Join Malcolm and Simone as they delve into a comprehensive analysis of multiple studies that reveal striking differences in how social media use affects the mental health of liberals and conservatives. Learn through detailed graphs and data how liberal social media culture correlates with higher rates of depression and anxiety, while conservative content seems to have a more neutral or even positive impact. Explore the intricate relationship between personality traits, ideological orientation, and social media interactions, and uncover the factors contributing to the growing mental health disparities in contemporary society.

Malcolm Collins: [00:00:00] Hello, Simone. Today is gonna be an interesting day because we are going to go over so many graphs today.

I don't even think we're gonna get to them all. Ooh, the first and most critical of the graphs is one I am going to put on screen here, and it opens up a, a both an explanatory mystery, I guess is what I'd call it. And so what you can see in this first chart is liberal and conservative depression index scores by social media, use category where red is conservative and blue is liberal, and the higher the bar goes, the worse their depression is.

And what you see in this chart is that if you are a progressive. The more liberal you are, the more using social media depresses you. But if you are a conservative, that is not the case. In fact, using social media frequently appears to increase your mental health when you're at the. High levels of use. [00:01:00] Now what's really fascinating, and I marginally you're still better off not using it at all, but marginally it increases mm-hmm.

Compared to using it some versus using it an absolute ton. Mm-hmm. At least once a day specifically here. And then I would point out here that and, and actually the, the conservatives who use social media at least once a day have significantly better mental health than the liberals who use it only once or twice a month.

Oh, goodness. That is how bad it is for liberals. Just the littlest bit. I mean, have you

Simone Collins: been

Malcolm Collins: on

Simone Collins: Blue Sky though? It's, it is depressing.

Like that's a big thing that I see on Blue Sky that I don't see on Twitter. Like I tweet about the, the asteroid that was gonna hit us, but then didn't hit us. And I get normal responses on Blue Sky. I tweet about that, and a bunch of the responses are finally someone to cure the plague of humans upon this earth.

Malcolm Collins: Here's where it gets really bad. Liberals and conservatives have almost exactly the same rates of depression and bad mental health. And we'll see this as we go to other charts when they don't use social media at all.[00:02:00]

Okay. Which implies that, and will, you know, it's broadly known, liberals have way more mental health problems than conservatives right now. Right? If you look at white liberal women, for example, over 50% are dealing with a major mental health issue. Mm-hmm. But what this appears to be saying is this is not like an innate thing about liberals.

It's not and this article will argue the opposite, but like the evidence shows otherwise, it's not like, oh if you are more likely to get depressed, then you're more likely to become a liberal. Mm. It's something about engaging with liberal culture itself

Simone Collins: makes you sad,

Malcolm Collins: is what makes you sad.

Simone Collins: Oh, my.

Oh no.

Malcolm Collins: And what's interesting is we're going to be able to break out the exact parts of liberal culture that do this. The amount that it's not being religious, the amounts that it's woke him, the amount that it's DEI stuff the amount that it's fear of, of like being attacked or something like that.

And we often talk about the urban [00:03:00] monoculture as something of a mimetic virus, which you know, the iterations of it that are better at spreading, spread better. And it appears to, as a mimetic virus, first sort of lower your mental immune system by destroying your mental health before it begins to eat away at your brain.

Mm-hmm. And we're going to see this in the data on this piece specifically. What she ends up finding out is first the mental health declines. Then a person starts identifying as a liberal, not first do they identify as a liberal, then the mental health declines.

Simone Collins: Oh, really? Yes, I would've guessed the opposite.

That's really interesting. Okay,

Malcolm Collins: so I, I would've guessed the opposite as well, but what it appears is happening here is that the mental health decline is sort of an erosion of self-identity, self-pride, like self affirmation ability that is required before people start, like rotely accepting woke ideas.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah. Like, I guess it's a lot easier to accept. [00:04:00] Super progressive ideology when you have an external locus of control, for example, plus a lot of self hatred.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Oh

Simone Collins: no.

Malcolm Collins: Wow. Okay. Wow. So, so it, it builds the self-hatred first. And, and I think that that's really fascinating. And we can also see from this other graph that it's specifically interacting with liberal culture that makes you mentally unhealthy.

And that interacting with conservative culture frequently actually appears to make people a little bit more healthy mentally speaking. That makes sense. This isn't surprising to me at all, actually. Mm-hmm. If you look at a lot of the types of conservative culture that, that progressives complain about, and it's like a meme thing where they're like, how do you know your son is a conservative?

Well, he exercises and he takes care of his appearance and he, and he takes personal

Simone Collins: responsibility for his actions. He's not looking at

Malcolm Collins: porn as much, you know? It's like, okay, but I can see why maybe these things are correlating to higher mental health rates. Okay. I

Simone Collins: oh no,

Malcolm Collins: but anyway. Let's get into this.

So now we're gonna [00:05:00] go to the second figure I sent you. Okay. And these are all from a study, mental health trends and the great awakening.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Okay. So we're starting right now with figure 27. I'm skipping around, I'm not showing the figures in order. I'm showing them to sort of painted narrative here.

Simone Collins: The effects of frequent social media use on internalizing symptoms by ideology. Yes.

Malcolm Collins: It, it illustrates the average score differences on seven item anxiety index and a 20 item depression index between self-identified liberals and conservatives. Uhhuh. These individuals reported using social media for over two hours at a time, uhhuh at least several times a week, 36% of the sample compared to those who rarely do 46% of this sample among liberals, those who use social media more frequently score.

0.33 standard deviation higher on the anxiety index and 0.22 standard deviations higher on the depression index compared with those who report never using social media for two hours at a time, or minimal use. Mm-hmm. In contrast, these differences among conservatives are negligible, 0.05 standard deviations and [00:06:00] 0.04 standard deviations respectively.

And this is a different study than the above study. So multiple studies are finding this.

Simone Collins: People,

Malcolm Collins: interesting People just keep going in and finding that social media is, or, or I guess I should could say conservative online content is not bad for your mental health. It's progressive online content that's bad for your mental health.

