The Blindboy Podcast - Speaking to a Cyberpsychologist about the psychology of online behaviour

Episode Date: June 21, 2022

Dr.Nicola Fox Hamilton is a cyberpsychologist. We chat about what social media is doing to our minds and behavior. Can it make us more hostile? What is the science behind internet trolls? Is social media addictive? And how will VR impact our brains? Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Embrace the day you Wednesday Kennets. Welcome to the Blind Boy Podcast. I am currently recording this audio in a hotel room on my bed with two duvets over my head because it's the only way that I can replicate a studio environment in a hotel room and I'm quite happy with the sound it does sound like a studio however it's not particularly pleasant and I am in complete darkness I'm on tour a particularly grueling tour where I'm leaving the venue at like 12 getting to my hotel at 1, and then up the next day at 5am to go on the road. So one of those tours, one of those tours that unravels the mind of people who work in my industry.

But fear not, for this week I have an absolutely incredible guest on this podcast who I'll be speaking to. Because I don't really want to do, I don't think I'm able to do a one hour monologue hot take. While crunched up in a little ball underneath two duvets. I think that would push me over the edge. I'd headbutt someone at the breakfast buffet and get the runs from those giant towers of orange juice that they have with the little tap. Continental breakfasts. Continental quilts.

The fuck is that about? What the fuck is that about? Why is it a continental breakfast? Why am I underneath a continental quilt to go downstairs and eat my continental breakfast? Who the fuck came up with that? What's continental about a slice of ham? And natural yoghurt.

But my guest this week is Dr. Nicola Fox Hamilton, who is a cyberpsychologist, and she's also a cyberpsychology researcher and a lecturer in applied psychology in IADT. Cyberpsychology is the study of what technology does to our brains and to our behaviour. Like what is social media doing to our minds? So as you can guess, this is quite a new and exciting area in psychology.

And Dr Nicola Fox Hamilton, she's not only an expert in this area, but she's also a fantastic science communicator, which is a completely separate skill. There's lots of people who are like experts and researchers and they really, they know their shit and they're doing fantastic work, but not all of them can communicate the work that they're doing in a language that's really accessible and entertaining and Nicola has that

nailed and she was so much crack to talk to and she's so passionate about what she's doing and I don't think there was there wasn't one question I asked her where she didn't have a really, really detailed, interesting answer that was 100% backed up by research and data. So I can't wait to share this conversation with you. If you want to find out more about Nicola, go to nicolafoxhamilton.com. That's her website. go to nicolafoxhamilton.com that's her website also nicola very recently published an audio book called the psychology of online behavior by nicola fox hamilton so check that one out on google so this was a really fascinating chat we spoke about what is social media doing to our brains, to our behaviour? Is social media addictive?

What is the psychology behind people who are online trolls, people who are incredibly mean to people online? Why does social media sometimes cause us to act in ways that are mean? What is virtual reality doing to our brains? We covered so much shit and Nicola had a research-based answer for everything. So without further ado, here's the chat. Like, what is cyber psychology?

So it's pretty much like you said. It's what happens to our behavior, our emotions, the way we think, everything like that when we interact with technology or with each other through technology. So it's the effect technology has on us and what happens to us when we interact with it. And like the first thing that pops into my mind is social media, obviously. But I'm assuming cyber psychology isn't just social media it's it's huge yeah it covers everything from virtual reality to gaming to shopping behavior to uh social media to like everything yeah misinformation um like just so much stuff yeah so anywhere where we interact with technology. So it's a massive interdisciplinary field.

And no one's an expert in cyber psychology because it's so much stuff. But there's lots of expert fields within it. And when did it start to become... Like at what point in history did someone go, computers are fucking with our heads. We need to have a name for a thing that studies this. That's a good question. So people to have a name for a thing that studies it. That's a good question. So people have been studying it for a while since.

There's early studies from the 1950s. There's studies on email and communication from the 1980s. But nobody really called it cyber psychology for a while. And in the States, they still kind of don't. But in Europe and the UK and Ireland... What do they call it in the States? Freedom prize. Internet psychology. Internet psychology. Yeah, which it's not. It doesn't sound as fancy as that. No. but in Europe and the UK and Ireland what do they call it in the States? Freedom Prize Internet Psychology

Internet Psychology yeah which it's not doesn't sound as fancy no I want that William Gibson shit I like that the cyber psychology

sounds fantastic it's way cooler if you tell people I'm an internet psychologist no one wants to listen to an internet psychologist it sounds like a made up job but cyber psychologist

yes please I know but in Ireland we had the first cyber psychology masters to listen to an internet psychologist. It sounds like a made-up job, but cyber psychologists? Yes, please. I know. But in Ireland, we had the first cyber psychology master's, the one that, I did it back in 2009 and I run it now. And Dr. Grainne Curran set it up in 2007.

And I went back to college to do something entirely different. I was thinking of doing a digital media master's because I was originally a graphic designer. I overheard her talking about cyber psychology and I was like that sounds way cooler why oh here's a here's a question that I have do you know the way with Twitter right like you kind of just have to be a prick on Twitter that's just how Twitter is not you know no I'm not saying do it I'm just saying

Twitter is very competitive. Twitter, like I don't view Twitter as social media. I view Twitter as it's a video game where you compete to have the best complaint. Right? I think Twitter is designed to reward performance-based combat. So if you watch an argument on Twitter, you say one thing, but everyone else is watching. So you award points. So it's points-based combat. But the thing is, because you only have a certain amount of characters, that makes you be more and more competitive. Now, I have seen people who use

Twitter frequently basically become assholes. Like, they just become more and more hostile over and over again, the more they become addicted to twitter and what i always wonder is are you now an asshole in real life as well like can being on a space like twitter where you're effectively fighting all the time turn you into that person in real life when you're online you're more likely to have your inhibitions lowered so you're more likely to act in ways that you wouldn't offline to have heightened kind of emotions and to say things that you wouldn't say now this can be positive or negative it's not all negative there's benign disinhibition which is all about being able to open up and talk about things and say support forums but toxic disinhibition can lead to people

being more aggressive now it doesn't happen to everybody because we don't all do that um personality traits play a part so if you have low self-control if you're more aggressive if you're more short-tempered a bunch of personality traits like that makes you more likely to do it you also forget that the person you're talking to is a full human yes with emotions reactions feelings that they can be hurt by what you're said. And that's partly because they're invisible. So even if you know who they are, you know their name, they're not anonymous. Anonymity isn't really the key thing here, even though a lot of people say if we ban anonymity, the internet will be lovely. It's not true. But invisibility is a key part of it. You also have a lowering of public self-consciousness.

So you are in the internet, you're doing your thing, you may be in a flow state or not, but you don't have the feeling of other people looking at you. And so what you do may stop aligning with your own values that you hold internally. So there's a bunch of things going on that mean that you might act out in ways that you wouldn't offline. So when you suggest talking by phone,

they're like, oh God. Exactly. I didn't actually really mean to talk like that. And you interrupt that state that they're in and they're like, yeah, actually, I don't really want to talk to you. That's why I try and do it though because if someone,

if I tweet something about a Marvel movie and I don't like this film because I'm not into it and then someone says, I fucking hate you, I'm literally shaking. That's what I'm talking about. So if this person persists, I'll go into their DMs and say, look, do you want to talk about this?

