Housel: Social media causes road-rage-style dehumanization when facing handles instead of people
Morgan Housel · How To Invest Like An Optimist With Morgan Housel · Apr 28, 2022 · at 50:32
Morgan Housel explains the psychological effect of online disinhibition and why social media discourse escalates into hostility.
0:00 / 0:36exact quote · 37.0s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“Once you're not talking to a person, you're talking to a handle, then all, all humanity goes out the window. And it's just like in road rage, it's easy to like flip someone off and scream at them. But if you actually get out of your car and see the person, you probably shake hands and be like, Hey, I'm sorry. I didn't mean any harm. Like it's so easy to dehumanize people when you're talking or when you're dealing with, when you're not looking at their face. And there, I think that really goes in on, in, in social media where you misconstrue what people mean and it's easy to create a caricature of who they are and what they want when you're just dealing with their handle.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Morgan Housel
Housel: Prolonged Market 'Irrationality' Is Just Normal Human Behavior
“If something has been irrational for a long period of time, I think what you're actually just observing is the normal craziness of human behavior.”
Housel: 24/7 financial TV makes things up to fill airtime
“The only way to fill the time is just kind of by making shit up sometimes.”
Housel: Eliminating internal insecurity leads to destructive ego and failure
“I'd say if you don't have that insecurity, the absence of that insecurity is probably the definition of ego. And like, I think you want that insecurity. You shouldn't try to get rid of that. Once you get rid of it, that's when you're screwed.”
Housel: The biggest economic stories of the next decade are currently unmentioned
“I guarantee you the biggest economic news story over the next 12 months is something that no one on Twitter or anywhere else is talking about. And the biggest story of the next decade is something that no one is talking about.”
Housel: Human psychology is 100% of what matters in startups and markets
“How people think is a hundred percent of what matters in startups and in venture capital and in the stock market and whatnot.”
Housel: You can be an amazing economist without studying economics
“You can be an amazing economist if you don't really have any economics background, but you're, but you really understand psychology. You really understand politics. You really understand sociology. You really understand, like all these things, all these differ…”