 Elizabeth. Are Elizabeth. Yes, she is. Yes, she are. Elizabeth Cornwell. Please welcome our Elizabeth Cornwell. You guys having a good time? Before I start my talk, I just wanted to say that this has been a terrific time. Even though it's my fourth time, it feels like I'm a first-hammer because I'm usually working my boss. Some of you may know of him. He's a zoologist in Oxford. I've written a couple of books. Some people have prayed. But anyway, this has been terrific and I'm so appreciative of James Randi and DJ Grothe and the entire JRef staff for the tremendous job they do at this conference and it's wonderful to be with such a great group of people. I also wanted to mention just briefly how impressed I was with Jamie Ian Swiss Talk this morning. It gave me a lot to think about and I hope it gave all of you a lot to think about. And what I really hope is it gives Bill Moore a lot to think about. So anyway, so I'm going to be talking a little about social networks and you may wonder what an evolutionary psychologist knows about networking. I'm sure my web staff is interested in knowing what I know about networks. But I'm hoping I can convince you I know something. So in biology, things really make sense when framed within an evolutionary context. Things like reasons for the mating of the Amazonian milktoad. And if we are out for a drink, I can explain these things too. And you won't shut me out, trust me. So don't get me started unless you really want a conversation about the sex life of Amazonian milktoads. But the secretion of garden eels and why reindeer hooves click. And why male seahorses are always going to be single parents. All these things become transparent, which when we look at it through the Darwinian lens, which is the beauty of Darwin's theory of natural selection. And so when I get a little stressed out, which happens now and again, I tend to go back to reading articles and books that are in the natural sciences, especially in the biological sciences. And it's because it makes kind of sense out of chaos. But there's one species in particular that really is confounding when trying to explain behavior from an evolutionary perspective. And that's us. I hope I have not offended anyone from Minnesota. So I mean, we are an odd species. We think abstractly. We possess very complicated technology. We have an intelligence that can explore the things from the minutiae of the atom to the great expense of the universe. We understand how all of life is connected. We're all related. Our DNA shows related to every living thing on this planet. We have created medicines and treatments for diseases and genetic disorders that our ancestors thought were caused by demons or sin. Now, all of our accomplishments as a species has been dependent on the evolution of language. But it was... That's how it happened, you know. We finally figured it out. But it was the development of record keeping of writing, which was actually for commercial use. Again, it's the accountants. That we began this long journey to present information technology. And information technology has come a long way from simple record keeping. It's developed in various ways from writing, texting, emails, tweets, and phone. We can also throw in some other forms of media, print media, electronic media, art, literature, music, dance, film, and theater. All these are forms of communication that take advantage of the human intellect and its ability to create meaning and the desire, the desire to be understood. But with the rise of information technology, especially in the last 10, 15 years, it's come at a cost. We lose some important components of communication when we are no longer face to face. Now, in some communications it may not be important, especially communications that make up for the loss of nonverbal transmission by making a pronounced effort to communicate clearly. So for books, for example, a talented author will labor extensively to be understood to make clear his or her meaning. Charles Darwin was one such author. He labored over his writings to clarify his thoughts to his audience. But as communication technology has advanced, there seems to be an inverse relationship on clarity of thought. Using fast communication devices tends toward terse short sentences that can be misinterpreted easily as curt, rude, or disrespectful. Let me expand on that. We live in an environment where the need of transmission has overridden the need to carefully compose our communications. We become impatient if someone does not respond to a text, email, or voicemail within a short amount of time. And we expect ourselves to respond quickly to such communications. Thus we respond with abbreviations, clipped sentences, and symbols. And while it does show the incredible ability of the human mind to adapt to new environments, and it's something that humans are just so incredibly good at, but it's easy to contemplate with the loss of nonverbal communications along with nuance with a decrease in the use of words that the art of communication is compromised. Now please don't take me to mean that I think that social networking is the doom of humanity and insurable end up being comic books. I'm not suggesting anything like that. My only point is that we need to be aware of the limitations of its use, its weaknesses, and that it is prone to misunderstandings. And it can lead to interpretations of aggressiveness at times. Now humans are the most socially complex species on the planet. And it was language that has been an integral part of our social evolution. Our ability to store and pass on