Unifying Models of Intergroup Hostility in Online Discourse

2026-09-17

AI Summary

研究通过分析2024年美国大选期间社交媒体上的286万条帖子，统一了六个关于群体间敌意的基础理论模型，揭示了敌意言论的结构与时间顺序。

Abstract

Hostile rhetoric toward social groups can normalize exclusion and justify mistreatment, as well as contribute to rising polarization and political violence. Efforts to moderate hostile rhetoric in online speech draw on foundational theories in social and moral psychology, and political science. However, these theories were developed largely in parallel, often propose different and sometimes conflicting accounts of how hostility develops, and have rarely been tested against each other in real discourse. The result is a fragmented understanding of the rhetorical mechanisms of hostility, without a clear sense of how they appear, and relate to each other, in real-world discourse. Using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, we model the mechanisms of six foundational theories of intergroup hostility -- boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation -- within a common empirical framework to recover the broader organization of intergroup hostility rhetoric. Structurally, we find that boundary construction and threat construction anchor the system; temporally, we find that these mechanisms tend to follow a regular ordering: boundary construction, derogation, and action orientation tend to appear early; dehumanization and threat construction later; scapegoating latest. Mapping how these theoretical frameworks actually manifest in discourse bridges longstanding divisions across social science traditions and presents computational social science with a clearer empirical foundation for modeling intergroup hostility rhetoric beyond single-label detection.

Problem

• intergroup hostility
• online discourse
• social groups
• polarization
• political violence

Innovation

• intergroup hostility
• empirical framework
• rhetorical mechanisms
• computational social science
• discourse analysis