Pandita, S., Garg, K., Zhang, J., & Mobbs, D. (2024). Three roots of online toxicity: Disembodiment, accountability, and disinhibition. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 28(9), 814–828.

Link: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2024.06.001

Open access: No

Notes: Violence on social media—such as toxic speech—increasingly requires those who seek to understand and address it (me, for example) to engage in interdisciplinary research. In this case, from the cognitive sciences. In this opinion, researchers Pandita and colleagues lay out a model to better grasp the roots of online toxicity. Their model is called DAD and proposes to center on three dimensions:

• Disembodiment: “Online communication disinhibits our behavior by rendering our view of others as imaginary characters in a sparse virtual world (. . . ) if others become imagined abstractions, we are likely to respond with reduced saliency to their mental states and emotions” (p. 816)
• Accountability: “Anonymity, along with the belief that people online are not real, can facilitate dissociative imagination, and create a sense of disregard for online reprimands as genuine punishments” (p. 820)
• Disinhibition: “Disembodiment impairs cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, leading to disinhibition and impulsive disregard for accountability” (p. 821)

By engaging with this model, the authors show how we can better understand societal issues such as moral outrages, misinformation, or upward social comparison. For instance, they note how looking at affective polarization through the ADA model could aid in explaining the social processes of belonging and othering: “Due to disembodied interactions, disinhibited emotional expressions, and a lack of accountability, social media can exaggerate extreme opinions and greatly increase social othering” (p. 823). Overall, while this model strongly draws the offline/online separation in ways that negate our postdigital living, it presents an interesting framework for grasping with the complexity that underlie contemporary antisocial behaviours.

Abstract: Online communication is central to modern social life, yet it is often linked to toxic manifestations and reduced well-being. How and why online communication enables these toxic social effects remains unanswered. In this opinion, we propose three roots of online toxicity: disembodiment, limited accountability, and disinhibition. We suggest that virtual disembodiment results in a chain of psychological states primed for deleterious social interaction. Drawing from differences between face-to-face and online interactions, the framework highlights and addresses the fundamental problems that result in impaired communication between individuals and explicates its effects on social toxicity online