Mm-hmm. Which means it's not the online content itself that's bad for your mental health. It's not the fact that you're consuming online content that's bad for your mental health.

Simone Collins: Thank you.

Malcolm Collins: It's the fact that you are conserving this ideological virus that as part of breaking you down and sort of turning you into a slave that will go out like a ant infected, like the corsets virus, go out and try to infect other ants.

It needs to break down your immune system first. Your mental immune system. And what that looks like is, is hating yourself. Mm-hmm. Although it uses different and, and not, keep in mind this study was showing not just depression, it was also anxiety. So, so in, in progressives engaging with their social media content increases both anxiety and depression.

Simone Collins: [00:07:00] Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Although it uses different and arguably more ambiguous measures of social media, use the 2022 wave of national, american National Election Studies social media study reveals similar results among liberals. Average depression scores increase with greater social media use. For example, those who reported daily use of at least one platform, 70% of liberal, 64% of conservatives scored significantly higher on a two item depression index compared with those who never use social media, 7% of liberals and 8% of conservatives.

Mm-hmm. Conservatives show much smaller. Less consistent increases in depression across usage levels, specifically while liberals who reported daily usage score 0.34 standard deviation higher on depression than those who do not use any social media. The difference for conservatives is close to zero and not sign statistically significant.

And this is a in blue graph here on screen that is absolutely wild how stark that is. Any [00:08:00] thoughts before I go further by the way, or theories I.

Simone Collins: One thing that stands out to me is that I could just keep thinking about both, both super progressive and super conservative. Online spheres can come across as mean, but the mean is very different. There's locker room mean, and actually, you know what it's mean, girl mean versus locker room mean. So the locker room room is like calling each other names, pushing each other around, but it's like immediately forgotten and not retained and not toxic.

Mm-hmm. And then progressives have this mean girl mean, which is talking about people behind their backs and being really catty and Oh, an

Malcolm Collins: organizing lists that, that of like blocking people. Yes. These

Simone Collins: people have been. Yeah, we, we hate these people and these people need to be destroyed and, and everything is retained.

Everything is held onto the, the resentment grows and festers. Whereas locker room talk is locker room talk. You're just messing around with each other, you know, and, and honestly, [00:09:00] that creates anti fragility. So I, I'm just in my head. My intuition is going to Well, and

Malcolm Collins: it's really important for like low anxiety, low depression, I think.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and it's again, building that anti fragility. You need to be insulted, you need to be pushed. And, and I think the really great thing about locker room talk and that kind of masculine bullying and making fun is that often it, it's really like it's real. You know, people make fun of you being fat as a dude 'cause you're fat.

People make fun of you being short or bald as a dude 'cause you're short or bald. Right? Like, and those things can really hurt. But they force you to find ways to deal with that and make up for it. Yeah. Whereas the kind of mean girl talk is very different. It is about systematically destroying and pulling you down as a kind of may blocking strategy and dominance hierarchy strategy.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. And, and, and you do see that these problems are worse for women than men when they interact in online environments.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Yeah. So that's, that's what I'm thinking here.

Malcolm Collins: These findings suggest that even [00:10:00] if girls and liberals and boys and conservatives were to spend si similar, if not equal amounts of time on social media, the former two groups would be worse off in terms of mental wellbeing.

Among these groups, liberals, especially liberal females, may suffer the most. Not only are liberals higher in neuroticism of emotional and aesthetic openness. Empathetic concern and justice sensitivity. Something I hadn't heard about before, but we'll talk about traits they share with women, but they also tend to score lower in conscientiousness, which likely puts them at a disadvantage in terms of emotional regulation and focus.

This further heightens their susceptibility to negative rumination in doom scrolling. In fact, the very limited data we have on the intersection of ideology and doom schooling from a small study of online sample 500 of residents of. OECD countries indicate that liberal and left aligned individuals score significantly higher, just under 0.3 standard deviation on measures of drom scrolling compared to the political right.

That is fascinating to me, and I think that they are wrong here. What they're [00:11:00] seeing is that when people start to engage in these things or have these traits like low conscientiousness, it makes them more susceptible to the mind virus. Because if you have sort of mental discipline, then you're able to, the mind virus hits you and you're like, oh, this is stupid.

The people who believes this stuff, obviously all are constantly. Tearing each other down and don't seem, I think that this is why consistently, even with progressives when they're high conscientiousness individuals who have this sort of ability to go out there, found a company, make something work like a JK Rowling or something like that mm-hmm.

They typically don't break. And they stay and end up on the conservative side. Whereas if they're the type of person who just got their roles through like DEI or moving up a bureaucratic ladder they continue to sort of. Hide in fear of all this. Mm-hmm. I'd also point out that it, it, it shows that our opponents really are not like having a good time.

Like if you are a liberal, you are a depressed, anxiety, adult mess. It is not awesome. As recently to a reporter [00:12:00] describing what it's like being in the prenatal list movement, and I'm like it's sort of like the Titanic has sunk and we're in a lifeboat and there's somebody in the freezing water, and I say to them, get.

Out of the water, or you are going to freeze to death here, you know, let me help you. And they'll say, did you hear what he just said? He said if I don't get in the boat, he's gonna kill me. And I'm like, no. What? No. I said, get in the boat or you're gonna die. And they're like, ha, he said it again. He said it again.

And I'm like, okay. Okay. So I talked them through that, and then they're like, wait a second, didn't Hitler have a boat? And I'm like, what? What

that, that has nothing to do with this situation. Get in the boat. And then they're like, wait, are you sure there's not any. On the boat was you. And I'm like, I don't know. I haven't asked these people. They're like, ha, I knew it. Only a racist wouldn't ask other people if they're not racist. And I'm like, what, [00:13:00] what, what does that have to do with anything?

They're, I'm just saving everyone I see right now. And it's very much like when I tell people, your culture won't exist in the future if you can't motivate above your population fertility rate. And they're like, ah. So you're saying you're gonna eradicate us if we can't motivate? I'm like. N no, no, I'm not.