I didn't like the film. And they always just, no, not really. And sometimes what I compare it to is, like what you were speaking there about when you're on the internet and you get that disinhibiting effect, how I often see it is, do you know the way when you walk down the road

and then someone else is walking towards you and you have that little awkward moment where you might bump off each other, right? And we have lovely ways of navigating that. You go, ooh, ooh. And it's always nice. And you go, oh, I'm going to go this way. Oh, better be careful or we're going to end up hugging. And we always manage to mediate conflict so beautifully in that situation. And you have a lovely little connection with a stranger and a smile and you get on with your day, right? Now, let's pretend it's happening in two cars. And you've got the disinhibition effect happens in cars

because you're in a bubble, and you can't really see the other person, and there's research to support that as well. So it's actually very similar. And the person is screaming and roaring and shouting. And the other thing as well, do you ever see someone in a car, right, driving along in traffic,

picking their nose? And they wouldn't do it walking down the same road. But I always find that similar. And what Twitter reminds me of is, here's the problem I have with Twitter. Twitter has become a space where we have really,

really important conversations, right? Conversations about race, gender, conversations about consent, all of these important conversations that require nuance and compassion and the entirety of our being, for some fucking reason we've done it on the site whereby fighting is rewarded to make

billionaires rich. Do you know what I mean? And I don't like that because it means that all conversations now end up in combat. What's really interesting about Twitter, so a lot of the, some of the reasons, so like I said, this aggressive behavior online is very complex. And another reason for it is the context, the space you're in and the social norms of that space. So if you see aggressive behavior or that kind of combative behavior as being the social norm in a space on Twitter, then you're more likely to view it as acceptable and you're more likely to do it. So these are the rules. Yeah. So let's say like

the comment section of the journal, everybody knows that if you go there, wow, you know what you're going to see, right? So if you're someone who goes in that space, you know what's acceptable there, you know what's okay as a way to behave in that space, even though it's not. You might not do that in other spaces, but because the social norms there are like that, you will. Same with places on Reddit, 4chan, et cetera. And some of Twitter's like that, not all of Twitter's like that. Because my Twitter is actually quite nice, because I've blocked about 10've blocked about 10 000 people yeah me that's what i do also i just like my thing is block and move on

so yeah block block block block block and i used it like a mass blocker during repeal and marriage equality and it like my timeline's lovely it really works i speak up about things like um you know trans people being included and trans women are women, et cetera, I have no problems because I've blocked so many people in advance. But it's not, you know, Twitter can be okay, but a lot of the time it's not. And I know a lot of the time it is really competitive.

But it's also a place where people have massive potential to learn about others. Hugely. And that's what I do love about Twitter. It's immensely beneficial in that way. I've learned so much about, from the perspective of other people, I've learned so much about,

we say, seeing my privileges where I didn't see them before and seeing things from the point of view of other people. And I love that about Twitter and I always have. And then there's,

because you don't get that on Facebook, you don't really get it on Instagram, get a little bit on TikTok. But I've loved that about Twitter it's the fact that things are driven towards combat that I don't like it's that I don't, when I see people fighting on Twitter

I want to go up and hug the two of them it's like I don't believe them, I'm like if we were in a pub, this wouldn't be a fight, it'd be a conversation and there'd be smiles and happiness and you'd be seeing things from the other person's point of view and it's just because this is a video game but we're all looking for points to have the best complaint that you're scrapping have you looked at how social media companies will have do some of them deliberately design their apps to encourage

toxic behavior like i've heard the term high arousal emotions can you tell us about high arousal emotions in social media so high arousal emotions are you know not the kind of like blah feelings where you're a little bit liking something it's where you are excited by something and that could be positive or negative so anger is a high arous of emotion. So is awe. So is excitement. And those kind of emotions make content go viral. We like that stuff. We click on it much more. We share it much more.

And so social media platforms obviously like that. They promote that kind of content. They don't even have to. We do. We share it. We like it. We promote it ourselves. And that can be a bit problematic

where everything becomes a little bit extreme and where we start to lose nuance, I think. But it is the content that we enjoy. It's us. It's on us for clicking on it as well. Has anyone ever felt that things have just been mad since 2016? Like, for me it was, oh fuck, David Bowie's dead. And then from there on in, it's just been mad and mad and mad. You're not wrong.

Did something happen? Trump. Okay. So Trump, there is research looking at various places online and looking at the quality of discourse, the level of aggression, the level of partisanship, polarization. And since Trump started running for president, the discourse has gotten worse. People have gotten more polarized. Now it's not completely balanced. So people on the left have gotten a little more polarized and a little more aggressive.

And people on the right have gotten a lot more polarized and a lot more aggressive. And that's partly because people like Trump, and there were others, Bolsonaro, lots of other people like that, who brought in fringe groups which were previously excluded and not really acceptable. The social norm was that they were not acceptable yeah but they brought them into the mainstream and that rhetoric um

became mainstream within the right side of political conversations and of course it extended way beyond politics so it extended into things about vaccines, things about health, like lots and lots of areas. Immigration, trans rights, LGBT rights, like basically everybody's lives. But there is demonstrable evidence that that promoted this worsening of discourse. Because he was such a large voice, his tone and... I mean, one of the things about Trump was like regardless of who's in

power in America right we all know it's a bit evil you know what I mean sorry are you from America sorry about that I don't mean you as an individual like when I talk about the Brits I'm not talking about British people but you poor little yank sorry about that um but i do believe i do believe i'm very

sorry but i do believe that america is a colonial evil empire and whoever's in charge like you know whether it's obama like obama like he used to love to drone weddings you know he droned a lot of weddings that's a fact yeah so whoever the fuck even like i drone weddings, you know he droned a lot of weddings, that's a fact so whoever the fuck, even I love Bernie Sanders, he seems like a lovely lovely man, but look at what he was going to take, oh he wasn't he was still going to be an imperial power

even if, like I have a theory that no one genuinely good can make it past mayor that's about as far as you can get to mayor and then beyond mayor you have to start doing some evil shit. So I'm kind of sceptical of anyone. Corrupting

systems corrupt people. Exactly. It's very very hard to stay uncorrupted by a corrupt system. Yeah. So even with fucking Trump I'm like okay we know that America's bad anyway but one of the things that we want from the American president

is to present, to give us the sense that they're at least in control. Do you know what I mean? So I knew Obama was doing all these drones on weddings. I knew he was doing some bad shit, but when he came on TV, I was like, yeah, I want to give him a hug. I want that

man in... My life feels in control now because I know he's doing... It's like smoking cigarettes. I know that he's doing bad things, but he gives me the impression that he's in control. Joe Biden has a little bit of that. With Trump, no. The toddlers

are after taking over the daycare. It really was that. And I lost that sense, that lovely sense of the President of America knows what they're doing. And you could see it happening. And he was speaking in a way that was so unpresidential.

He was so aggressive. He was so misogynistic, so sexist, that we lost the feeling of control you want to feel that there's parents in the house there wasn't at all and you could see that happening yeah with other people's discourse then so he was able to change that discourse by the way that he spoke yeah that was influential enough yeah and what's really interesting is like a lot of stuff gets blamed on social media this idea that our discourse is bad because of social media everybody's angry because of social media politics is bad because of it misinformation is there because of it but actually media elites and political elites have much more impact on what

we're talking about and how we're talking about things than social media does much more it's the primary means of changing opinion always has been tons of research on going back to the like 30s and 40s that is what changes people's minds and what gets people talking about particular things and then of course with social media everybody has a voice in a way that they previously didn't and some people have a more public voice that they wouldn't have had before there's more people with a public voice and so it does kind of exacerbate that messaging and allow people to share it themselves but still media elites are the are the primary and and political elites are the primary source of it when you say media elites you mean like someone who just has a massive voice so like someone who

i'd consider to be harmful would be like tucker carlson carlson's exactly my go-to person for that, yeah. So Fox News, but even mainstream media, you know, mainstream media in the way that they handled, and this is not my area at all, but mainstream media in the way they... We can talk about whatever we want. Yeah. The way they talked about Trump, constantly talking about Trump,

reporting on every stupid or annoying or terrible thing he said gave him a voice that he didn't have to have and everything that got reported on got talked about on social media and shared on social media and the people who supported him loved seeing it because it made him seem like he was constantly in the news

and newsworthy and important and the people who didn't were angry because of the things he was doing and rightfully angry at a lot of the things he was doing. And so they talked about that as well. And so it was this constant buzz of information and misinformation about Trump and everything he was doing. How do you know when social media is negatively impacting your mental health? So a lot of people think social media is

addictive and that it must be bad for us and i saw like in the the post you put on instagram lots of people saying you know how do i stop using it i think i'm using it too much it's so bad for me um you know by looking at your own reaction to what's happening when you look at social media so basically the most important thing from the research so far is your emotional reaction to what you're doing. If you're going onto social media and you're connecting with your friends and you're looking at some interesting stuff and you're laughing at some cat pictures

and you come away from it feeling quite good, just a little bit good, doesn't have to be great, a little bit good, it affects your short-term well-being, your momentary well-being for a little while and leaves you feeling good. If you're on there and you're not interacting with your friends or people you know, if you're interacting mainly with, say, celebrities or you're only looking, you're only browsing, you're very passively using it or you're doom scrolling and it's not making you feel good.

