Teenage girls are predisposed to behave in the way described, and Facebook/Instagram is profiting by exploiting that. Nothing about the explanation above is blaming them. If anything the comment makes a stronger case for Facebook's actions being immoral.
How could the words "I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect..." not be considered blaming them? There is definitely some nuance here (I don't think the parent comment is hard-lining to say that the victims here are 100% to blame), but they are most certainly associating some level of blame to teens and their inherent "predisposed" behavior as you say.
Has this been studied, or are we taking an arbitrary thought experiment as a foundational axiom?
Observer expectations can be really strong.
For example, does sugar make kids hyperactive? No real evidence for it (last I checked). But widely believed as fact.
In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?
If you don’t think universities are the right people to help with this question, who would you recommend to answer it?
You said: “Young girls are mean to each other, that’s a fact.”
How do you know this fact?
It’s helpful because it’s pointing out how absurd it is to constantly demand “data” to verify rudimentary observations of human nature. For whatever reason, and maybe it’s because of tech being so data obsessed, you can make a claim on this website as benign as “look both ways before crossing the street” and inevitably someone will want to see a “peer reviewed” study that says looking both ways before crossing the street “affects the outcome variable” of not getting hit by a car.
> If you don’t think universities are the right people to help with this question, who would you recommend to answer it?
Your mother, or your sister if you have one.
>How do you know this fact?
My name is remarkEon and I went to middle and high school in the United States on a planet I call Earth.
>>> In all societies across time? Or just in American High schools and on Instagram?
>> How do you know this fact?
>My name is remarkEon and I went to middle and high school in the United States on a planet I call Earth.
Ok, so you think your American High school experience gives you insight into all societies across time.
Understood. Your answers make sense now. Thanks for answering.
It’s a claim so extreme that … I’d like to see some data to back it up.
Why do you think this? You only have your school experience to go on. You have nothing to base this claim on.
I think it’s entirely possible that the conditions of school create much of the competition you are observing, and that US schools are more extreme than others.
School intentionally creates behaviors. There is no reason not to believe that it has side effects.
And yes, to get any insight into which of is right, we’d need someone to have studied it.
There is nothing pedantic or academic or anything I have said.
> US school structure and its problems explain all malevolent minor female behavior
This is simply a lie. I never said anything that implies this extreme view.
You are arguing that malevolent minor female behavior is universal and doesn’t need to be studied.
You might turn out to be right about the former, but without studying it, it’s just your baseless prejudice.
That said, the error I see more commonly is that the observation is perfectly valid, (or at least roughly valid) but the explanation is poor. People believe in the explanation because they feel so strongly about the observation. This is a fallacy I see over and over again. (and is often something I've seen leveraged in scams: "You've all experienced X. Here are some emotional stories about X. Now let me tell you how I have all the answers to X.")
I've tried to make it clear that my idea is not proven, but is something that I think is reasonable, and will hopefully lead to an interesting discussion. I'm definitely not suggesting that I have access to the truth, or that my idea is fact simply because I've explained something using scientific terms.
I sometimes wonder how these people would have survived at parties or social gatherings before the Internet when you couldn't just whip out your phone, spend 2 minutes not talking to anyone, click on the first Google search result, and then proclaiming "um acksually..."
Facebook is immorally exploiting that stress.
And it's really pretty clear that Facebook didn't create any of these problems and that removing it won't solve them. Facebook makes it easier for girls to bully each other in the same way that relaxed gun laws make it easier for criminals to shoot people. Or, as Londoners will tell you: "you can't solve knife crime by taking away people's knives".
The fact that Facebook profits from the issue doesn't make it their fault unless you can prove that they actively seek to make it worse. And even then, they can only carry the blame proportional to how much they made it worse.
A little O/T, but this trope needs to please stop.
The places with the highest gun crimes are also the places with the toughest gun laws. It should go without saying that criminals without definition would not care about laws.
Only in America. Other western nations have tough gun laws and also low gun crime, because you can't hop in your car and pick up a gun in a neighbouring state.
And actually the correlation is only seen in parts of America. New York City has tough gun laws, comparatively low gun crime and a lower homicide rate per capita than the rest of the country.
