It feels like all the efforts of social media companies and message boards to create a ‘town square’ where people could meet and discuss have only led to a place where the town idiots congregate.
And because I am right about this and need to feed my confirmation bias, I would like to point you all to an article in Nature Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. The article examined who is most likely to participate in online political discourse on social media in eight countries (the US, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam).
To do this, they recruited about 8,000 people and measured not only how often they participated in online political discussions, but also their psychological profiles and their cognitive skills.
The graphs below show a key result for four of the eight countries. People with higher cognitive ability generally participate more often in political discussions. But when you look at how steep the lines are for different levels of cognitive ability, you notice something strange. For people with lower cognitive ability, the lines tend to be steeper. But steeper lines indicate that people with more psychopathic traits are increasingly participating in online political discussions.
Relationship between psychopathy, cognitive ability and political discussion
Source: Ahmed and Masood (2025)
What this study essentially shows is that people high in psychopathy and low cognitive ability are overrepresented in online political discussions.
So the next time you’re triggered by someone on social media or a message board (or in your workplace, for that matter), think to yourself, “high psychopathy and low cognitive skills,” and move on.
#Psychopathy #cognitive #ability