What's doom scrolling though? Doom scrolling is just looking at all the bad news. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, all the bad news. And that might not be making you feel good. What's doom scrolling though? Doom scrolling is just looking at all the bad news. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, all the bad news. And that might not be making you feel so good. Now, it might be having a completely neutral effect on you. Some people can do that and it's not making them feel bad. But if it is making you feel bad, it's kind of up to you to notice, I suppose.

And I sometimes say to be able to maybe keep a journal if you're worried about it. Keep a little bit of a journal, see how you're feeling after you use social media and if there's things in particular that you're doing that aren't making you feel good maybe change that habit there's a lot of conversation around social media being addictive and there's very little evidence to show that it is um so it's the evidence around that in particular is very very poor quality why do people think this then why do people think that addiction is the correct word because there's loads of moral panic about it okay so moral panic

is where society decides that some kind of technology or something is responsible for all of society's ills it's been going on forever music in the 80s like yeah absolutely dungeons and dragons you know causing people to take up Satanistic worship. Yeah. If you go back, like, the 1940s, the headlines about radio were, radio is destroying our kids' ability to communicate with each other. They don't read anymore. They don't play anymore. All they're doing is sitting around this box.

They can't think straight anymore. It's destroying their attention span. Sound familiar? Sounds like the internet, social media, right? This stuff is just circular. It just keeps going. And and whatever the new thing is so there's been loads around games being via causing us to be violent and games being addictive again the research around games causing us to be violence is pretty much non-existent um the research around games being addictive there's a very very small percentage of people who do have

disordered gaming. But when you look at it in a clinical sense, and there's actually very few people who end up with clinicians for this, there's something else going on. They're suffering from anxiety or depression or another mental health issue. And the symptom is excessive gaming, where they're using it maybe as escapism. But it's not the primary cause. And when we look at these kind of things, we put so much focus on these things in a moral panic, the research goes into the wrong place, the funding goes into the wrong place. We ignore the fact that there's all this other stuff going on in the world that's causing people to have mental health issues. And we go, it's all games, it's all social media's fault.

mental health issues and we go it's all games it's all social media's fault and that's that's like that's a trauma-informed view of addiction because similar arguments are there about about drugs like we can speak about drugs as much as we want and making them illegal but unless you're looking at a trauma-informed model which is what is going on with this person that they feel the need to self-medicate. Yeah. You know? Yeah. So same with games or social media. If a person is, like I know that within myself,

Jesus, if I, if I wake up in the morning and my mental health isn't great, if I feel anxious or frightened, that's when I lack the inhibition. That's when I will open up Twitter. That's when I will open up Twitter that's when I will open up Facebook or the news and hurt myself but if I wake up in the morning and I feel high self-esteem I feed my two cats I feel good then I say to myself do you know what I don't think I'm going to use Twitter today because it's going to hurt me and that right there is exercising self-control over using an external stimulus to

mediate an internal woe if you get me for mood for mood management management that's it and we do that a lot online so there was a lovely piece of research that looked at why we look at so many cat pictures and videos because like obviously the internet's made of cats. And it found that we use it for emotional regulation. We use it to make ourselves feel good. And it does. It makes people feel good. They enjoy it.

If they're using it for procrastination, it can also make them feel guilty. But if they really enjoy it, that offsets the guilt. And what they'll do is often share it. And that sharing might be to help make other people feel good, to alleviate the guilt, because then you're actually doing something good for the world so it's really interesting but there's lots of stuff that we do to make us feel good so when I feel good I go on Twitter because I know I can cope with anything problematic I might see if I'm not feeling good I try and avoid

it because I might not be able to deal with all the stuff that's on there because there's lots of issues that I talk about and sometimes that just gets, you know, a lot. Yeah, regarding the cats there, like, I... No, but I consciously, I follow cats, otters, ferrets. Like, I follow all these wonderful creatures. Foxes. Foxes. And I do this because I want them to break up my timeline. You often see people saying timeline cleanse,

and they'll post a picture of their cat. That's exactly what it does. It lifts your mood a little. Until. So I started following cats in fucking 2014, and I foolishly developed several parasocial relationships with online fucking cats. And then they die. They don't have the same lifespan as us.

And then they fucking die. I know. And it's like, I didn't even have to feed the cunt. I didn't get to cuddle him. And I'm experiencing grief for an online cat. There was this poor cat that had no face because he was in a fire when he was in a kitten. And I used to watch him every day. His name was Sir Thomas Trueheart.

And he was the patron saint of abused cats. And his owner used to dress him up as a little knight. And he had no face. And then he died. And it fucking broke my heart. I was like, no, not Sir Thomas Trueheart. You know what I mean? So I had to lay off the cats.

And now I'm after moving on to ferrets because I don't give a fuck if a ferret dies. I was going to suggest animals with more longevity maybe, but yeah, okay. But yeah, that's a real thing. I can't develop a parasocial relationship with a ferret, but I can develop it with a cat. I'm serious.

This is where my head is at, unfortunately. What people also get from that cat following is a community of other people who love cats and they communicate with each other. And when the cat dies, like Lil Bub or Grumpy Cat or any of those famous cats, people come together and they grieve together. And that's a bonding, belonging sense of social support

that people can get online as well. There's lots of benefits from being online too. Do you follow Bilbo? No. No, not Bilbo. Bilbo is an orange cat from the north of Ireland. Oh, sorry, I do. Yeah, but Bilbo... Of course I do, yeah. Bilbo is a wonderful... He the north of Ireland. Oh sorry I do. I do. But Bilbo

Of course I do. Bilbo is a wonderful. He's Ellen's cat. Ellen's cat yeah. Bilbo is a wonderful mascot for like the trans community. Yes. So that's what I love about Bilbo and you get trans people kind of uniting around how wonderful Bilbo is. But Bilbo's going to die soon.

Because he must be eight or nine. He's got a mate now. He's got Laserdisc. Yeah, he's got a friend called Laserdisc. But again, I had to lay off. Bilbo had to lay off the parasocial relationship. And I probably moved on to an otter or something, or an ocelot.

But don't they say that having pets is a really good way of learning how to grieve? That when kids get pets, that one of the things that's going to happen is are going the pets going to die before the kids and it's their first a lot of the time their first experience of grief and it helps them to learn how to grieve um so well i'm in my 30s and i don't need internet cats i'm done what i've done that my dad's dead i've done grief i don't need fucking cats from the north of ireland who are orange dying on me so i i have actually had to

i've had to back off the internet cats and i'm very sad about that you know so let's take a little break from the chat with dr nicola fox hamilton to have an ocarina pause which is where a cast digitally insert an advert and i play a clay whistle so you don't get any surprises. Trying to keep it low pitch so I don't disturb any dogs. You're invited to an immersive listening party led by Rishi Keshe Herway, the visionary behind the groundbreaking Song Exploder podcast and Netflix series. This unmissable evening features Herway and Toronto Symphony Orchestra music director Gustavo Gimeno in conversation.