Time and time again people say "tough gun laws lead to more gun crime" but really they mean "in a country where it's really really easy to buy guns, we mostly see the negative impact of gun ownership in high-density poor neighbourhoods".
You can’t do this in America either. You can only buy guns legally in your state of residence.
If someone is willing to buy a gun illegally, they don’t need to go out of state.
The claim that this is because people can drive to others states is false.
For everyone else, how available they are depends on where you live.
For the law abiding, that’s not true in places where you need a license just to buy one such as NYC, or in CA where most handguns and many rifles are not available.
It's not about criminals not caring about the law. Shooting people is already illegal. It's about making it more difficult to access and acquire these weapons. If you can't access something, it is much more difficult to use.
the link you posted does not oppose it as the other comment pointed out.
I hope you will keep an open mind as you look into this, setting aside the agendas of the NRA or the anti-gun groups.
When there is an item (gun, in this instance) which has both good and bad uses ( what they are, we are reasonably argue) -- there needs to be a balance in how the item is procured.
Nowhere in the country does one just go and pick one up. There are (again, we can argue on what is reasonable) checks and balances - checking the person's track history etc.
All this goes out the window when it is possible to skirt the law, or in the case of London, use knives instead of guns for the crimes.
We need to solve the problem at the right level of abstraction.
We need to focus on why the society today sees more shootings in the past decades when the guns have been existing for much longer.
Big claims require some big evidence. In the UK there are strict controls on gun ownership and we have virtually no crimes carried out with legal guns, and more but still very few with illegal ones. Can you give some counter examples?
And I can't really agree with your assertion either. See stats in [0] and a gun law map in [1]. At best it's a correlation without causation, but the correlation certainly isn't the inverse as you suggest.
I also don't see how it's not a relevant example - it's Thing A making Thing B worse, but Thing B would still happen without Thing A and so Thing A can't be blamed for Thing B. Regardless of whether the underlying assertion is correct (less gun control leading to more gun crime), the logic is valid.
[0] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/gun-death... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overview_of_gun_laws_by_nation
That is, tough gun laws are enacted exactly because of a high rate of gun crime?
And of course those tougher laws can have at best a mild moderating effect when guns can freely enter that area with the tougher gun laws from other areas that do not have them.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_firearm-r...
Anyone, at any time, can stop using Facebook or Instagram with 0 repercussions.
I appreciate the approach, but I do think it is probably (as you yourself warned) a "just so" story.
Teenaged girls can be mean. Teenaged boys can be mean. Adults can be mean. Members of all of these groups can be nice, sometimes transcendently kind. These behaviors can be explained without reference to ancient drives to fertility and mating, I think.
Also i don’t think most teenage girls act like “Mean Girls” in real life. I was once in school and I have a teenage sister. Many girls like to post instagrams and tiktoks to get likes and follows, but they’re not cutthroat about it and the girls are sympathetic to each other.
The places where girls are backstabbing each other, are probably the same places where guys are fighting each other.
We humans are apes and, so, teenaged girls are apes. Apes are obsessed with hierarchy, status and sex. That doesn't change because we communicate using abstract symbols over a ridiculously innovative invention.
Note: I am not arguing one way or the other here. Obviously there is competition for mates among human beings. What I'm suggesting is that we be careful when drawing on evolutionary explanations flippantly and simplistically. Lord knows that e.g. "evolutionary psychology" (which this would fall under) is packed with just-so stories.
I think this has to be admitted, and that any explanation based on evolutionary psychology should be viewed more skeptically than other arguments. However, I think it's absolutely true that genetics do influence our psychology to some degree. And so, there must be some evolutionary psychology claims which can be said to be true. At a very high, and very basic level, some are so self-evident that no one bothers to make them: ie, that sexual attraction exists, is a strong motivator for most people, and must have a basis in evolutionary fitness. Obviously things can get more murky when you want to discuss behaviors with more nuance or complexity. Further, even when a claim is probably true it's quite hard to actually test in a scientific manner. You can isolate the behavior, but not the explanation. How can you truly prove that a behavior is caused by evolution rather than social pressure?
