The Digitally Mediated Self
The Psychology of Weaponised Reactivity: Reaction, Response, and the Failure to Understand
We tend to assume that when people fail to understand one another, it is because they lack information. More often, it is because they are reacting rather than responding. I call this weaponised reactivity: the way our platforms take an ordinary human survival mechanism, our capacity to react under threat, and turn it into a permanent, profitable state that steadily erodes our ability to understand each other at all.
Emotional reactivity is not, in itself, a fault. It is one of our oldest and most useful instincts. The trouble is what happens when it is switched on all the time, and when a technology is designed to keep it that way. Social media does not thrive on nuance, truth, or mutual understanding. It thrives on outrage and emotional contagion, and the result is a slow erosion of our capacity to understand one another. To see why that matters, it helps to start not with politics or platforms, but with a small occurrence most of us will face most days: an aggravating email.
Reaction, response, and the aggravating email
The distinction between reaction and response sits at the centre of my work with organisations trying to build more harmonious workplaces. It is a considerable leap from how one might respond in the workplace to an aggravating email and the nature of geopolitics, but the underlying dynamics are similar enough to be illustrative, and starting with lower-stakes examples lets us get our heads around far more serious ones.
Take an aggravating email. A reactive move is to fire off a hasty reply that serves to express your anger, a choice likely to set off a chain of escalations, ultimately making things worse rather than the first step in resolving a tricky situation. A response is different: you register the emotional impact, sit with it, recover, and then choose how to reply. Perhaps you wait until you are less angry. Perhaps you decide that a phone call or face to face meeting would serve the situation better. You may even discover that your aggravation had little to do with the email at all, but something within you - and by resolving that, you don't have to do anything in response.
When we are in a state of reactivity, several things happen that stand in the way of a good decision. Reactivity reduces our capacity to think, narrowing the range of responses we can imagine. It makes us defensive, and less able to see the situation from the other person's point of view. It is hot, so we react emotionally, which tends to trigger the other person to do the same. And it pushes us into binaries, white and black, good and bad, victim and aggressor, which diminishes any chance of compromise or a shared way forward.
To complicate things, we may be reactive for reasons that have nothing to do with the event in front of us. You may have read the email in a way it was not intended. You may already have felt vulnerable when it arrived. The sender may remind you of someone with whom you have unfinished conflict. The email may simply be the trigger that opens up feelings about something much older.
Because email is instantaneous and effortless to send, it is especially good at provoking reactivity. In a face-to-face encounter, tone of voice, facial expression, body language, and ordinary decorum all help to regulate things down. With an email, you experience all your feelings in your own head, and you react from there.
Reactivity is for short-term fixes, not long-term solutions
Although we cannot simply apply theories of individual psychology to groups, nations, and whole populations, they can help us understand the dynamics beneath a great deal of what we see in the world. When an individual is under threat, they tend to reflexively react under the direction of the self-preservation instinct, rather than respond thoughtfully. These instincts come online in the face of physical danger, but also when something more symbolic is threatened, such as a cherished identity. Under attack, you instinctively defend yourself, fight back, or run.
The moment you are under threat is not the time to reflect on your aggressor's perspective, or to resolve things through reasoned discussion. You become reactive precisely so that you have the resources, the adrenaline and the panic response, to survive it. This is reactivity at its best: it gets you through the emergency so you can live another day.
Once you are safe, your thinking resources return, and you are better able to evaluate what to do next, or to prevent similar conflict in future. There is no guarantee the available choices will be good ones, but they tend to be wider than fight, flight, or freeze.
The difficulty is that when the emergency goes on and on, it can produce a permanent state of reactivity, in which the survival mechanisms are forever engaged and there is little chance to step away and recover. Something similar happens when there is no present danger at all, but a history of violence has produced hypervigilance: a person who has learned to expect threat whether or not it is there. This is common in those who have experienced significant or repeated trauma, and it can even be carried down the generations, when the trauma belonged to one's ancestors rather than oneself.
In short: we need to be reactive when we are in danger, and it does us no good to stay reactive when we are not.
Social media: like a hurricane of angry emails
Now scale that up. Social media is like a hurricane of angry emails sent to no one in particular, and one that, to mix a metaphor, snowballs. Righteous indignation is voiced, amplified by agreement on one side and enthusiastically clobbered on the other. Evidence is dragged in to double down, often graphic and distressing, shared and made viral to reinforce positions by amplifying the outrage. And to what end? Certainly not understanding, because understanding requires stepping away from binary thinking, not entrenching it.
More than 60% of the world's population is now on social media, and for many of them it has become a primary source of news. These are not platforms built for nuance. They profit from our outrage, and that shared outrage keeps us in a state of continuous reactivity that does all the things described above: it limits our thinking, reduces our capacity to understand one another, and hardens the world into binaries that divide us further.