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but if you are fuck it just give it a follow and if you want to find out more about my guest nicolafoxhamilton.com so we're going to go into part two now, and I just want to give a little heads up. We speak briefly about consent and sexual assault, and how these things are spoken about and portrayed in the media. This happens at about 50 minutes into the podcast, and it's a broad conversation, there's no explicit detail, but it's always a good idea to give a heads up. I'd love to talk about um

parasocial relationships online this is something that i discovered when i started listening to podcasts when i started listening to podcasts i didn't know what to call it but like something like bill burr's podcast that i went through a long time listening to that and i'd listen to it not necessarily because I'm like, I really want to hear what he's talking about. It felt like for one hour a day, I was spending time with a dear friend. And it was lovely.

It was a lovely feeling. And I began to call this the podcast hug because it's something that podcasts can do that nothing else can do. And I started to notice this as well around the time when I said like 2016 onwards was when my phone started to hurt me you know what I mean because before that I didn't really care like I if you said to me in 2009 you're going to get bothered about your phone like I didn't give a fuck I used to go to bed and read books. But when the internet started to bombard me,

when I noticed that the algorithm was just anxiety, cute cat, anger, beheading, you know what I mean? When it was that, and when the timeline became so many different conflicting emotions that my brain couldn't keep up with it, I started to notice heightened anxiety because of it.

And the only thing that cured this was podcasts. It's like, here's your little mindful hour where you listen to this thing and you give it your full attention. And it was the one thing on the internet for which there was no comedown. There's a comedown from Instagram. There's a comedown from Twitter. I don't think there's a comedown from a nice podcast it generally does leave you feeling nice and then i learned that that's called a parasocial relationship where i

experience an online person as an actual friend what's that about and is it a bad thing no it's it's not. Like most things, it's mostly not a bad thing, except for some people it can be. So what's happening online with people whose podcasts you listen to, when you think about how you listen to podcasts, it's quite intimate. It's usually in headphones. It's quite close. And it's the sound of their lovely voice telling you things that you're enjoying but also like influencers on instagram or anyone that we follow on social media who gives us a

glimpse of their lives people that we don't know offline we're getting an insight into their lives and we may have the impression that this is their full life it's usually not even when they are portraying themselves as being very authentic it it's usually not their full life. They're showing you what they want to show and how they want to present themselves. I don't want a bag in my head all the time, Les. But that's what we all do. We don't put every single bit of minutiae about our lives online either.

Like, this is just how we live our lives. We do it offline as well. But because you're getting this glimpse into someone's lives, the they show you the more you feel like you know them and the more that you develop a bond with them but it is completely one-sided and we tend to forget that to a degree they have no idea who we are even if we interact with them fairly regularly they still don't really know who we are at all and we don't really know who they are and so it's for most people it's fine because they look up to them they idealize them maybe they like to be a bit like them they take inspiration from them whatever it is it's usually fine it's usually quite healthy

if you're only following people like that it's a little bit problematic because they're presenting a very idealized version of their life and you're not seeing how it's constructed and if you're not putting anything on social media you're just browsing these kinds of profiles you forget or you don't know that people are constructing their lives and so you might start to view them with envy rather than yeah thinking that you look up to them which which is two quite different things. Because when I think of parasocial, for me, it's, I like this person, I'd like to have a pint with him, that's about as far as it goes.

But I don't listen to Bill Burr and get jealous of him. Do you know what I mean? But I can see with influencers, parasocial, like with any relationship, it doesn't have to just be, I like this person. There could be a parasocial relationship of, relationship it doesn't have to just be i like this person there could be a parasocial relationship of i fucking hate this person yeah which is why i don't like twitter because i have to deal with that all the time with people who fucking hate me

and it's like you don't know me you've never met me but for me it feels like bullying it feels like the real thing yeah you know so that's very hurtful for me and part of why people do that so sometimes they're trolls which we should talk about for for me and part of why people do that so sometimes they're trolls which we should talk about in a moment but part of why people do that is that because they feel like they know you because you've given them a glimpse into who you are through your podcasts or other influencers do this glimpse into their lives if you do something that violates their expectation of you yeah they have an idea in their head because they don't know you so they've built up an impression of you in their head and if you

violate that in any way so you say you don't like a marvel movie and they assumed that you were like them and must like marvel movies they get really angry because you are not the person that you said you were that they thought you were that they created in their head. And there's that violation of expectations that happens. And then you've got online disinhibition, so they're more likely to say something about it. And they can sometimes develop quite strong relationships with the people they have a parasocial relationship with. And of course, it's not reciprocated,

but sometimes people who are maybe delusional or something like that can develop the impression that they are being communicated to through messaging that's only meant for them and so on so that's a tiny tiny percentage of people but obviously quite problematic they can be people who end up becoming stalkers or violent or things like that and like that's always existed that's like so that's how john lennon got shot because he the person who shot him Mark David Chapman believed that the lyrics were just for him yeah you know and now we have even more of an insight into everybody's life you know celebrities influencers we see a lot more than

we used to in those days then it was quite managed it was media interviews things like that now they're showing their kids at home with them and things like that it's it's quite which is a shame because i remember like i said i remembered the internet not being a thing like i kind of like the fact that like rock stars were aliens you know that's like i can't i i consider myself so fortunate that like when I was a kid I used to adore the Prodigy I mean fucking adore loved them all I had was one photograph

for years just a photograph and it wasn't even a photograph it was a drawing of them and I can't but I can't believe that I had this tape that I would listen to all the time and I had no access to I saw their names all the time and I had no access to...

I saw their names on the back of the tape, a cartoon of them, that was it. And it was wonderful for my imagination. It's... What's that lovely Oscar Wilde quote? Through a slit through wide there comes no wonder. You know? And because I only had a tiny glimpse of what the prodigy were

my imagination could be whatever it wanted to be yeah but if I maybe if I saw an interview when they were talking I go fuck it he sounds like a prick and that's it ruined and like we know now that having a lot of information about a lot of people that we would have idealized has turned out not to be great like you kind of can't idolise anybody anymore because you're going to find out something bad about them. If I find a new musician and I love their music, I will not follow them on Twitter. I don't want to know their opinions. I just want to keep them there and listen to their lovely music.

Just take the art, leave the person. Yeah, Jesus. One thing I do want to talk about is, and I said this backstage, a word I fucking hate is troll. I hate the word troll because I think it makes trolls look really, really friendly. When my experience of what a troll is, is a fucking psychopath, a sociopath. Genuinely.

There's people who are having a laugh but like i i've got fucking 230 something thousand followers on twitter so i get a lot of toxicity a lot and some of it is from people who say things to me that are so bad that i they should be arrested not not like they're hurting me but it's like, if what you're saying is, it's so harmful, and so designed, people who want me to kill myself,

people who do that, they wake up in the morning, and I'm going to write this fella an essay, I'm going to write Blind Boy an essay, about why he needs to end his life. I don't know who the fuck they are, I don't know why they're doing it. Someone who does that, I'm left thinking,

like I'm on the internet 20 fucking years so and i have a lot of tools so i'm able to distance myself from it it doesn't really affect me but what bothers me is who the fuck writes that and what else are they doing in their life you can't just go i'm gonna tell blind boy to kill himself for the laugh lol like no it doesn't work like that it doesn't work like that every other aspect of their life this is a dangerous fucking person I don't know who the fuck they are do you look at

what we call trolls what's the act there? I think the problem with the word trolls is that it covers a lot of different behaviours so there's the people like that what are often called misery trolls there are people like RIP trolls where they go and troll the relatives of people who've died particularly like there was one case in the uk of a guy who trolled the relatives of teenagers who died by suicide i mean that's a particular kind of troll and then there's the ones who operate

in communities like reddit where they do it for each other's entertainment, they're disruptive, they're very annoying, but they're not actually trying to cause harm or misery. But they are disruptive. That's the commonality amongst all trolls is that they are deliberately trying to be disruptive and annoying and aggravating. But those misery trolls in particular are hugely, hugely problematic.