Oh, good, look, your friends are here! Hey!

You're supposed to want to have children. And this is your ultimate goal in life. It is a very archaic idea and old idea and representation of a woman.

So you you're getting people to sign a petition.

pledge, basically saying that they will not have Children until the Canadian government takes serious action on climate change.

Is that your blood? What, no. No, it's college kid blood. And how many people have signed on so far. 1, 381 as of right now. I know what this is. This is a suicide pact. Oh my god, that makes [00:14:00] so much sense. , we have got to hide all of the sharp objects!

if only I was born with a vagina. To solve that problem. Amen, sister.

Holy mother of God! Some kid, he just hucked himself right into the wood chipper! What? Head first, right into the wood chipper! It looked like it might have been one of the college kids..

Malcolm Collins: But this sort of constant mindset of like needing to vet everyone, having to constantly worry about fears of contamination is mentally incredibly unhealthy.

Simone Collins: It's also a very, being someone who has a lot of contamination problems that are not connected to logic, I can tell that there's a mental problem there.

Malcolm Collins: Mm.

Simone Collins: Takes one to know, one

Malcolm Collins: takes one to know one all. However, people's social media experiences, particularly the content they encounter, are at least partially influenced by the broader media and political context As figure 29 illustrates using the salience of the New York Times since about 2011, news media, attention to societal issues, [00:15:00] societal issues, the.

This, these are signs of the urban monoculture. When these words are used often, like racism, inequality, discrimination, sexism has surged to unprecedented levels. Oh, I wonder if it's because they're associated with a matic virus. Concurrently the underlying sentiment reflected in news media has become decidedly more negative and pessimistic.

Of course, some of this is attributable to the rise of Trump and his president. See, okay. I'm sure. Which serves to intensify these trends. And consequently, the alarm, many liberals felt, so here, if, if it was because of Trump and his presidency, it would've gone down in the Biden presidency and it didn't.

And here, just across the board, you see this sharp spike upwards in terms of like, racism, sexism, oppression, privilege trauma discrimination, vulnerable bias if, if patriarch. Of our patriarchy, injustice, inequality. And what's really interesting is they measured this on Twitter now x from 2008 to [00:16:00] 2023.

And what you see is it's going way up, like it was, was the New York Times, and then there's the eLog and acquisition in 2022 and it starts to fall off a cliff with all of these, these same words, which I think is really interesting. And, and, and I think a direct. I mean, I bet if you looked on Blue Sky that you said these words, it's just off the chart.

Simone Collins: Yeah. I don't even, I wouldn't wanna know.

Malcolm Collins: As the tenor and content of social media coverage have become more negative and alarmist, so have the perceptions of sociopolitical issues among young liberal females and males as shown in figure 31. Young liberals, especially liberal females, have become much more socially and politically conscious over the last 10 years.

For instance, and I think this is just the amount of their brain that the urban monoculture has eaten. It, it like a virus infecting cells infects more and more nodes of their brain until all they ever think about is the urban monoculture and needing to spread it. And then eventually they just end up like breaking down and screaming.

Like when one of those insects is infected by like a, a [00:17:00] insect that controls this mind and like eats it from the inside and they get to the stage where they're just bloated and filled with like worms. That's, that's what they are when they're like at GC game conferences last year. All of the, like, people with dyed Herod went outside and screamed at the sky.

Malcolm Collins: And it was just like a great, to me example of just like total mental breakdown. Nothing is left of the host.

All right. I'm not talking to that thing in your head. I'm talking to Skara. Nothing of the host survives. Your friend had a feeble mind. It suffered greatly and gave it easily.

Malcolm Collins: But nothing of the host survived. And, and I think that this is true, you know, once you're, this Eaton is, is very hard to ever come back.

And I think that this is why a lot of lefties in the media that they produced, like we were talking [00:18:00] this morning about how good 30 Rock was when compared to Unbreakable to Kimmy Schmidt, even though it had the same team and I think it was. 30 rock, the brain watt hadn't eaten as much as them. They were able to have like, really cool and aspirational conservative figures like Jack Donnay in it or like, you know, the team.

Well, they

Simone Collins: made fun of them, but they made fun of everyone. Yeah. And I think they, they were still able to acknowledge the existence of, and, and have the presence of conservative figures, whereas it got to this point where like the mere presence of a conservative figure, even if they were the. The source of Ridicule WA was considered.

Well, you wouldn't knowable, I mean you saw the same in, in Parks and Rec as well, where there was a conservative figure. Yeah. Ron

Malcolm Collins: Swanson, you, you wouldn't have a Ron Swanson in modern Progressive Media. Yeah. And,

Simone Collins: and he was played by a progressive actor. Like,

Malcolm Collins: well, remember that Progressives can't and we did an episode on this recently.

They really struggle to mentally model conservatives.

Simone Collins: Well, and that's, but I feel like there's something de that degraded because [00:19:00] clearly before that was possible. And yeah. And in addition

Malcolm Collins: to being unable to mentally model conservatives, they also in, in conservatives show a great deal of empathy for liberals.

But liberals show very little empathy for conservatives. Yeah. And so I think that it's just sort of as the brain rot eats some more and more, I think that this is part of what we're seeing with the Wachowski effect, which I've, I've talked about before. What you'll have a, like a great game designer or great writer, like the people who did like the matrix they get.

Trans surgery and then everything they do sucks after that. And I think part of it can just be getting more and more into this culture that prevents you from mentally modeling others as part of it. The reason why the urban monocultural virus has to prevent you from modeling others is that if you could, you would be much more likely to leave it.

You would see how imperialistic it is that its goal is that the, the colonizers flag, this new perverse version of the pride flag is, is. Over every country in the world. You know, they want one day this to be on top of every mosque and every you know, establishment in Africa.

