Stanford prison simulation<\/a> experiment, in which he randomly assigned college students to play either prisoners or guards. Within a day, the two groups were at odds, each bitterly denouncing the other.<\/p>\nThat kind of intense group identification is the human default mode. Whether it\u2019s a relatively trivial matter (sports) or something more important (politics and religion), we\u2019re quick to choose sides and demonize those who make other choices.<\/p>\n
So Zuckerberg\u2019s admirable ambition to bring us closer together bumps up against the unflattering reality of human nature. In effect, Facebook\u2019s software must somehow circumvent our hardwiring, which has been tuned by untold millennia of evolution.<\/p>\n
In designing around the peculiarities of human behavior, it\u2019s useful to search for successful exceptions, or what\u2019s been called positive deviance. In this case, are there situations in which people interact with others who have different perspectives, resulting in greater understanding?<\/p>\n
I want to focus on one example, because I have personal experience with it\u2014and because I think it suggests an interesting direction for Facebook.<\/p>\n
During high school, I was an exchange student in South America, living with a family in Uruguay.<\/p>\n
Looking back decades later, I\u2019m struck by how ordinary my time in Uruguay was. I attended school with the boy in the family who was my age, and I hung out with him and his friends. I helped out in the tiny convenience store that was located in the garage of the family\u2019s house. I visited with their large extended family of aunts and uncles and cousins.<\/p>\n
There were no epiphanies, no transformational moments. But my perspective changed. What had initially seemed exotic to me when I arrived in Uruguay eventually became familiar. And here was the surprise: when I returned home to the United States, what had been familiar to me for all of my life suddenly seemed somewhat exotic. The smallest details of life became remarkable, because I had seen that they could be different.<\/p>\n
I wish that more people could have the experience of being an exchange student. Realistically, though, it\u2019s not scalable to large numbers. But I wonder whether there\u2019s a virtual exchange experience that Facebook could offer to its vast audience of 2 billion people.<\/p>\n
I should immediately say that there\u2019s currently no substitute for living in another country. Maybe that\u2019s a project for Oculus, the virtual reality company that Facebook acquired. But I think we can reverse engineer the exchange-student experience, and replicate a small, but crucial part of it in software.<\/p>\n
What might that look like? Practically, how would a Facebook Exchange Program work?<\/p>\n
I think it could be simple. To sign up, you\u2019d accept an invitation in your news feed. And then you\u2019d basically just have one more Facebook friend. There would be nothing new to learn. You would already know what to do.<\/p>\n
You\u2019d probably be paired with someone around your age, but who otherwise had a very different background. Within the United States, it\u2019s easy to imagine pairings that bridged political, geographic, and demographic differences. And with the decent machine translation that we now have, we could also have international pairings of people who speak different languages.<\/p>\n
In at least one important way, your daily experience in the Facebook Exchange Program would be similar to mine as an exchange student: it would all seem pretty ordinary.<\/p>\n
In your Facebook news feed, you\u2019d now see occasional photos and updates from the new friend you\u2019d been paired with\u2014in the same way that you see things every day from your other Facebook friends. Sometimes you\u2019d like and comment on their postings. Other times, you might want to send them a message.<\/p>\n
The Facebook Exchange Program would be decidedly low-key. There would be no consciousness-raising workshops or \u201cKumbaya\u201d sing-alongs. It would be more like having someone new move in next door, and getting to know them in a neighborly way.<\/p>\n
Psychologists call this the mere-exposure effect<\/a>: the way our feelings about unfamiliar things become more positive over time, simply by encountering those things more often.<\/p>\nInitially, we tend to be uneasy when confronted with something new. And that makes evolutionary sense: it seems plausible that our more cautious ancestors were more likely to survive. With repeated exposure, though, we get increasingly comfortable with what was initially off-putting.<\/p>\n
As an exchange student, you usually move to another country, speak a foreign language, and eat different food\u2014among many other changes. But when you strip away those details, the essence of the experience is the mere exposure to the unfamiliar, on a daily basis.<\/p>\n
I think a Facebook Exchange Program could provide that mere exposure at scale, bringing millions of people closer together.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Around the time last month that Facebook\u2019s audience had grown to an astounding 2 billion people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a change. \u201cFor the past 10 years,\u201d he said, \u201cour mission has been to make the world more open and<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":8787,"featured_media":430,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[503],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-behavior"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/files\/2017\/07\/Earth-as17-148-22727-medium-cropped-400x400.jpg?fit=400%2C400&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p8Tgb2-7Q","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8787"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=486"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":488,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/486\/revisions\/488"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/430"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/danieloran\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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Around the time last month that Facebook\u2019s audience had grown to an astounding 2 billion people, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced a change.<\/p>\n