And it's certainly something that seems to be growing online. So the research into trolling, and obviously because there's different kinds of troll, this is an overlook at it all, and we need to look specifically at different kinds of trolls to find out more about them. But what it finds is that the dark tetrad of personality traits, so psychoticism, sadism, Machiavellianism, and narcissism are all related to trolling, but particularly psychopathy and sadism.

And then if you look at things like schadenfreude, laughing at other people's misery and other kinds of humor, which are about laughing at people and not with people, that is something that comes out very strongly as well. So these are people with dark personality traits. So they are not nice people offline who just happen to go online and be utterly awful. They are horrible people offline who have something kind of deeply disturbing going on that makes them do this. So it's definitely an issue. And that's what's worrying about it

because if they are doing that, then what other things are they doing offline as well because it doesn't exist in isolation and it's one thing to like you were talking there about uh psychopathy and you know the way with a lot of psychopaths they find that when they're kids they hurt animals set fires and the other one has pissed the bed but one thing that they found with so lots of kids will hurt animals often kids who are traumatised

it's not necessarily the hurting of the animals that's the flag because there are kids who will hurt animals so that other kids can see it's the one who does it in private that's the real risk and the difference there with the trolling is that you can have someone who's acting the bollocks for a

community to watch because this it's fucked up and they're trying to get approval from others yeah but the one who does it by themselves and there's no audience and it's anonymous and it's for their own personal enjoyment yeah that's what bothers me yeah and there's this misconception as well that psychopathy means that you don't have empathy. So there's different kinds of empathy. There's cognitive empathy and affective empathy. So cognitive empathy means you understand what someone's thinking and what's going on in their head. Affective empathy means you're able to feel it and experience it. They have strong cognitive empathy.

So they understand what you're feeling when they're doing something awful to you they just don't care there's no sympathy and they don't feel it themselves so there's there's a mismatch there but they do understand the feelings yeah because what they're doing is so deliberate and well thought out. And that is what's so freaky about it too. It's the having a good think about how to hurt someone. And something I learned recently as well about psychopaths that was chilling and really opened my eyes was a psychologist said to me, the thing about a psychopath, it's not necessarily the desire to hurt someone it's a curiosity about someone's pain which is so fucked up when you think about it

do you know what i mean curiosity and when you think of that you think of people who not even physically but you know when you meet someone and they stick the knife in in a conversation and you can tell that it's they want to see how you react and it's the knife in in a conversation, and you can tell that they want to see how you react. And it's the creepiest thing in the world. You just want to immediately leave that person, when you meet someone like that. Because recently there was an account on Twitter, an Irish account,

and they ended up exposing a lot of trolls. And exposing trolls who were doing fucked up nasty shit, really, really harassing people. And they found out the identities of some of these people. And what really fucking pissed me off about it was sometimes when I see someone behaving like this, they're anonymous, so I will mediate it within myself by saying,

this person is probably deeply unhappy. This person probably doesn't have a lot going for themselves. it within myself by saying this person is probably deeply unhappy, this person probably doesn't have a lot going for themselves there are environmental reasons that they're this unhappy and I kind of level that with myself and walk away from the computer but when this account exposed a bunch of these fucking Irish trolls

they were like bankers and accountants and stuff, do you know what I mean? people holding down decent jobs people voting for Fianna Gael. But it was, it was unfortunately lads. And that made me really, really, really angry because the things that these accounts were doing, the targeted harassment of certain other accounts, one particular person who was exposed had sent an activist something like 18 000 messages over the course of a year and then this activist went and confronted him at

his fucking workplace on video and he's there like in an accountancy firm holding down a fucking job i hated that how do you have time to hold down a job after sending that meme out to the sky? I don't know. It's so obsessive. It's just really disturbing. To sleep at night, I need to think that these people don't have power. I need to subscribe to that stereotype of lonely man in his ma's basement type of thing. Yeah, unfortunately. Nothing against lads in their ma's fucking basement, but i mean but you know what i mean yeah i know it's it's it's another myth but that

helps me sleep at night yeah and unfortunately it's a myth about quite a few crimes that happen online things like when people picture um you know child sex offenders online. They pictured the same thing, like a lonely man in his basement, blah, blah, blah. It's not. When I often think about, again, the conversation around consent and thinking back to messages that I would have learned as a kid, and one of the things that I always found

that was deeply unhelpful was we were led to believe that men who sexually assault are dirty old men who hang around alleyways. Do you know what I mean? You'd be able to spot them. You'd know who they were. They're different.

They're not like everybody else. And that they hide and jump out like some type of mythical creature. And this is what we were led to believe. And we were led to believe as kids to go, look out for the man in the trench coat with sweets. He doesn't exist. He doesn't exist. He doesn't exist.

Because I guarantee you, the trench coat people figured out long ago and they said, we better start wearing wax jackets instead. But you know what I mean? This was really taught to me at a young age. And then what happens then as an adult, and it wasn't just every lad of my generation

was told about sexual assault or or rape is done by these these particular men and then when you get something like the ulster rugby trial coming out it's like no not them ones yeah no they're good they're not your neighbor exactly yeah you know as opposed to learning about no, someone who does this does not look a certain fucking way. Yeah. You know what I mean? And it happens in our wider societal conversations and the media reporting. If you look at the media reporting of rape cases or murders of men killing their wives or children,

a good family man, GAAAA member but they always act surprised and with rape cases you see things like underage girl who got drunk may have been sexually assaulted by three older men it's like that's not the accurate way to report what actually happened here you know this is a child sexual offence and it's not clear in a lot of media reporting. There's a great account on, I think, Twitter and Instagram that corrects headlines around sexual assault cases in particular because they're not reported that way. And that's part of that conversation around,

well, you know, ordinary people can't do these things. And so we fudge the language around them. And then you've got social media where people have a parasocial relationship with the Ulster rugby team and now the expectations are violated and they don't like that and so they have to defend them to make themselves feel good about having idealized them in the first place and so they can get quite aggressive about defending them and wouldn't possibly believe that somebody you know that they could have done this thing um so it's there's lots of problems and it goes back to the point you were making earlier that the language that we get from leaders or from the media is actually what makes a difference

like another term that i don't like it's a very fucking Irish thing when someone is murdered they say known to Gardaí and basically what that says is oh it's okay it's okay that that's the message it's okay then yeah they were known to Gardaí it's okay if it was a bad person yeah and we shouldn't be okay with that like because it's quite dehumanizing it really is and the same you know if sex workers are assaulted or murdered it's like oh well you know they were putting themselves at risk anyway doing that and they're obviously bad people so they're not worthy of our respect or care in the same way that an innocent person who's only out for a jog who's murdered is deserving of an outpouring of sympathy. It's still a woman

who was murdered for no good reason. And regarding the internet trolls, I keep saying fucking trolls and I shouldn't, regarding the internet bollockses, have they actually found that, like, how do you do that research? How do you find

out a bunch of these people are actually psychopaths? They must have volunteered themselves forward. Yeah. So they do big, wide-scale surveys of people. There's a trolling questionnaire, and it's only got a few questions. But one of the questions is, the more beautiful something is, the more pleas something is the more pleasurable it is to destroy it that's not the exact language but that's essentially the language

i'm like surely the questionnaire could just be one question because that questionnaire sums up a lot of what trolls do so they use that and then they use um questionnaires that measure psychopathy and on the other different personality traits. There's also been interview studies with people who have come forward as trolls who volunteer themselves for it. Have you ever heard the episode of This American Life where it's from about 2015. You know This American Life, it's a podcast, yeah?

