When people sit down to dinner together, they tend to be civil and polite--and if they sit down to dinner repeatedly (e.g., as a family, as part of a book club), they may be more tolerant of behavior or ideas from other group members that they might find unacceptable from people outside the group. However, if people get into a discussion on social media, disagreements between them can quickly become far more angry and hostile than they would around the dinner table. Explain this behavioral difference by relating it to the concepts of community and social identity.

Question

What will be an ideal response?

Answer 1

People want to be members of groups, and when they sit down with a group of people, they want to be accepted as a member of that group. They therefore behave civilly toward each other so they can be accepted as part of the community of people around the table. If they sit down repeatedly with those same people, they have a social identity as members of that community. People want to maintain that social identity because it gives them a sense of belonging in an in-group, so they will tolerate negative behavior from other members of the group for the sake of remaining in the group. On social media, there is far less sense of community and social identity, since one is often dealing with “friends” one has never met in person as well as strangers one has never and will never meet. The sociocultural incentives to be civil and tolerant toward those one disagrees with do not exist or exist to a far lesser extent on social media, so civility and tolerance are hard to maintain there.