That said, I don't think the whole field can be thrown out, despite your accurate claim that the field can be a bit of a mess.
Raspberry pis are computers and, so, raspberry pi picos are computers. Raspberry pis, and picos especially, are obsessed with computation related to hobby projects. This doesn't change because computers can technically compute anything.
Is what people are "horrified" by the dangerous facts you spill, or the fact that your analysis here completely misses the point when we talk about social media and interventions aimed at curbing their tremendously negative impact.
There are elements of addiction at work here, too, but if social media was a net negative it wouldn't be as sticky as it is now. People are obviously getting something they want from it.
I don't see why this is relevant (if it's even true). The article barely talks about bullying or girls being awful to each other. It more broadly talks about people spending hours in their feeds comparing themselves to what they see and feeling bad about it, which seems like a very different problem.
And now that I think about it even more, I really have no idea of what I'm talking about. Most of the time that I've been mean to people, when I was younger, it was basically because I was an immature and confused jackass. And, as far as relationships go, who hasn't made a complete ass of theselves at one point or another?
Game theory.
If you want to ask about these things, you first should first ask to anthropology how teen girls behave in different cultures before jumping to biological explanations.
We'd want to measure things like "stress" or "anxiety" rather than simply meanness, it's possible this trend is not always expressed through cruelty. (notably, the facebook article suggests explicitly that it's not.)
I think in general the idea of leveraging sociology and anthropology in these cases is perfectly sound. If this only happened in America, I think there'd be a good argument that there is not a genetic component. (or perhaps, that there is a genetic component which is only activated in some contexts.)
One point I'd like to push back on is something I observed when studying anthropology in college. (and to be clear and fair, I am not suggesting that you have pushed this point of view.) Evidence of a single and rare outlier would be brought forward as proof that a set of behaviors did not have an evolutionary basis. Usually this was taken even further: if an outlier could be found, then the entire trait was completely socially constructed. Evolution affects behavior for certain, but these are experienced as drives an impulses which get filtered through the mind, the contextual social, and more. So, if a behavior is very broadly expressed cross-culturally, it is reasonable to suspect there is an evolutionary component to it. (of course this alone does not prove it.) If the outlier scenarios are sufficiently rare, this is likely proof that although there is an evolutionary basis for the behavior, they are not set in stone, and can be suppressed by the right circumstances.
Why does this conversation always have to exclusively revolve around how young girls treat each other? Young boys are awful to young girls. Women and men are awful to young girls. The question you should be asking is why do we as a society tolerate people (of any age and any gender!) being so awful to girls?
The article is about Facebook, the company. Facebook isn’t run by young girls. And yet many comments in this thread are focused not on Facebook’s responsibility to (and profiteering from the exploitation of) girls mental health and are instead focused on blaming the girls themselves.
Seems more than a little backwards to me.
Since this article is talking about young girls, the interest is in behaviors and interventions that would be more impactful for young girls, as a population, than other groups.
It’s not blaming young girls to develop interventions that work to help based on the common characteristics. Nor is it blaming African Americans to study and create specific diabetes interventions to address the specific risks of that subpopulation. It’s not African Americans fault that they have higher diabetes and different characteristics of the disease and they shouldn’t be blamed for this condition. But to help, creating customized interventions will be more effective.
I would think it bad if there were only specialized interventions and no one address other parts of the population.
But what I’m saying is this behavior isn’t “peculiar“ among these groups at all. It’s the same. Yet we only seem to talk about how it happens amongst young girls and ignore how the behavior is frequently directed towards them as well.
This was referenced in the article for how Facebook knew it’s stuff affected girls differently than boys.
I’ve read a lot [1] on how social media, in particular, disproportionately negatively impacts girls.
I don’t think we only talk about this, but because it is more significant it comes up more, I think.
Again, I don’t think this is a reason to blame girls or individual girls, since much of the bullying is not caused or targeted to girls. But it affects girls differently.