And so a woman journalist, her dad died and she was grief trolled so this dude did that thing just everything obsessive, your dad deserved to die he died because he hated, like just fucking rotten and then finally

he revealed himself and she does a podcast episode where she speaks to him. And what I found so fucked up about it, it's an episode of This American Life. If you type in This American Life, grief trolling or whatever, you'll get it. You should listen to it. He is completely apologetic, not in a pleading way, in a kind of, yeah. She's there reading out the messages. And the message is like, your father deserved to die because you're a terrible daughter and he's ashamed of you.

And she's reading this out to him. And he's going, yeah, I'm just really sorry about that. I don't know what was going through my mind at that time. That's a really nasty thing to say to you. I don't know what I can do. I'm so sorry. And what was so horrible about it is that you wanted a payoff of him almost denying it even.

You wanted him to go, well, no, I didn't mean it like that. That's almost what I wanted. I didn't want him to complete. He wasn't taking ownership. He was getting off on it. He was getting off on being confronted. And I could tell that by the way he was doing it. And it was so off on being confronted and i could tell that by the way he was doing it and it was so fucked up yeah it was a tension it was a tension yeah um

it's it's a really interesting one like you you see people like mary beard talked to one of her trolls as well and she was like well it turns out he's just you know a guy who didn't really mean it as well and didn't mean it that harshly and now he's more aware of what he says online and I'm like you don't get a lot of depth into that person you don't find out what other people in their life think of them um so you don't know what their partner if they live with a partner what their experience of this person is like and I worry about giving someone like that that much attention those kind of misery or grief trolls because they're getting something out of what they're doing and I think by giving them extra attention like that and almost giving them an out or an apology like letting them apologize ish for it could be maybe problematic is there a

way to use like I think when you see someone who's a troll it could be there could be something useful there because it's an early indicator for intervention possibly we don't have enough research on that but is it something people care about enough to research yes i would say so so there's increasingly more research because it's become more of a problem um over time and you know with this surge of research on the dark traits i think people will start to look more at how is this presenting offline what other things are they doing in their lives are there indicators where we could catch this early does this tell us something about the person where we might need to keep an eye on them or talk to them and see how things are for them. Because I just think this whole be kind thing isn't helpful,

because it's, like, the thing is, when something really important makes its way to Instagram in particular, sometimes it can get reduced to these platitudes that mean nothing. So one of them is be kind. Be kind means nothing anymore. In fact, a lot of the people who are really aggressive online have be kind in their profile yeah it's fascinating i'd love to see some research on that like what is the likelihood of you being aggressive if you have be kind in your profile it really is it's they're the person who's not being kind at

all and even with mental health conversations, things like just talk to someone, just open up, they don't mean anything anymore. They don't mean anything. It's an excuse for, I think, government inaction on mental health. You know, if everybody just talks to each other, all the mental health issues will go away

and we won't have waiting lists anymore. We won't need to hire psychologists. You know, Simon Harris did a fucking video where he went, you know, guys harris did a fucking video where he went you know guys just talk to someone and it's like well fucking who simon because like i found it so uh it was really offensive because like I don't even like saying to people, just talk to someone because, OK, right, talk to your fucking dad or your ma or whoever, granted, that's a wonderful first step,

but the second step then is talking to a professional, and that feels insulting in this country where you've got these fucking waiting lines unless you can afford a private psychotherapist, which a lot of people can't. And the person you're told to talk to, your friends or or your family aren't always equipped to deal with the kind of things you might need to talk about yeah that's the other thing jesus christ if you just went for a run you'd feel better fucking hell when i went to my fucking hell when i went to my ma with panic attacks for

the first time good lord she told me to turn on the heat. Do you know what I mean? That's what you're dealing with you know. Not a professional. So I wasn't annoyed that Simon Harris shouldn't be saying that because it's like Simon you were the Minister for Health at the time so you actually have the opportunity to open up all the

people that you can talk to. So I really disliked that i felt that was the essence of fucking neoliberalism you know and i think that bothers me but also the putting the blame on social media bothers me as well because it's another excuse yeah that's one thing you're quite passionate about you are quite passionate about social media getting the blame because you said to me backstage you feel that that's disinformation yeah why is that disinformation so i think there's a lot so i mentioned moral panic there's also a lot of people who have strongly held opinions that they get to talk about in the press and in media and other places about various parts of cyber psychology particularly things like social media and gaming that it's not remotely evidence-based. So they would call

it common sense, which tends not to be very common and based on anecdotal experience. But the evidence doesn't support most of what they say. So you see all these things about, you know, the people who work in Silicon Valley don't let their kids have tech. Tech is like drugs and alcohol for children, which is blatantly ridiculous because I'd love to see that study. You would have to give some kids drugs and alcohol and some kids technology

to measure if it has the same effect, which would be a little tricky to get ethical approval for. And things like, I finally unsubscribed from The Guardian when they put out a piece that said, technology is like drugs for kids and schools are the pushers. I was like, seriously? This is just absolute rubbish.

So I have very strongly held views about reporting things accurately and having opinions that are based in fact and evidence around this because it's immensely harmful so what happens is when something like this develops into moral panic and you get all this stuff where everything's being blamed on social media then you've got governments being allowed to just say well everybody should just take a break from social media every now and then and you know maybe try and cut back a little bit instead of providing mental health services they do research on mental health and social media when there's plenty of research showing that it's not necessarily a problem so the question becomes

what kind of harm does social media cause rather than what are people getting out of social media? How is it also beneficial? What kind of impact does it have on people's wellbeing, which is a much more broad question. So there's all those kinds of problems. So the funding goes into that because it's a hot topic that everybody's interested in.

The funding doesn't- And there's a clear target. Yes. And the funding doesn't go into why clear target yes and the funding doesn't go into why are so many kids suffering from anxiety and depression that's what i want to know because like i'm i'm misinformed i was of the opinion that anxiety is getting worse and depression is getting worse because of social media like similarly let's take cyber bullying for like that's a real problem and it's a real problem with kids it is yeah but is it not the cyber part that's the problem no so what happens with cyberbullying is

it often very often happens in conjunction with offline bullying and the kids that are very negatively affected by cyberbullying also experience offline bullying most of the time, and also usually have something else going on that's not reported on. So you'll find that they have a learning disability or they have other problems. They already had anxiety or depression or something else going on, or they have no support at home.

Their parents aren't supportive of them, or there's neglect, or there's other support at home. Their parents aren't supportive of them. Or there's neglect or there's other problems at home. So you'll find that there's something else going on most of the time. And that doesn't get reported. It's just cyber bully happens, child takes their own life. But there's usually an awful lot more going on than that. And because of that kind of reporting, it's all about don't let your kids on social media. Instead of we need mental health supports for children we really do the waiting

lists are ridiculous we need to hire more psychologists and this has been going for years we know this it's been going on for years and there is just massive inaction the waiting lists are getting longer and longer and the actual problems are just not being addressed at all it reminds me a bit of like columbine in the early 2000s when they just started blaming music. They started blaming new metal music. And Marilyn Manson, I just found out recently that the kids on TikTok are calling new metal, do you know what they call new metal? Divorced dad rock.

They're at home with my cans listening to Karn. And I said that online and then I had to delete the tweet because so many men in their thirties got offended and they had to start going well maybe stained but not the deftones I remember Columbine and I remember

being a teenager and listening to new metal and going like this is fucking ridiculous like new metal did not make them shoot up a fucking school. Just like video games aren't now. Yeah. So it's now it's not music anymore it's video games

so it was new metal then it was rap then it was video games It was Prince in the 1980s too but like the PMRC the Parents Rights music committee was set up by tipper gore al gore's wife yeah in the 1980s to create this moral panic yeah and then they inadvertently created the you know the parental advisory stickers yes which is the coolest thing ever that's the one i want And that's where the funding went, which was not the cause of school shootings.