They, they want a true global monoculture as the outcome of this because [00:20:00] that's how the monoculture motivates them to go out and, and, and convert people because they're not motivating and, and reproducing. Mm-hmm. It's a faster way for a culture to spread, but obviously it'll eventually burn itself out.

I, I almost think of it as like a wildfire that's burning through the human population right now and just extinguishing huge swaths of it. Sad, but you know, this is where we are. Yeah. As the tenor of content and media coverage have become more negative and alarmists so have the perceptions of sociopolitical issues among young liberal females and males.

As shown in figure 31, young liberals, especially liberal females, have become much more socially and politically conscious in the past 10 years. For instance, the share of liberals who say. That they frequently think about the social problems of the nation in the world, in quote, imagine if somebody said that to you on a date.

I think a lot about the social problems of the nation in the world. I'd be like, that's such a red flag, has reached record highs, as has the share who say they are working to quote correct social and economic inequalities in quote. Extremely important to them. Concerns [00:21:00] about race relations and environment have also surged while tr changing remarkably little among conservatives of both sexes.

So that's really fascinating. So if you're looking at this on, on screen here, the far left category is the female liberal, where you just see it like shooting up. During the first Trump P presidency interesting. Down during the Biden presidency, they're like, oh, I don't care anymore. And second Trump presidency's like,

Simone Collins: ah,

Malcolm Collins: Trump DER syndrome on a graph.

So Trump presidency here. So, no, it's just constant like freaking out. I, I bet right now it's off the charts for them. And it was the mail, liberals, it, it, it goes up a lot here. But with the conservatives, what's interesting is there are periods where it has gone up, but it seems to actually be going down a lot on average, especially things like, I often worry about pollution and climate change.

Hmm. And I've noticed this was in our circles, like people don't care about the, the climate as much as they used to. Well,

Simone Collins: I think that after so many, I mean in our case, decades of being told that the end is nine and.

Malcolm Collins: Here we

Simone Collins: are. Hi. [00:22:00] Well, it's

Malcolm Collins: not just that, but it's so clear that like, oh, okay, so we panicked about it and you had control of the UN and you had control of the US government, and you had control of the World Health Organization and you did the Paris Accords, and nothing did.

Nothing was achieved, right? Like apparently it's still a major issue. We shut down everything during covid. I, and we didn't e, we only incrementally met the carbon reduction that's expected every year. That one year. Like obviously it's not doable. And, and, and so I think for a lot of people, they're like, well, what you just let a large number of species die?

And I'm like, yeah, sure. Like it's happened before. That we are not the first species to cause a many liberals. It's so weird to me when they're like, well, there's been mass extinctions before, but like, no animal has ever caused a mass. I'm like, yes. They have. Like, have you not heard of the great oxidation event?

Like, are you just like you, you're so proudly uneducated. It's actually happened in two of the major mass extinctions. It was caused by a life form. So yeah, it has happened. It's a thing. It's a thing that

Simone Collins: [00:23:00] living life does.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Humans will find a way to survive. Without nature, humans won't find a way to survive without humans.

You know, so it's, it's one of these things where I'm like, I'd like nature to be around, but it's really more of a aesthetic concern. I'm much more interested in just categorizing think it's, it's DNA, so it can be recreated at a future date, you know? Yeah. See with these dire wolves they're creating now you, these science downers, and they bummed me out so much.

Like when they made the dire wolves and somebody was like, oh, it's just like putting them in costumes. They only changed like a few of the, it's like, come on, man, like you, this, this is literally laid out. Specifically

Simone Collins: what they're complaining about is that they're not genetically identical. Like they don't have the exact DNA of historical dire wolves, because instead what they did was they.

Altered them to phenotypically be what we could guess is the same as

Malcolm Collins: dire wolf. You've seen di Wolf, DNA

Simone Collins: using, well, yeah, they used dire wolf, DNA to see kind of what was going on, but then used different interventions to adjust it to. 20% bigger to make them [00:24:00] all white, to do a bunch of other things. And yes,

Malcolm Collins: but they were, they were not.

So there's something that some people have tried to do in the past, which is make genetic changes to an animal. Not using the original animal's, DNA, just to make it look more like an ancestral phenotype. Mm-hmm. So, so maybe trying to breed cows larger because it was a larger form of cow in the past.

The, this has been done with a few species. That is not what the dire wolf thing was.

I misspoke here. This was what the dire wolf thing was. , still incredibly impressive nonetheless.

Malcolm Collins: . Yeah. This is a bit like somebody coming up to Jurassic Park and

Oh, that's just a big chicken. It, it's just been phenotypically changed to look like a brontosaurus. Like what are you talking about? Why are you guys so impressed with this? It's like,

Some people have a compulsive need to erase all of the wonder from the world in a human [00:25:00] achievement. I.

Malcolm Collins: there was a woman who we had on our show before recently in relation to ai, and she had a moment like this where she did an episode saying, AI is not conscious and it's never going, we're never gonna get a GI.

And she used this proof this study that we might go onto in another episode where it showed that AI. Didn't know how it came to the decisions that it was coming to, and I was like, I wish you had watched Our AI is probably conscious in the same way we are video in that we show that humans work that exact same way.

Yeah. Like this is, this is only going

Simone Collins: to convince us more that AI is humans. Yeah. It,

Malcolm Collins: it's literally, not only do humans work in the same way, but if you ask a human, if they work in that way, they'll say, no, I don't work in that way. And they will make up fake memories of how they, mm-hmm. Thought through something.

Mm-hmm. Watch our you know, stop pretending humans are s Sapient video or LLMs are, are, are, you know, function the same way the human brain does. Mm-hmm. But anyway, so, so not only that, but like a human, they will make up. [00:26:00] Having, how, how they got to their end state. So literally every part of that process is exactly the way the human brain appears to do it.

And then people can be like, well, I remember specific intermediary steps in my thinking. And it's like, well, that's just because we don't haveis looking at their own ledgers right now. But it's not that we can't, if you've ever used like a deep search on grok. Or on Google, you can see where it will output the various parts of its thought.

