human evolutionary history, all humans were nomads. Our ancestors lived in small clans that were capped at approximately 150 (see Dunbar, 1992). And people were regularly surrounded by family members and other familiar individuals. Under such conditions, being estranged from even a small number of others would have had consequences for someone’s capacity to survive and reproduce. Getting shunned from others under ancestral conditions could have, in fact, been deadly. And estrangements are signals that anticipate ostracism—a dangerous and unpleasant state of affairs indeed. For these reasons, it makes sense that our ancestors would have had strong emotional responses related to estrangements. Estrangements are painful and problematic for all kinds of evolutionary reasons.
Cancel Culture as Estrangement Culture
If estrangements are on the rise, partly due to the increased use of social media—which allows people to estrange others at the press of a single “block” button—all the research on the adverse effects of estrangements suggests that, simply, we can expect to see increases in social and emotional problems on a large scale.
This all said, let’s take a minute to think about how this all relates to cancel culture. In a sense, a cancellation is tantamount to a large-scale, public estrangement. Someone who is canceled in the public sphere—after sending a hasty tweet or being outed for some transgression in one’s past or being called out as a hypocrite, etc.—is essentially experiencing a level of estrangement from others that would have been off the charts under ancestral conditions.
This is not to say that some actions don’t deserve such treatment. Kanye West’s recent comments in support of Hitler, for instance, are difficult to come back from (although he is a great rapper, I’ll admit). And Andrew Cuomo’s recent fall from grace was also, to the minds of many reasonable people, fully warranted based on what was a clear pattern of abuse of power and sexual misconduct.
In any case, it is at least reasonable to consider the psychological pain that must accompany an all-out public cancellation. While the canceled may well have reaped what they sowed, they are also human. And I think it’s useful for all of us to understand the psychological nature of that kind of experience.
We know that a high number of estrangements tends to correspond to all kinds of adverse psychological consequences. Applied to the topic of cancellation, we can infer that cancellation likely has profound adverse psychological consequences, leading to all kinds of emotional and social difficulties in one’s life.
A World Full of Cancellation is a World Full of Pain
Cancel culture seems to thrive on moral outrage, often as part of a virtue-signaling process. In other words, if we publicly cancel Teresa for her abhorrent behavior, we may partly be doing so to, unwittingly, raise our own status (Can you believe what Teresa did?! I would NEVER even THINK of doing something like that!). And without question, virtue-signaling and its sibling, moral grandstanding, are rampant in the world today (Grubbs et al., 2019). Cancel culture is, in a sense, a natural consequence of a culture that is filled with moral grandstanding and virtue-signaling.
As the ability to communicate via technologies such as social media increases, moral grandstanding becomes easier and easier to engage in. Along the way, publicly shaming others—which is, in a sense, the core of cancellation—becomes easier and easier as well. There’s a lot of pain connected with all this.
Bottom Line
Cancel culture is partly the result of a world in which people are able to bash others publicly at the push of a button—with a potentially global audience.
Clearly, there are actions that cross ethical lines and that are unforgivable. That said, the ability to publicly shame someone—often in a mob-like manner—is easier now than it ever has been in the history of the human experience. And while those who are “canceled” may well have had it coming, there is no question, based on all the research that exists on the adverse outcomes associated with being cut off from others, that the canceled are likely in a lot of pain.
Without question, social-media technology has played a major role in the advent of today’s cancel culture. As Nicole Wedberg and I argue in our book Positive Evolutionary Psychology, perhaps companies that are building these kinds of technologies would be smart to hire leaders who are educated in human evolutionary psychology—people who think about how these technologies might play out given our understanding of our evolutionary roots.
Because at the end of the day, technologies are supposed to help people—not cause large-scale problems and pain.
References
Di Santo, J. M., Montana, D., Nolan, K., Patel, J. P., Geher, G., Marks, K., Redden, C., McQuade, B., Mackiel, A., Link, J., & Thompson, G. (2022). To Ghost or To Be Ghosted: An Examination of the Social and Psychological Correlates Associated with Ghosting. EvoS Journal: The Journal of the Evolutionary Studies Consortium, 12, Sp. Iss (1), 43-62.
Dunbar, R. I. M. (1992). Neocortex size as a constraint on group size in primates. Journal of Human Evolution, 22(6), 469–493.
Geher, G., Rolon, V., Holler, R., Baroni, A., Gleason, M., Nitza, E., Sullivan, G., Thomson, G., & Di Santo, J. M. (2019). You’re dead to me! The evolutionary psychology of social estrangements and social transgressions. Current Psychology. doi: 10.1007/s12144-019-00381-z
• Geher, G. & Wedberg, N. (2020). Positive Evolutionary Psychology: Darwin’s Guide to Living a Richer Life. New York: Oxford University Press.
Grubbs, J. B., Warmke, B., Tosi, J., James, A. S., & Campbell, W. K. (2019). Moral grandstanding in public discourse: Status-seeking motives as a potential explanatory mechanism in predicting conflict. PloS one, 14(10), e0223749. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223749
Twenge, J. M., Cooper, A. B., Joiner, T. E., Duffy, M. E., & Binau, S. G. (2019). Age, period, and cohort trends in mood disorder indicators and suicide-related outcomes in a nationally representative dataset, 2005-2017. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 128, 185-199.