information has allowed us to build ever more complex societies, all while pushing the limits of human adaptability. Because our brains are not all that different than those of our ancestors who eked out a living on the African Savannah. But we have most definitely changed the way we live and the way we interact. We are no longer living in small bands of related individuals, but in inconceivably populated cities where we know less than one percent of the people within them. The transition between our hunter-gatherer past and our current environment has not been an easy one. And as it's been said for the most part, nasty, brutish, and short. Now in Steve Pinker's new book, The Better Angels of Our Nature, which Michael Schirmer touched on yesterday and I hope you heard his talk. It was excellent. Pinker explores the process by which humans have become less violent, more tolerant, and caring. In other words, just more humane. And he also explores and expands on the concepts first proposed by the German sociologist Norbert Elias called the Civilization Process. Now Elias traced how post medieval European standards regarding violence, sexual behavior, bodily functions, table manners, and forms of speech were gradually transformed by increasing thresholds of shame and repugnance. This was all working outward from a nucleus of court etiquette. And Michael, wherever you are, I do appreciate the fact that you went over all those disgusting bodily habits, so I don't have to. Now in his book, Pinker discusses not only how the civilizing process progressed across the world, but also how in certain environments such as the emerging Western US territories, there was a regression back toward a more violent, undisciplined blood honor and vigilante lifestyle. All fitting with the thesis that as society implements and enforces standards of behavior, we are more able to live together in harmony. And when for reasons such as a new frontier where social protocol is no longer in effect, we humans tend to revert back to less civility. We no longer worry about being shamed or ostracized by society or risking our loss of social standing. And that for humans, the loss of social standings is a tremendous loss. In other words, without punishment of society for bad behavior, without the repugnance for bad behavior, we regress toward a more base state. Now I want to bring together what may have seemed like two disparate concepts, but they really are interconnected. So at the beginning of the talk, I mentioned that communications rely on signals other than words. Eye contact, facial expressions, body language, tone and inflection, they all convey meaning. And often when we rely on these signals to make certain, we rely on these signals to make certain that we're understood. So for example, when we say we're sorry, if the words don't match our nonverbal signals like, yeah, I'm sorry. Then our words do sort of fall flat. And instead of an apology deescalating a situation, it antagonizes it instead. So when we communicate using electronic means such as emails, blogs, texts and tweets, et cetera, we are relying solely on words to convey complex meaning. Yet with such technology, we tend to invite us to use fewer words, shorter sentences, and yet we still expect our audience, the receiving end of our messages, to get exactly what we're trying to say. Well of course, misunderstandings are going to happen. Now let's add to the mix the idea that the internet is a new territory where societal pressures are few. Especially since individuals can hide under false names, they can change their names, they can remain anonymous. Thereby circumventing the social punishment for bad behavior. Additionally, without face-to-face interactions, we lose our sense of empathy. And we also lose our ability to quickly disabuse our audience of an obvious misunderstanding. Now losing the lack of empathy is important because when we're talking to someone face-to-face and we see that they're in distress, most of us know to back off. Most of us are not going to keep up with threatening that person or making that person feel badly. So losing that is something we need to be aware of. So what we end up with is sort of a wild west environment, violence in the form of threats, bullying, and vigilante posse's bubble up across blogs and tweets and other form of social networking. And this phenomenon can be understood when we apply Elias's theory of the civilizing process to the internet. Now cyberbullying has a real dark reality to it. With young people such as Megan Meyer and Jamie Roadmire giving up all hope after relentless bullying and taking their own precious lives to finally end their torment. And in a study of young people by Samir Hinduja, I hope I didn't slaughter that, and Justin Patchen, they found that 20% of respondents reported seriously thinking about attempting suicide. All forms of bullying were significantly associated with increases in suicidal ideation. Cyberbullying victims were almost twice as likely to have attempted suicide compared to youths who had not experienced cyberbullying. And this is interesting. Those who commit bullying are also at higher risk of suicide. Now as the issue of cyberbullying comes into the public sphere, it's being discussed and debated concerning what to do. The awareness too, although we can't confirm this, it's too early to confirm with any kind of data, but it possibly could facilitate a downward trend because of social disapproval. But also states are also imposing anti-bullying legislation, at least in terms of children, in response to some of