[0] https://www.pacer.org/bullying/info/stats.asp
[1] https://time.com/5650266/social-media-girls-mental-health/
I scoffed. I scoffed for a long time. But there is an uncomfortable kernel to her statement that I have seen again and again, long before social media, in young women and their constant status hierarchy struggles, and Mean Girls wasn't even the first time it was made too evident. I would point to Heathers and Carrie as even earlier examples. Teenage girls are vicious with one another's emotions and friendships, trusts and secrets, in a way that boys and men rarely get a glimpse of.
Heathers was a movie also about an abusive sociopathic male engineering the deaths of his classmates in an act of petty rebellion against his abusive sociopathic father who killed his mother.
Anyone that tells you that 'All {men,women} do is about {power,sex,men,women}'. is just telling on themselves and their social group specifically.
On the first and second statement, lesbians the world over would like a word.
You've based your analysis on a comedy you saw in the 2000s that in turn based itself on the experiences of white affluent American teenagers.
The second leg of your analysis is not grounded in an understanding of actual female biology.
The one 'fact' you cite is wrong, 'young girls' are not the most fertile, the range for peak fertility for women is from their very late teens (18-19) to late 20s. The majority peaks in their early to mid 20s (~24 years old).
If you want to comment about how women and men function 'evolutionarily', please at least understand a bit about how human biology works right now.
I like to think of it more as "presenting the details of my argument clearly so that they can be discredited if I've made an error.," rather than "navel gazing." Of course, there is nothing wrong with criticizing ideas, and so thank you for your response.
I don't know that I have a direct counterpoint to your claim, and it might be that my argument is irreparably harmed. I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology, as it seems to be related to the onset of puberty. So, perhaps my idea still plays a role in what's going on here, even if it is not the primary role. (ie, perhaps it's one of many factors at play. Women could still be quite invested their sexual prospects shortly before they hit their peak fertility.)
I suppose my question for you would be, what do you think about all this? Do you believe that young girls are affected differently than young boys by social media? If so, do you believe this relies on a psychological tendency which existed prior to social media? If so, do you believe there's any evolutionary component to it, or do you believe there's some other explanation?
"I might still wonder that this is still wrapped up in evolutionary psychology"
is a more useful frame of reference than, say, a model of addiction: https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w28936/w289...
Do we gain any explanatory power by adding untestable hypotheses to the existing body of work about how society constructs /impossible to realize/ standards for both boys and girls.
To your question, yes, girls and boys are socialized differently in our culture, and thus they will be exposed to different social media, pressures, and expectations from the moment they are born. However, I don't think you need to immediately reach for evolutionary psychology to explain this.
The underlying pressure, in my view, is the pressure to sell objects that relieve the dissonance that 'influencers' and ad writers amplify.
Evolution certainly made us (regardless of gender) susceptible to this kind of influence, but culture determines which of our insecurities weaponized and how.
See also: brain pills, protein, and cars for predominantly male audiences.
Would these same kinds of pressures have existed in the tribal circumstances under which we evolved? Sure, but they'd have been way way way less potent.
I also don't think evo psych tells us that our current societal structures are pre-determined or inevitable. If anything, we've been taught again that human brains are remarkably flexible and even relatively light social pressure from social media can cut against the grain of other fundamental biological tendencies, like self-preservation.
Yes.
Women are taught from a young age how they must act, dress, etc. What they should look like, that they should fit into a size 0, be <100 lbs, start counting calories when they hit puberty, etc.
Keep in mind that every attempt at a teenage boy's magazine has flopped, while teenage girl's magazines (at least until the decline of magazines and print media more generally) were quite popular. And this is in large part because there are a lot of expectations placed on girls that were never placed on guys, so these magazines helped guide a lot of young women through puberty (whether they guided them well is a matter for another discussion entirely, but they certainly did hold a lot of influence).
While there certainly are images of the ideal man that societies have held up over time, they don't have the same weight as expectations for women. If you have a dad bod, nobody is going to be glaring at you at the beach for showing it off, whispering about how "un-masculine" you look, that you need to show a little modesty, but a woman who goes to the beach with hairy legs will absolutely be subject to comments about how un-ladylike you are and that you look "masculine," even though body hair is entirely natural.