You could have the AI have access to that. We just choose to not give it access to that. That's about how we're handling its memory. We're basically erasing the, the point where it was making markers of what it was thinking that we would otherwise have in our own head. So I, I just find that to be like some people are just so determined to not see the wonder in the world.

It makes me sad. But anyway, back to the topic at hand. Trends in sociopolitical awareness among 12th graders by ideology and sex. So we, we just went over that. I didn't notice it was 12th graders. That's sad. Alright. [00:27:00] So despite the significant educational socioeconomic advancements that women have achieved since the 1960s, figure 32 further shows that liberals now perceive greater discrimination against women in various.

Context, including in assessing higher education than ever recorded. We've got, oh, this is another episode, and it's just insane. They think women are more discriminated against now than they were like 10 years ago, 20 years ago. Concurrently the share of female liberals who think their sex will prevent them from obtaining their desired careers, quote unquote, somewhat, or quote unquote, a lot shot up by more than 30 points between 20 12, 30 6% in 2019.

67%.

In contrast, if they've changed at all, perceptions of discrimination against women are lower among conservatives of both Sexists today than they were in the 1970s. Which is accurate, like the conservatives seem to be broadly accurate. They think that women are less discriminated against as time goes on, where progressives just have [00:28:00] this shoot up out of nowhere in 20 20 12.

That's where this number just like shoots up the female liberal. What's interesting is that the male liberal shoots up and then like goes back down. It's still fairly low. Interesting. Female conservatives going down over time. But this is, this is, and 2012

Simone Collins: was Gamergate, right?

Like we sort of, Gamergate

Malcolm Collins: was every, Gamergate, what was it was in

Simone Collins: 2014.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. I, I don't know, 28. I wanna say 2014. Anyway, but yeah. This is, oh, interesting. Okay. So this is, remember how we had that, like what happened in like 2012 question or 2014? Yeah. Gamergate was 2014,

Simone Collins: by the way. You're right.

Yeah. That we're

Malcolm Collins: seeing the same thing here. It's when they interacted with online culture. Yeah. This new reme virus. Mm. When their, their perception of reality shot to hell. All downstream of Tumblr. Tumblr came phenomenon, and then everything changed. Oh, the Tumblr arenas attacked and now everyone thinks they're a dog.

I didn't know [00:29:00] this, but there, like, I thought like the dog and furry stuff in school was like completely fake, but there was like this great video of kids protesting outside of school because furries were being allowed to like, walk around school and like bite the other kids, and kids were getting like.

Sent to like detention if they like kicked them away or like, they, the kids weren't even allowed to wear costumes on Halloweens, but the furries were allowed to on a daily basis. And it was because the principal's daughter was a furry, apparently. That's why she Oh

Simone Collins: dear. Well, that sounds like one crazy isolated case.

Most of the instances of furry fear that I've heard of have ultimately been. Discounted somewhat, or, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: I'm very much like chill out about furries people. Like Yeah, like whatever, whatever. Kids are

Simone Collins: weird. Like, and they, you know, I remember there were the kids, at least in my high school who like.

There was one kid who insisted on wearing a vampire cape to school every day. You know, we didn't make a big deal out of it. We didn't give them a litter box or like some blood to suck. We just let wear cape, you know? Do you

Malcolm Collins: remember the [00:30:00] trend where everyone thought they were vampires for a while? Like psychic vampires and stuff like this?

No.

Simone Collins: One. No one in my school, I think, actually thought no one in my school

Malcolm Collins: did, but I saw it online. You guys are missing the best trends from internet history. This is like early internet. There were all these like communities for them and everything, and they're like, oh yeah, this big thing. I had, I

Simone Collins: had like friends who, who practiced what they believed to be Wiccan things.

I did too. I did too.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Yeah.

Simone Collins: But not, not,

Malcolm Collins: I remember one was like, okay, watch, I'm gonna make the wind blow. And she's like, we gotta say super still. Then like August would come after like a little bit, she'd be like, see, I did it. Oh boy. I was like, okay, okay, okay. Oh, I, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that these people were more susceptible to mimetic viruses.

Simone Collins: Oh, yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Right. You wanna see the history of Wicked that it was all basically made up in the 1920s. You can go into our video on that. It's, it's pretty interesting actually.

Simone Collins: Very entertaining.

Malcolm Collins: Other data similarly revealed high degrees of use, pessimism about the prospects of success for women and racial minority groups in [00:31:00] contemporary American society.

For example, a 2023 study released by Skeptic Research Center observed that 49% of female and 34% of male Gen Z correspondents agreed that women in the United States have no so hope for success because of sexism. 40 'cause of now 4%. Yeah. In 2023, women make up like the vast, what do they think is happening to women?

They, they make more money than what men do at Yeah. Lower age ranges. Like what? It's, it's, it's, it's, it's worse in regular discrimination because they are doing it well. Being ungrateful. Yeah. That's just the worst. That is really bad. It is, it it, Hey, at least they're going extinct and, and, and hate themselves.

Like, you know, they could be doing this and having a grand time of it. Right. You know? While the rates of agreement were comparable among millennials, 44.5% and 36.8%, they dropped substantially for Gen X, female, male 23.9%, and Boomer 25.9%, [00:32:00] 15.6% correspondence. Further, as in the MTF data, they also show a market political divide with 51.8% of very liberal correspondence agreeing with a statement and 23.2% of very conservative correspondence, not so even within very conservative correspondence, 23.2% in 2023 agreed with a statement that women in the United States have.

No hope of success because of sexism. Oh, oh, this just

Simone Collins: RO versus stuff

Malcolm Collins: is I, I don't know. I don't know. These people are mentally, as we know now, like this, this isn't tied to reality. Now we're gonna get to where we break this out. 'cause this chart I found to be the most interesting.

Simone Collins: Okay. I

Malcolm Collins: can figure 33 here.

Okay.

Okay. If media driven increases in the adoption of woke bias centered narratives of inequality have contributed to liberal conservative differences in mental health. Mm-hmm. Such differences con considerably when woke beliefs were held constant.