these tragic outcomes. But cyberbullying doesn't stop at the end of adolescence, and it doesn't take long to find examples of flaming, trolling, threats of violence, or even organized attacks across blogs and tweets in the adult world. Now the root causes of uncivilized behaviors are in part the same as we see in adolescent cyberbullying. Narcissistic tendencies, low self-esteem, false self-esteem, imagination of power, these are all reflected in the personality of the bully in his or her henchmen. Now there are relatively few studies on adult cyberbullying or issues of civility on the internet as it's pretty recent phenomenon, but the few that do exist suggest that there's a strong tendency on hotly debated issues, such as the example of politics, things like aggressiveness, certainty, angry assertions, insults, and the attempt to humiliate opponents. Is any of this hitting a chord? So now the CDC has initiated more research in the area and labeled the problem as electronic aggression, giving it a broader name. And for the most part, again, studies focus on children and adolescents. But really it would be a mistake to end it there. Now psychologists have had little time to develop comprehensive theories on electronic aggression, but certainly the decades of research on bullying in general provide some sound-building blocks. But I want to propose that the internet offers a unique environment that perhaps exacerbates the problems, especially for individuals who are prone to bullying or prone to being what we call henchmen, which are the kind of friends of bullies that help the bully along. There is evidence of a positive correlation between narcissistic personality disorder, which is called NPD, and electronic aggression. And additionally, the internet can provide and this narcissistic personality kind of feeds off this kind of thing, provides a false sense of one's own self-worth. And by the people who they found had tended toward narcissistic personality issues, they were just counting the number of friends they had on Facebook, or the number of comments they had on their blogs as being measuring their success, measuring their social status, measuring who they are as an individual and their contributions. And then when faced with any criticisms or non-support, the narcissistic person can react angrily and aggressively. So in other words, the internet, unlike the real world, can provide, more than sure, easily provide a false sense of importance and an overestimate of contributions to society, as well as bolstering the false sense of self-esteem. And in some cases, it may even cause kind of what we call acquired NPD, which we might see with brand new stars that make their way. They, you know, kind of not used, not accustomed to the feign to become narcissistic. It's acquired and not necessarily something that they, not a genetic cause. But when, so when, narcissists, when their self-esteem is threatened, the individual lashes out and goes on the attack. And such attacks will include threats of harm, vilifications, especially, of anyone who kind of commits the offense of either ignoring them or criticizing them. The other thing that the internet does that is unique is that it brings people of various abilities, expertise, education and backgrounds together on a single topic. Now, the narcissist will tend to identify him or herself as part of the high status group, the people who are very knowledgeable on the topic, the people who have the education or the expertise in a particular area. Yet, at the same time, the narcissist will feel threatened by these high status individuals because the high status individual, you know, if they were to meet face to face, they'd be kind of found out, right? So the narcissist actually does understand that they, their, their self is, their, they have kind of a false self-esteem there that they don't really have what they wish or tried to project that they have in terms of, of talent or education or knowledge. So the narcissist will use electronic aggression to act out against those people in higher status and, and not really through any kind of valid discussion but by personal attacks. Now, most of us do not engage in such bullying. We have better awareness, empathy, control and we engage in contemplation as to how our words might affect, aggravate, hurt an individual. And just as we check, we check our words in cyberspace just as we would check our words in our personal space and our public space, we, we care about people and that's, that's generally the majority of people but it doesn't take but a few to, to kind of ignite some of, you know, electronic aggression. So social networks, I mean they're still nascent and reflect, as I said, a bit of the wild west but I suggest as it evolves, it will go through a civilizing process. Now for example, in the 70s, some of you remember the 70s, I certainly don't. Sorry, I'm just taking this from my history book. It would have seemed rude to ask someone not to smoke in your own home and even if you were a non-smoker, some, it was just common if people smoked in your home but today it's considered a common courtesy for smokers to step outside if they must smoke although obviously not in casinos in Las Vegas but those people who don't smoke now feel it is within their right to keep their home smoke free and no reasonable person would accuse the homeowner of denying someone his or her freedom by asking them to step outside to smoke. Well it's also the same with if somebody came to your party and they were obnoxious and aggravating your other party guests and just