But it's not just when you're at the beach, and it's not just leg hair - it's everywhere, about everything, and it starts very early on. It's your parents telling you, advertisements and Hollywood reinforcing it, being told by your teachers you should be more feminine, your pastor saying that your outfit isn't "appropriate" for Sunday school (because it's not a dress), random men saying you should lose some weight... it never ends.
So while men are definitely having more body issues these days, it's nowhere near the same extent. Social media helps to reinforce societal beauty standards that have been taught to us all our lives.
> If so, do you believe this relies on a psychological tendency which existed prior to social media? If so, do you believe there's any evolutionary component to it, or do you believe there's some other explanation?
Not any innate tendency but just being beaten down until you conform. The advent of social media didn't magically erase the expectations we place on women, instead it became another place for reinforcing them.
> Women could still be quite invested their sexual prospects shortly before they hit their peak fertility.
I am single and have no desire to have kids despite being in "peak fertility." I am also not actively seeking out a partner. I'm not opposed to dating, it's just more convenient for me not to at the moment.
This is entirely anecdotal, but of my friends who do want kids, they don't really think about "oh god gotta find a mate and have kids I'm about to turn 26." They're more interested in finding the right person first, especially since we have so many fertility treatment options today (and having kids has gotten more expensive than ever). Having kids when you're not ready is generally a bad idea, and I hope I don't have to explain why.
We need fewer systems that put children (especially younger children) in situations where they are primarily interacting with and modeling the behavior of other children. This includes both our education and digital social systems.
Some children have active and involved home and family lives. This helps. Some get more favorable interactions and time with teachers, this can help. Some find positive models in media (books and movies) and can help, but media is often negative.
Now there's similar issue with male body image, but somehow that's even more extreme (visible six pack abs with single digit body fat), thus boys will think its not achivable without 8 hour workout a day and not bother, whereas for girls it seems like contemporary female body image is perfectly achivable to them or their peers and they lose sleep over it.
What is the shape of evolution? Many believe the shape of evolution to be a line of deterministic "progress" with a forward and a backward movement that may be accelerated.
Maybe evolution is a process which we are unconsciously subject to and consciously participate in forming. It seems directors, managers, and other employees working for Facebook may be more conscious of the role the Facebook systems play in social, psychological, and evolutionary processes, and the outcomes the systems grow.
I don't think this is correct. At least this is not a definition of evolution that I've ever seen reproduced. If anything, biologists I've read point to views such as this a misconception which must be corrected.
Dawkins is mostly talking about evolution and creationism in "The Blind Watchmaker," (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Blind_Watchmaker) but I think it applies here as well: evolution is not guided, and there is no progress in the human sense of the word. ie, people are not "more evolved" than our ancestors. We have different adaptations which might be better (or worse) suited for certain evolutionary challenges. If the evolutionary pressures lined up properly, we could easily evolve to be more similar to other mammals. (ie, some people would call that "devolve.")
We already know this is a vulnerable group, and that teen girls have tendencies to compare themselves with peers. Putting a 24/7 stream of perfect, curated, retouched posts from friends in front of all of them seems obviously not ideal.
edit: I may be giving a gut reaction to seeing up-voted amateur evolutionary psychology
> Adolescent mothers (ages 10–19 years) face higher risks of eclampsia, puerperal endometritis, and systemic infections than women aged 20 to 24 years, and babies of adolescent mothers face higher risks of low birth weight, preterm delivery and severe neonatal conditions. (4)
And just because you might be in the "peak fertility" period doesn't mean you should rush to have children. If you are not ready for kids, they will suffer for it, and none of the girls I knew who got pregnant in high school were mature enough to handle a child and finish school (much less the fathers), so their parents and grandparents had to step in and do most of the parenting.
These kinds of discussions, especially combined with the evolutionary biology pseudoscience, really remind me of the way incel forums talk about women. Especially with the interesting absence of any mention of men's fertility, which also peaks around 30. [0]
[0]: https://www.bumc.bu.edu/busm/2013/07/02/fertility-peaks-arou...
[1]: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/adolescent-...
Does this make it acceptable that a corporation like Facebook exploits this tendency for profit? Should we not recognize this vulnerability and protect our children against it?