Mm.

Simone Collins: Supporting

Malcolm Collins: [00:33:00] the hypothesis. Figure 33, which uses data from the 2022 cooperative election study, shows that a force item index of. Racial wokeness alone accounts for more than nearly half 0.5 SD conservative liberal difference in self related mental health.

Simone Collins: Okay, what am I looking at here?

Malcolm Collins: I, I'll explain after I get to the end of this 'cause it's a little hard.

Okay. Yeah. So, reflect religiosity alone accounts for just under a third of this gap. So half of the gap accounted for by wokeness. But a third is accounted for by, a lack of religion. So, so wokeness is more damaging to an individual than not having religion. Racial wokeness is more mentally damaging than not having religion.

Mm-hmm. But, but, but only by a degree, not like, dramatically more damaging.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: That's

Simone Collins: interesting because Yeah, I, I think a lot of people turn, of course, to progressive mainstream urban monoculture culture because they have abandoned their inherited cultures. But you have to fill that void [00:34:00] to. Make do with the complexities of modern society, and yet this is making things worse.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, so what you see here, which is absolutely fascinating, is if you and, and so every line here that you're seeing, like every set of graphs, is how much of a difference this makes with the far on the left, one conservative versus liberal, the middle one being female conservative versus female liberal.

The far right one being male conservative versus male liberal. Mm-hmm. But you can see there's really not that much of a difference in here. It, it affects 'em all about equally. But what you see here is if you adjust for one religiosity, I find really interesting because it appears that religiosity.

Has more or, or, or not having it is more damaging to females than it is to males.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Which makes sense because females often go to like crazy other things when they're not religious, like Wiccan and like crystals and stuff like that. Whereas males typically go to atheism or agnosticism, which is a much more mentally healthy way to deal with reality.

Simone Collins: Maybe [00:35:00] I think women are more consensus building and like community oriented. It would seem so. The, the lack of community that comes with strong culture would be felt more by someone who is more inclined to community. No.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. So, if you, if you, adjust for all covariate. So, and this is really interesting.

Mm-hmm. So specifically here, this is adjusting for racial wokeness religiosity and self-rated physical health demographic, socioeconomic indicators. Mm-hmm. You get between conservatives and liberals, almost the same rate to the mental health. Huh. So it really is entirely explained by racial wokeness and religion.

Simone Collins: Wow. That's,

Malcolm Collins: that's almost all of it. Because that's the pink graph here. It's only a little bit higher than, than putting in everything

Simone Collins: that's crazy. I. Oh man.

Malcolm Collins: The relationship between attitudinal wokeness and poor mental [00:36:00] health outcomes has also been found. Outside the US was a recent finished study showing that agreement was the statement, quote, if white people have on average higher income than black people, it's because of racism, has the strongest correlation with anxiety, depression, and general unhappiness.

Simone Collins: Oh.

Malcolm Collins: One that's like obviously a wrong statement. Like there's a bunch of other things that could cause that. But people who are in the urban monoculture, one of the beliefs of the urban monoculture is just, people aren't different. No one else believes that people aren't. Everyone else is like, yeah, there's like cultural differences between people at the very least.

Mm-hmm. And it could be something in black culture that's causing this. Dis disparity. But they cannot say that within the urban monoculture. In the urban monoculture, everyone is exactly the same, which is ironic because then they're like, diversity has value. And it's like, why does the diversity have value if everyone's exactly the same?

Like, we're not having different perspectives and proficiencies to the table. And predilections. Why? Why do I need an equal number of men and women in my company? Why not just have all men? Presumably, it's exactly the same as having an equal number of men and women. Presumably. It's [00:37:00] exactly the same.

Like having, having only white people is presumably exactly the same as having some black people. So there's no benefit to it. Like, why would I do that? And I found that really interesting.

Simone Collins: That is really interesting.

Malcolm Collins: All right. Now we're gonna go back to some other parts of the study. So, we're getting outta the area that I found the most interesting in the study.

Hmm. Importantly, as depicted in figure 19 Below, sourced from three large and recent studies of US adults, some of the same personality facets that distinguish girls and boys similarly distinguish liberals from conservatives. Hmm. And this is likely why we're seeing them split into two different camps, as we've seen.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Those deviating political divides.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, women are more voting progressive and men are more voting conservative. Similar to the pattern observed in sex differences, we see the w withdrawal aspect of neuroticism encompassing depression and anxiety facets, the openness aspect of openness slash intellect, encompassing aesthetic sensitivity, and emotionality.

And the compassion aspect of agreeableness in governing facets like fear, mindedness, and empathetic [00:38:00] concern are all positively linked with a liberal leftwing political orientation. Conversely, the facets of conscientiousness and a certain facets of extroversion such as assertiveness, are associated with conservative right-wing political orientation.

And you have a graph here showing that, because girls and liberals tend to score higher than boys and conservatives on key factors of neuroticism, openness and agreeableness, all of which are positively associated with justice sensitivity. It follows that girls and liberals would also likely score higher on justice sensitivity.

Data presented in figure 20, drawn from separate studies of US adults supports this expectation across studies on most, if not all, four aspects of justice sensitivity, observer, beneficiary. Perpetrator victim Women score significantly higher than men and liberals score significantly higher than conservatives.

The bottom row of Figure 20 additionally shows these ideological differences hold within each sex with female liberals, outscoring, female conservatives, and male liberals, outscoring male conservatives. [00:39:00] That is really fascinating. Because this actually I want to go down and take like, what is justice sensitivity? Yeah. Taken together, the data shows that girls in liberal tend to score significantly higher than boys and conservatism personality traits associated with mental health challenges and significantly lower on those associated with psychological resilience and stability.

Oh, really? This is a funny thing, like I as a guy can be like, girl, be crazy. And, and they'll be like and I'd get canceled for that. I'd be like, no, like biologically girls are like, kind of crazy. Okay. And, and here this is a research paper saying this data shows that girls tend to score significantly higher than boys on personality traits associated with mental health challenges, and significantly lower on those associated with psychological resilience and stability.