And video games are not the cause of school shootings. And actually, there's a racial element to how video games are associated with school shootings. They're associated with white school shooters in the press. There's no correlation. School shooters play video games less than the general population of their age group. And they're not interested in them because video games tend to be social

and they tend not to be social. But they're associated when white young people commit school shootings as sort of an excuse. Well, it wasn't their fault they were playing video games. When people of colour, young people of colour commit school shootings, nobody's trying to excuse that. It's just, well well they're bad people and they're brought up wrong and there's

something in their genes that makes them do that so there's a racial element to that as well and then there's a lot of really really terrible research on how video games are associated with violence there's huge problems with the body of research there's kind of two groups of researchers

there's one group that says body of research. There's kind of two groups of researchers. There's one group that says, that has looked at it and, you know, almost always comes out and says there's no association with aggression or tiny associations with aggressive thinking, but, you know, there's no way to show that that actually results in physical violence in the real world. And then there's another group of researchers who strongly believe that video

games are associated with violence, have negative views of video games, and also happen to be more likely to find out that video games are associated with violence. When you look at the research that they read to support their research, it all finds that video games cause violence. They don't look at both sides. So there's a bias in the researchers themselves, which is, of course, really problematic. And some of them have given evidence at trials of school shooters to say, well, it's video games' fault. And then, of course, they want to keep finding those results

because there's an impetus to. They don't want to be proved wrong. So there's massive problems with the research. So they say things like, what level of heat of chili sauce would you give to your opponent when they beat you and that's supposed to be a marker of how violent you would be it's not exactly realistic obviously you can't let somebody beat someone up I mean you've got to find ethical ways to show aggressive. So they do measure like tendency to have more aggressive thoughts with like word completion tasks and people who fill them in with more

aggressive words have more aggressive thinking. So I recently got myself a virtual reality helmet. And it gave me like an existential crisis, right? And it was interesting. So I hadn't really done VR before, so I had a crack at it. And yeah, it gave me a spiritual and existential crisis, only for a bit. But when I took it off, I was like, oh, fuck, what is reality? Oh, shit, what's this? Because I'd been so perfectly in this virtual reality,

and very soon I'd forgotten. I'm like, wow, it's real life. And then I took it off've forgotten I'm like wow it's real life and then I took it off and I'm like fuck this is real life but this real life is kind of like that real life that was just in there so what if this real life is actually some type of virtual reality as well and we're in this hologram bullshit it's all the matrix yeah so so that freaked me out that really did. It was unpleasant for a while. Then I chilled out and I said, look, it's a video game, calm down.

But what I have to note is that it was a profound existential anxiety and spiritual thing going on. So what's that about? Like your cyber psychology has the answer there. So VR is very powerful for that reason. So you can experience a space. So you're in a space even though you're physically somewhere else, which is called immersion or presence.

You're present in that other space. And you believe you're in that space even though you know you're also somewhere else. But you feel like you're in that space. you know you're also somewhere else, but you feel like you're in that space. And because of that, you can evoke the same emotions and emotional arousal that you do in the real world. And that's a really powerful tool. But what it's really useful for is it's so it's used quite a bit for VR therapy. So let's say phobia is the most commonly experienced anxiety disorder or phobias. Public speaking is one of the most common of those. And you can go into VR, you can get like the little VR cardboard sets and an app on your phone and you can practice public speaking. You can put your slides up on the

screen behind you and you can manipulate how many people are in the audience. You can manipulate how friendly they are so they can be smiling and nodding or they can be neutral or they can be negative and so you can keep practicing this as though it's a real space and people have found that useful for practicing public speaking and then therapists use it not a lot not a lot have taken it on yet which is a shame because it it's really powerful so typically if you were treating an anxiety disorder you would do you know graded therapy where you introduce something to people slowly little bits at a time until they get used to it. You give them tools to deal with it and then you do more and more over time. So let's say someone's afraid of heights you might start with some stairs. You give them

some breathing techniques. You give them some CBT to help them deal with going up to the top of stairs. And then the next time you want to go something a little bit higher and higher, and eventually you want to be standing on the edge of the cliff, and they're using these techniques, and they're doing really well. That's very difficult to do in the physical environment. So usually therapists will get people to imagine, but people have varying levels of imagination, and with something difficult, it's hard to maintain the focus on it because you don't really want to be there. If you take people out into the world,

a lot of people's fear about anxiety disorders is freaking out in front of other people or having a panic attack in front of other people. That's where the anxiety is coming from. And you're asking them to deal with their anxiety in a public space, which isn't great. So VR, because it evokes the same emotions as the real space, you can manipulate it to because it evokes the same motions as the real space you can

manipulate it to make it exactly what you want so you can have people go a little bit up in a glass elevator go higher higher until they're standing out and aboard at the top of a building in Vegas or something um so you can there's all these programs that are created for various different things and it's been used really successfully um to PTSD after 9-11, after different wars, wars in Iraq. Even 70-year-old veterans of wars from Portugal, who were obviously a long time out from having dealt with it, and they successfully treated them in VR for that PTSD as well. Wow. So there's huge potential in it.

And some of the VR videos are shit to the point of being hilarious, right? So I was trying out some of the, it was an 8K video. So I was like, fuck, I want to see this 8K shit. This is going to be amazing. But it was like, because it's the start of VR, like remember when the PlayStation first came out and there was no games, there was just one loop of a dinosaur,

just a T-Rex in 3D. So it's a bit like that. So I went to one video and it was, it was a behind the scenes at an influencer's party in Los Angeles, right? So I'm like, wait, all right, okay. I'm going to be in LA by the pool with a bunch of glamorous people.

So I can see the thumbnail and they they're all looking really cool and glamorous, and it's in 8K, so I'm getting ready for it. So I go there, and all of a sudden I'm nine feet tall. So they'd recorded it on the top of a fucking pole. So now I'm trying to enjoy this fully immersive, lovely LA party, where everyone is gorgeous and beautiful and amazing but i'm fucking nine feet tall so now i start to feel anxiety about being robert wadlow so it was shit nine foot taller than influencers party you're only looking at the tops of people's

head yeah it's interesting though manipulating height is one of the things and manipulating body image in general is one of the things that vr has also been used for body image around eating disorders quite successfully but height is something so there's there's some researchers in the uk in london um who are doing fantastic work with people who suffer from paranoid delusions and schizophrenia and other disorders like that um one of the things they did was measure how many people suffer from paranoia um at a non-clinical level so they did something that you just couldn't do it allows you to do research in a way that you just cannot do in the real world so they got people to go into a virtual reality tube and they had complete control

over all the other people on the tube, of course, which you could not do in reality. Like the train, the London train. The train, the underground, yeah. And they had the person kind of walk through it and then get off. And then they asked them, you know, how many people,

how did you feel about the people on the tube with you? Do you think they were looking at you do you think they thought positively of you negatively of you and about a third of people thought that the neutral faces of people on the tube were thinking bad thoughts of them were sneering at them and those kind of things about a thought a third of people thought that they liked them or were flirting with them and then most people in the middle at less than a third thought that but the most people in the middle kind of thought it was quite neutral and nobody really cared all that way one way or another but about a third of people

who have non-clinical levels of paranoia experienced paranoid thoughts so they're able to figure out what the baseline level for society is but they they're also able then to create virtual reality spaces for people who do suffer from clinical level paranoid delusions to help them function better in those spaces. So they created doctor surgeries and things like that, spaces that people have to go to that they feel a lot of anxiety about and help them to function in those spaces. And they can manipulate how the people around them are acting.

They can figure out what the person thinks of those people, and they know exactly what those people are doing. It's really fascinating. So it allows behavioral psychologists to conduct behavioral experiments that would be too expensive or impossible to do. Impossible, because you can't control people. So even if you tell everybody to behave the same way, we all react differently to people.

Even if they're actors, yeah. Yeah, it's just impossible. And people get tired, We tell everybody to behave the same way. We all react differently to people. Even if they're actors, yeah. Yeah, yeah. It's just impossible. And people get tired and they just accidentally do something a little bit differently. But with this, you have complete control. It's total control.