First, young boys are certainly competitive with each other. Bullying is largely about social status, and social status is the main predictor for mate choice.
Second, male attractiveness does not follow the same pattern. Yes, sperm quality does degrade with age, but that decline is nowhere near as sharp as the decline in a woman's reproductive health. Not only will their eggs run out, but their chance of surviving childbirth drops sharply with age. Remember, we're not talking about western societies with modern medicine, but evolutionary imperatives which would have developed prior to any sort of antibiotics, pain killers, C-sections, etc.
Third, male attractiveness is strongly correlated with access to status and resources. Which young men almost universally don't have. (although young men may show traits which indicate potential future access to status and resources: intelligence, drive, assertiveness, popularity, etc.) However, an older man (30s-40s) still has very healthy sperm, and may have proven access to status and resources, which is nearly universally considered attractive.
So, I don't think it's fair to claim that male attractiveness declines over time an sort of the same way as female attractiveness. (Once again, from a strictly evolutionary perspective.)
For an intro: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Physical_attractiveness
So no "HN algorithm", just users flagging.
You can set the "showdead" flag in your profile and you will see dead posts, including this one (grayed).
[1] - Guanlin Wang, Minxuan Cao, Justina Sauciuvenaite, Ruth Bissland, Megan Hacker, Catherine Hambly, Lobke M. Vaanholt, Chaoqun Niu, Mark D. Faries, & John R. Speakman (2018). Different impacts of resources on opposite sex ratings of physical attractiveness by males and females. Evolution and Human Behavior, 39(2), 220-225. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S10905...
Maestripieri, Dario et al. "A greater decline in female facial attractiveness during middle age reflects women’s loss of reproductive value". Frontiers in Psychology 5. (2014): 179. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.0017...
I never knew (and still, don't know) to what degree this trait is actually universal. (ie, perhaps it's just a weird quirk of teen magazines in the last 30 years) Do you have links to that study or anything like it? I'd like to check it out.
Plus, Facebook is indeed a harmful product for society at large (like cigarettes), and often has bigger negative impacts on younger users (again like cigarettes).
The combination of these is obviously bad...but Facebook knowing it and hiding the fact is very much (again) like what tobacco companies did.
For the record - I believe in capitalism generally, I just think the incarnation of capitalism on social media is particularly damaging. The free market has produced a product like big Tobacco did.
Visual and maybe hormonal attractiveness may change over time with other mammals too, but not actual numeric quantity of eggs. (I'm not sure if there is broad enough data on egg viability across all mammals though, but the fixed quantity and therefore approximate time period of fertility is more easily seen)
Given that this variable is the different one, the differences in human populations (ie. the competition for being chosen) really should be evaluated with this aspect weighted more heavily.
This has been ingrained in us for millions of years yet people act like a few decades of social upheaval will change this.
yea this random comment on a random tech site about evolutionary biology passes the smell test why? oh is it because of preconceived notions and biases rather than rigorous argumentation (i.e. well cited and published research)? hmmm
Here's a theory that's nearly guaranteed to land me in hot water:
Why are young girls so awful to each other? I don't think it's unreasonable to suspect that is has to do with "hormones," new emotions, and new social awareness, etc. But, it's also the case that from a strictly evolutionary perspective, young girls are are the most fertile and therefore the most desirable. This will decline over time, and sharply as women enter their 30s, 40s, and 50s. Perhaps there's an evolutionary reason why young girls work so hard to identity and sideline any competition? If this is the period of their life where they are the most desirable, there might be an evolutionary benefit to be the most cut-throat when it comes to vying for the best mating opportunities.
A few caveats:
- Hopefully I don't have to explain that evolutionary impulses are not the same as desirable or positive social values.
- Nor are evolutionary impulses immutable, or always expressed in the same way. (for example, sports are often observed as a peaceful replacement for warring city states.)
- Further, I'm definitely aware that evolutionary psychology can sound very reasonable while being perfectly rubbish and unscientific. There are plenty of people who say things like "because hunter-gathers experienced X," that explains "dubious trend which I have anecdotally observed." Even in the case where an evolutionary psychology explanation may happen to be correct, it remains difficult to prove or test.