So unfortunate they're less conscientious and more neurotic.

In other words, some of the traits that help explain the poor mental health outcomes of girls relative to boys may also be relevant to [00:40:00] explaining the poor mental health outcomes of liberals relative to conservatives. In fact, this vulnerability in girls may be tied, at least in part to their disproportionate alignment with liberal left wing ideological orientations.

And here what you can see interesting is digital connectivity among adults 18 to 29. This is for 12th graders, a comparison of internet usage with political orientation and sex. And what you see here is liberals just use this stuff a lot more than conservatives here. I'm gonna think it's because of lower conscientiousness.

They are more susceptible to addiction.

Simone Collins: Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So, they start using this stuff and they can't turn it off as easy.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Well, and I mean, I think any sort of approach to addictive stimuli is going to be. People are less likely to recover from it if they are progressive because there's this progressive attitude against removing in the moment pain.

And the only way that you're going to get through addiction is to remove in the moment pain, or [00:41:00] I mean, is to endure in favor of long-term benefit. Right? So, and

Malcolm Collins: here I'll put up two more graphs, which show the same thing. I'm not gonna say it again. But it just shows liberals using this much, much more than conservatives.

Now this was really interesting. Differences in emotional responses to social media, content and interactions, as well as attention to certain types of content may be equal, if not more relevant to understanding the sex and ideological gaps in mental health. First, higher average levels of neuroticism.

Empathetic concern and justice sensitivity among girls and liberals would likely make them more sensitive to negative social evaluations, aesthetic, moral, intellectual when interacting with others on social media, while this proposition cannot be directed, tested. Figure 24 present suggestive evidence drawn from MTF survey on 12th graders, specifically girls, irrespective of political orientation and liberals, regardless of sex, reported significantly higher levels of concern about how they were perceived by others.

Mm-hmm. Interestingly, during a. 2017 to [00:42:00] 2022, the share reporting concern has grown 13 to 17 points among the liberals and 12th graders of both sexes and 12 points among conservative females. In stark contrast, no net changes have vari among conservative males who, as we've seen

, tend to be fair comparatively better on base indicators of mental health and report the lowest rates of frequent social media use. So this is a grade of, of within 12 graders. I often worry about how other people react to me. And what you're seeing here is liberals just being way more concerned about this and also women being way more concerned about this.

But interestingly, that concern has gone up , over time.

Simone Collins: That makes sense. Again, the progressive subculture in general is much more focused on conformity, consensus building, et cetera, whereas the renegade sovereignty, I. Libertarian leaning culture is now the conservative culture.

Well,

Malcolm Collins: I actually would think it, it might be something else. It might be even a desire to want to [00:43:00] confirm, makes it easier to foresee to be a liberal. Because liberalism today being the culture of the urban monoculture, the dominant cultural group mm, is going to be much more conformist. You're going to be afraid to stand up against that.

And so if you have this deep desire to confirm and, and, and be approved by other people that's gonna happen to you. And you, you're gonna, what's the core? It's the core thing that he uses. Like if you look at the urban monoculture, it's like it gets you to fall in line by like screaming racist or something like that, or trans fo whenever you say something that like.

Is, is, is, is dangerous to the urban monocultures proliferation to continue here. Recall that neuroticism, openness and agreeableness are all predictive and conscientiousness negatively. Predictive of the reported frequency of encountering social media and content that triggers feelings of depression and loneliness.

So all of these negative traits are, are predictive of how effective these social media things are going to be at hurting you and liberals go into spaces [00:44:00] where the content that hurts them is more frequent which is really interesting as we saw, like they doom scroll more and we just know this from, from liberal spaces.

Conservatives actually seem to like. In terms of the content, they like content that affirms their preexisting police a lot more. Instead of just do they more than

Simone Collins: conservatives. I just feel like that's a human thing. With

Malcolm Collins: conservatives, it's affirms their existing beliefs and look at the other side, getting their comeuppance, like videos of leftists crying after an election, or leftists women who left guys, you know, ending up.

Sad as adults or, you know, I always tell Simone Progressives

Simone Collins: like that too. I've, I've been seeing, 'cause you know, I follow both a lot more than you do, I think. Oh yeah. They,

Malcolm Collins: they do like, like, oh, I not my face like a leopard wouldn't eat my face or something. Well, no, now

Simone Collins: they're like, maga people are now regretting their choice to vote for Trump 'cause of the tariffs.

Like they're 100% doing that too. What heck of

Malcolm Collins: people as if, like, I, I actually know, I don't know, I haven't

Simone Collins: watched the videos, but I've seen the title cards and they're, they're trying to make this argument and I think. Maybe the same thing, the same reaction would be had by a [00:45:00] progressive when they're like, what single cat lady is crying?

Because she's all alone. She's happy. You know? So, I don't know. I, I, I don't see that. Is plausible

Malcolm Collins: as just progressive. I love it. I also see progressives like freaking out. Like Trump's putting in tariffs, Trump's firing woke. Like, like people who were involved in DEI, I'm like, yeah, he told us he was gonna do all of that when he was campaigning.

That's why we voted for him. Like outta the blue. This isn't like a, a surprise, this is, this is what he was running on. If he didn't do it, it would be a sign about lack of integrity.

Simone Collins: Anyway, this was the plan.

Malcolm Collins: Given these relationships and the sex and ideological differences in personality traits, we would expect women and liberals to report encountering such content at significantly higher frequency than men and conservatives data graph and figure 25 confirms that they do.

So I'll just go straight to the, the graph here and we can talk through it. Sex and ideological differences in reported frequency, encountering social media content that triggers negative internalizing emotions men versus [00:46:00] women and liberals versus conservatives. Again, you just see that they're encountering this stuff at way higher rates.

And I think again they do seem to seek it out a bit more. The, the conservatives are winning and look at how bad they're doing is. Mm-hmm. Is like a common liberal thing. So, mm-hmm. And then here we have a graph that shows trends in relation between daily screen time and negative mental health outcomes among high school students by sex.