being a pain, the host would have a right to ask that guest to leave and no one would accuse the host of denying that person their freedom of speech because they asked them to leave the party. So I think you know where I'm going with this. So how do we create a more civilized internet, a more civilized social network? Well I'm not saying that we have the answer but at RDF we do moderate our discussions and comments and we do take the view that RDNet is our home and we want people to feel comfortable in expressing their opinions and so we do our best to keep out trolls and individuals who resort to less than reasonable discussion and we don't just constantly look for comments, nobody has time for that. It's our, the people that come to our site that alert us to people being obnoxious, people being trolls, people causing trouble and attacking others for making personal attacks. So because of this, and we did have a few complaints, people said oh freedom of speech and the fact is we don't consider it heavy-handed censorship and of course we're not the US government, we're not bound by constitutional law, we are simply maintaining an atmosphere on our website that we feel is civil. We don't go through approval of postings, there's no queue in terms of our postings. It's just simply monitoring content in our site and because we've done this over time, we no longer have to do quite as much as we called it smiting. That was always fun. Shall we smite him? Yeah, he's been smote. People come to our site for opens, so because of that we don't have to do a whole lot of that and so people do come to our website expecting open civil discussions and the fact is that we don't have a big problem with bullies and aggressive behavior but we do invite well thought out and valid criticisms. I mean people have discussions and they disagree and it's quite civil. It's like what you would do probably at the bar here, you're sitting and talking, you can disagree about things but you're not going to start saying well I hope you're found burning in hell or something, whatever. I'm sure that's not what we would say but you get the point. So social networking is a powerful and extraordinary change in our ability to communicate and I think it's reasonable to say that it equates an importance with the printing press because it has changed the world and I really do think it has changed the world for the better and combined with access to what seems like really unlimited information via the internet, although of course we've heard a lot about how a lot of the information on the internet is not all that reliable but social networking does grant us an opportunity to explore well beyond anything we could have imagined. And in the lifetimes of most of the people at this conference we've seen changes in how we interact with one another that are really quite astounding. And while social networks are still in their awkward adolescent stage struggling with what it will become in recognizing its limitations, issues such as cyberbullying and uncivilized behavior are just growing pains. I think it will be resolved and those who engage in poor social behavior will be marginalized in social networking just as they're marginalized in real life if you know, face to face, I'll put it that way because internet is real life, isn't it? And people are also understanding that the internet, everything we do on the internet our comments or posts or blogs, they kind of stay with us for a really long time and as we come to terms with the fact that our past is not particularly easy to lose, we begin to self adjust our behavior and while we can remain anonymous which gives us maybe some protection for admonishment but I don't think you can guarantee that it won't come back to haunt us so just keep in mind this age old adage that the only difference between love and blog posts is that blog posts last forever. So in closing the majority of people again are responsible, they're kind, they're thoughtful when they use technology to communicate and I think we've all had experiences where there have been misunderstandings with text messages and things and we allow for we have allowances for people and I want to go back to what Jamie said this morning of the importance to understand we're all human. I don't think there's anyone in this world that hasn't said something really stupid. I mean, you know, we've all said something stupid. We've all said something that we regret we've all said something that we kind of wish would just disappear into the fog of time and most, and before now that usually is what happened. Unless you happen to be someone that the press followed, the things we said sort of disappeared. But now people can and do judge an individual by one post, one tweet, one article. We make entire judgments on people based on one thing that they did and none of us would want that. None of us would want to be judged on the one stupid thing that we said. And I think Jamie's point of being humane, as skeptics we don't mean we can't be humane, that we can't recognize that we're all fallible, that we're all, you know, we're all struggling. We all just try to make it through this world the best we can and do the best we can. And I think we need to have allowances for one another. And I'm hoping that the internet will reflect this and I'm hoping that this community in particular can lead that charge. And I think we can. So I just want to say thank you again. And I really do think the issues of uncivilized behavior will dissipate. And I just want to say please network wisely and be human. Thank you.