Yeah. Fucking hell. And one of the things they found was when they made the person feel a little taller in virtual reality, they felt like they had a little bit more control in their environment and they felt a little bit more powerful.

Wow. It's just fascinating. Well, I certainly didn't feel particularly cool when I was nine foot tall at the influencer party. Maybe at a basketball game you would have felt really great. Jesus. I'm going to open up questions to the audience. You can ask questions about anything.

How are you? I'm just wondering if you've done any research into working online and those kind of relationships, if that's kind of changed or if you've done any research into working online and those kind of relationships if that's kind of changed or if you know of any other research that's really good the past two years fuck me

that's really good it's changed a lot so research tends to take about two years to come out and be published so we're starting to see stuff coming out now some of the initial research there's a lot of it around Zoom So research tends to take about two years to come out and be published. So we're starting to see stuff coming out now. Some of the initial research, there's a lot of it around kind of Zoom and how people felt about that and how tired they were and the effects of it. Not so much stuff yet on relationships, but I imagine it'll be coming out soon.

The Zoom stuff's quite interesting because I'd know you've probably all heard the term Zoom fatigue and you probably all felt zoom fatigue at some point mostly because we were just online doing it a lot but it was looking at why we felt like that and who was more likely to feel like that and women feel it more because you can also see yourself in that little picture and we're more self-conscious about stuff like that more aware of our image and so turning that off was quite helpful but then you don't want to because you're afraid you don't look good but part of it is that normally in meetings or when you're talking to people you have the ability to move around a little bit but when you're stuck in front of a screen there's a very limited window of space you've no physical movement

at all and you're looking at a screen which itself can be quite tiring. And a lot of those meetings were much longer than they needed to be, and a lot of meetings could still be emails. And particularly for meetings that went on for two hours or longer, people really felt fatigued with it. But in terms of relationships, so there's some, there's quite a bit of research looking at virtual teams that goes back quite a bit. And one of the really interesting

findings from us is around something called the hyper personal effect which happens with online dating and with online teams so what they did was so the hyper personal effect is when you communicate with people that you don't know mainly through text primarily through text which we do on slack and teams and all those kind of things and you don't know what they look like yet and you don't have other information about them. You're filling in the gaps in your knowledge with stuff that you're kind of making up.

So you get an impression of them that they seem like a nice person and they're friendly so you might see them as more extroverted. And you get an idea of who they are. What they did in this early research was have teams get to know each other like that and then they showed them a photograph of each other and they found that liking and affinity went down because the more information we have the more it confirms that they're different to us but also it was different to who they had imagined in their head

as well. Now most of the time we now have biopics and things like that, so you're not just talking to a shapeless kind of icon, but not all the time. So that might be one thing that virtual teams experience where everybody has an idea of who the other people are, but when they meet in reality or when they video chat for the first time, that that's not real, and it reduces liking more than if they had just gotten to know each other in person.

So it's kind of interesting um one thing so this is purely anecdotal but a buddy of mine is a psychology lecturer and he's been teaching for the past two years and he just says i'm not as effective as a teacher anymore because in his job as a psychology lecturer sometimes he'll do he'll disclose so if he wants to speak about a particular topic within mental health he'll speak about this happened to me or one thing he'll do when he's teaching is he'll curse a lot he'll use rude language because he believes that communication happens in the language of the receiver yeah he can't do that on zoom it's all recorded is he yeah recorded or monitored

and now he's not as effective as teacher because he's having to be too solemn i think it holds people back and you also worry that someone might share the video of something afterwards and seem to be more careful maybe of what you say most of us are very careful of what we say anyway most um i still swear in my video lectures okay you know if that's how you need to communicate we're all adults exactly i try not to but i swear a lot in my other life like my normal life so it sometimes slips in um i do try and be professional but it's more difficult in some ways you You know, one of the things about teaching is that you see people's faces and you see how they're reacting.

So you know if they got something or if they're confused. And they're not turning their cameras on. I'm not making them turn their cameras on because that's tiring. So, you know, and also I don't want to see them sitting on their bed or whatever because they don't always have spaces to sit in

because rental crisis. But it makes it more difficult in that way. And sometimes it's just like talking to the void, which is very difficult. You've got to really change how you teach. Now, I actually, I started out hating it. I ended up really loving it. And I've moved some of my programs online. So our master's has moved pretty much fully online

with the option of coming in for some blended stuff for the cyber psychology master's. My certificate in cyber psychology is now fully online. And it works really well. And I really enjoy it. But not everybody does. And it depends what you're teaching. And something like psychology like that,

if you're teaching what they still call abnormal psychology, terrible name for it, where you're teaching about psychological disorders or mental health issues. You kind of want to be in the room because it's, you know, a lot of people study psychology because they want to figure out what's going on with themselves. So there's going to be people experiencing stuff or they have family members experiencing stuff. And so you need to be able to support them in that as well. Yeah, safety is huge. huge yeah it really is i trained in in counseling ages ago and safety in the room was very important because it's like we're going to speak about things today and something might come up yeah and you want the safety of the group yeah not the safety of i'm at home in my fucking room and i just had a traumatic lecture yeah you know and you can't see that

they're traumatized by it or upset you can't take a moment take a break speak to them outside afterwards anything like that now i don't teach generally those kind of subjects luckily um but for people who did that was quite difficult for them um i was wondering what you thought of the whole theory that um technology and social media and stuff messes up your dopamine receptors because of the quick release dopamine as compared to reading or exercise and creative stuff. So it's often a lot of those headlines I was talking about where they compare social media or the Internet to drugs and alcohol is because it also releases dopamine. But like so does food. So food increases our dopamine by about 50%. Sex increases, doubles it.

Metamphetamines increase it by about 1,000%. Or 1,000 times, not 1,000%, 1,000 times more. We don't actually have accurate measurements of how much social media increases dopamine but it's probably not the same amount as heroin or methamphetamine and the theory that people are saying is that if when i share or like a tweet yeah or if i get a like i get a little dopamine hit and then i get addicted to that and i keep going back for that dopamine and is that harsh it it completely is yeah wow it because you need like you you need enough dopamine to make physical changes in your

biology like drugs physically change you clicking like on somebody's tweet doesn't physically change your brain chemistry to that degree um you might enjoy, but there's lots of things we enjoy. I think what happens is we pathologize a lot of normal behavior. You see gaming being pathologized. Anyone who plays a lot of games is told that they must be addicted to it. They're not. They're just playing a lot of games. Unless it's severely impacting on your work life or your college life or your relationships, it's not problematic. You just really enjoy doing a thing. Same with social media. If we're on it a bit and we're enjoying it, it's not a problem. We don't have to make it a problem.

Most of what we're doing is connecting with our friends. And in fact, some researchers in the UK put together a really good scale, which they called OFAQ. O-F-A-Q. It was the Offline Friends Addiction Questionnaire. And what they did was take social media questionnaires and instead of it being about social media they made it about seeing your friends so do you think about seeing your friends a lot do you get upset if you don't see them all that often instead of do you think about social media a lot do you get upset if you can't use it and they found that about 70 something percent of people were addicted to seeing their friends so you can pathologize anything if you try and people have

really tried to pathologize a lot of normal online behaviors okay um thank you so much to my guest dr nicola fox hamilton so that was a absolutely fascinating conversation there with dr nicola fox hamilton um i could have spoken for way longer. Check out Nicola's website. Nicolafoxhamilton.com And also her audio book. The Psychology of Online Behaviour. It's available now if you want to check it out. I'll chat to you next week.

I'm still currently underneath the duvet. I won't be in the duvet next week. I'll be finished my tour and then I'll be taking a break from gigging for a while because I've got a book to write. I want to get back to writing and not worrying about gigging.

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