And it's looking at unli ideation, all three tapes combined, mental depressive episodes, su aside plans and you see just this stuff going up slightly, but not that much. And so what I would actually take away from this is, and I seem to remember looking at the debt on this and said it was nearly statistically not relevant.

So it is not the internet that's causing the rise in unli rates. It is progressivism that's, or, or some, some meme that's in the environment that people. Who L-G-G-B-T are more exposed to, and [00:47:00] women are more exposed to. Mm-hmm. And progressives are more exposed to, I would guess it's the urban monoculture.

Your friend had a feeble mind. It suffered greatly and gave it easily.

Malcolm Collins: You know, if it's ev, ev, ev, everybody who walked in that particular room like fell out sad. Like, now I will note here, you, this is where you get the, the, the trends of young adult mental health and smartphone, social media use. And you see it all going up. And so you get this. Perception of, oh, it's, it's smartphone stuff.

But what we're seeing in the other data is no, it's progressive stuff, which is being transmitted through smartphones. If you're a conservative and you have one as this, you're just not getting as big a negative effect or potentially any negative effect at all.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: Here I note a graph that says trends in religious importance and attendance among 12th graders by political ideology and sex.

Now. This is interesting because what we're seeing here is female [00:48:00] and male liberals, it's going like way down. But generally speaking female conservatives are much more religious than male conservatives. The orange line is female conservatives and the red line is male conservatives.

Simone Collins: Hmm.

Malcolm Collins: So that's fascinating. Whereas. It's actually true with liberals as well. Male liberals are less religious than female liberals. The blue line is male liberals. The purple line is, is female liberals. That's that's really interesting. Anyway, Simone, we are gonna head off this and, oh, I guess I can do the last graph here.

. And these are the effects of the big five personality domains on the frequency of en encountering social media content that triggers negative positive emotions.

Simone Collins: Oh, wow. We knew there be correlations. That's interesting. Yeah, so

Malcolm Collins: extroversion is like middling.

You get a openness and intellect causes seeing. Negative things. More neuroticism is, is very big in terms of seeing negative things. I guess that's not surprising. Agreeableness slightly big, but not that much. And and really negative in seeing these [00:49:00] things is, is conscientiousness. So conscientiousness is just really protective, neuroticism really bad.

And neuroticism is higher in women. I'm sorry. I'm gonna get so canceled for that 'cause I, I've got a graph.

Simone Collins: I think we all know it. Like, yeah, women's odds of depression lessons are higher. It, it's just, yeah. This is, it's known.

Malcolm Collins: I'm, I'm, I'm not using gamer words anymore on the show, so I can just say Bees be crazy.

Simone Collins: Yes.

Malcolm Collins: Because I'm so responsible now.

Simone Collins: Women have a different constitution. They're inclined to.

Malcolm Collins: Rotunda teeth,

Simone Collins: hysteria.

Malcolm Collins: You know, it turned out that that whole needing to like masturbate women thing to get rid of hysteria. Yeah. Turned out to be like a, a thing that was made up by like one person. You mean it wasn't

Simone Collins: a widespread treatment?

Malcolm Collins: No. It was like one historian lady who was like a feminist, wanted to like get one over on her boss and like made it up

Simone Collins: like the eating spiders [00:50:00] meme. That's hilarious.

Malcolm Collins: Yes. Number of spiders.

Simone Collins: Wow. That's, there you go.

Malcolm Collins: I can see why it's spread. It's very catchy. It's

Simone Collins: hilarious. Yeah. But wow, that's, that's incredible.

Malcolm Collins: Alright, love you. Did s Simonon happy. I love you too.

Simone Collins: Malcolm. Let's not go crazy. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: I'm more worried about You're the one who's gonna go crazy. We've seen the data.

Simone Collins: I've already gone crazy, so we don't have to worry about me.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, you can't do, oh, you could go double crazy.

Simone Collins: I can, oh.

Malcolm Collins: We're gonna be talking about a lot of graphs.

Simone Collins: Yeah. The new, the new Twitter thread I sent you was about a psychologist, a researcher who wanted to test the ability of psychologists to diagnose conditions. It's, it's quite, it's quite interesting because he's a

Malcolm Collins: famous case study, Simone. I'm very familiar with it.

Simone Collins: Okay. So you know about that one where he like sent in normal professionals like a painter and other stuff

Malcolm Collins: too. Yeah, people haven't covered it enough recently, so like I'm totally okay with. [00:51:00] I'm doing it again, but

Simone Collins: thank you for the graphs you're sending. I love me some graphs. Actually, I don't, I think that I'm not really able to read graphs well, as you can tell, you may have noticed a pattern

Malcolm Collins: where I try to show you a graph and you're like, and I'm

Simone Collins: like the graph it, there are lines trending

Malcolm Collins: and after this point, I'll just maybe describe the grass to you

Simone Collins: because I won't understand them anyway. It's because I'm a woman. Malcolm, why are you trying?

Malcolm Collins: Well, I could probably find some graphs about that.

Simone Collins: It's like showing statistics to a pig.

Two, they're all your favorite car. Yeah. Wow. And look at this tow seat when I turn it over. There's a bunch of blank spaces for more cars. You can keep your car safe in here, mom. Okay, well open it up. Look, one, two. Wow. This is upside down. [00:52:00] Oh my goodness. Opened upside down. And.

This is sweet. Can you say thank you, grandpa Steve? Thank you, grandpa Steve. This is sweet. And this one's blue because that wet. See this wet. Wow.

And this one is gray. This, this like Stacey's gray car. Oh my gosh. Yeah. And And the yellow one. That is so cool. Well, let's put them back. Yeah. Now you have the coolest car container to keep your car safe. Yeah. This, the truck to hold all of your cars. This is the truck to hold all of my cars, so, so they can't be safe.

Is it your favorite thing ever? [00:53:00] Yeah.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com