Outrage is not a nice feeling, but it is a sensational one which can be, somewhat perversely, enjoyed. Venting feels relieving; that is why we do it. Being right feels good, and being righteous feels better still. And yet it accomplishes little beyond keeping us coming back for more, even when the engagement makes us miserable. As Johan Hari argues in Stolen Focus, that returning is the point: the design works precisely because it keeps us engaged. It is, more or less, an addiction to poison.
None of this is accidental. Social media is an outrage machine, and more precisely a divisiveness machine, built that way by design. Facebook's own researchers said as much in an internal report, later leaked, which concluded that “our algorithms exploit the human brain's attraction to divisiveness”, and warned that, left unchecked, the platform would serve “more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform”. The same report found that 64% of people who joined extremist groups on the platform were steered there by its own recommendation tools. Its findings were reportedly diluted or shelved, which is not hard to understand: keeping our eyes on the feed is precisely what the business model requires.
The symbolic equation
Part of what makes this so combustible is that social media is a brilliant vehicle for projection, largely because it is so poor at carrying nuance and complexity. Projection, in the psychoanalytic sense, is the way we expel what we cannot bear in ourselves and locate it in someone else. A feed of strangers, stripped of tone, face, and context, is almost purpose-built to receive it: we load our fears and hatreds onto figures we barely know, and they become whatever we need them to be. What looks like expression is often something else. Expressing is not the same as processing, and a great deal of what happens online is the former dressed up as the latter, which tends to exacerbate a wound rather than heal it.
There is a psychoanalytic idea that explains a good deal of what happens next. Kleinians will know this as the "paranoid/schizoid" position, but a simpler way of understanding it is "binary thinking", both rest upon what is known as the symbolic equation, where the distinction between a symbol and the thing it stands for collapses. The symbol no longer represents the thing; it becomes the thing.
This is why a flag, a word, or a group can come to feel identical to the worst associations attached to it, so that a person is treated not as themselves but as a stand-in for something they may not even support. It is a powerful engine of dehumanisation, because it lets each side see the other as simply the same as the threat, which in turn licenses the very behaviour that keeps the cycle turning.
We saw this vividly in the reactions to the 2023 Israel-Gaza escalation, where criticism of Israel was conflated with anti-semitism and the support for Palestine was conflated with Hamas and terrorism. These symbolic equations continue today when an entire population, be that Jews or Palestinians, are equated with binary positions on the geopolitical map, explaining why a keffiyeh or Palestinian flag may be experienced by some as an anti-semitic and a star of David may be experienced as a statement of Zionism. The point is not to deny that real hatred exists on every side; it is that the symbolic equation makes all of it worse, by dissolving the very distinctions on which understanding depends.
The Failure to Understand
All of this converges on a single point: being in a state of reactivity requires a failure of understanding, because understanding undercuts reactivity. To understand the other is to humanise them, and reactivity cannot easily survive that. So the refusal to understand is not incidental; it is load-bearing. It is what keeps the machinery running. It is only in being able to understand that we can start to undo the binary and hold some nuance. In Kleinian terms, only understanding and inhabiting the grey area allows us to move from the paranoid/schizoid position into the depressive position. This is an uncomfortable position to sit because we lose our righteousness ideal - but we also lose its opposite - making it harder to denigrate and dehumanise the other.
Understanding is not the same as exoneration. It does not mean excusing heinous acts, or justifying the unjustifiable. It means accepting that events have a meaningful context, and that grasping the context is not the same as endorsing the act. Yet on social media the two are constantly, and often wilfully, confused. To try to understand the causes of something terrible is treated as though it were the same as condoning it. This is the symbolic equation once more, now turned on the very act of understanding.
I have been on the receiving end of this. When I have tried, publicly, to hold both condemnation and understanding at the same time, I have watched people substitute the word justify for the word understand, and insist that some things simply have no context. But there is a context for everything. To say otherwise is not a moral position; it is a refusal to think.
One of the forms social media can take is an attack on understanding.
And as an attack on understanding, it is an attack on all of us.
So what are we even posting for?
So what are we posting for? Having written a book on this, you might think I would know, but social media and global politics have both moved on a great deal since 2014, and so has my thinking. The honest answer, when I examine my own compulsion to weigh in, is that a good deal of it is narcissism: the quiet conviction that my saying something matters to events it cannot possibly meaningfully effect. Mostly, posting achieves nothing except triggering my own reactivity and escalating the reactivity of others, ultimately keeping my attention on my phone rather than on the people actually in the room with me.
Knowing something is bad for us is rarely enough to make us stop; I am no exception. But I have come to believe there is a direct relationship between our engagement with these platforms and our shrinking capacity to hold complexity and to understand one another. That is worth taking seriously, and worth taking responsibility for.
It bears asking whether a given medium is even the right tool for what we are trying to do with it. Expecting a platform like this to carry complexity or nuance is, as I once put it, like asking a surgeon to perform an operation with a butter knife. Being thoughtful about what a platform can and cannot do for you is part of using it well, and sometimes the wisest use is to decline it.
If I am going to die on any hill, it is the hill of trying to understand. Do not condemn me for trying to understand, because I am not going to stop. I will let you know when I get there.
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