Are NTs/humans becoming more easily offended as time passes?

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It's certainly a popular opinion that people are more easily offended these days, and obviously you can't be expected to discount your own local experiences any more than I can discount mine. So I'm sure we can agree to differ. Our personal experiences don't tell us much about the global trend, so they're not in conflict with each other. There are a lot of articles discussing whether or not it's true, but I've not been able to find any that try to answer the question scientifically, if they even answer it at all. The only ones I can find that draw any conclusions don't even ask the question in the first place, they just wade in and present the "answer" without showing their working.

I was glad to notice this in a survey:
Sizable shares within both parties say both issues [offensive speech and people being too easily offended] are major problems – 35% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats say this.
because I think they're both problems. I wasn't glad that (according to the poll) so many other people think only one of those things are a problem, because it suggests to me that the majority of people have extreme and opposing views on the matter, which is a recipe for a perfect storm.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2 ... clear-cut/
There's so much data there that some of it made my head hurt, but there's nothing about what's been going on over time, and it's only about the USA, so who knows what's going on in the rest of the world?

I was recently reflecting that I never used to see progressive bigots, but they are common now. I think that ever since dogma took over the social sciences people have been trying to project and defend ever less grounded self-images and social theories. The acceleration of intolerance over the last decade, though, seems to be the product of the social media algorithms, which maximize conflict to generate attention for the ads, while creating media bubbles that isolate people from other opinions and decrease any self-doubt.

If they've taken the science out of social science, that bothers me. To me it's bad enough that some religionists and right-wingers seek to discount science, because I think good science is a useful tool for cutting through bigotry and dogma, but who is driving the removal of science from the social sciences? I'm not saying it isn't happening, I just want to know who's doing it.

Hint: They are easily offended.

Society as a whole becomes easily offended now. Even people on the spectrum.

No. I was clumsy how I wrote that. I meant that people are getting more immature in their attitudes, I don't know why that is happening. I shouldn't have brought the interests into it because they aren't connected to maturity.

Maybe it's because of social media. Lots of people are very rude and childish on social media because they are behind a screen and anonymous. I'm sure they don't act like that in their real lives.

I suppose it could be just my local experiences and where I live now, I don't know. I do live in a small village but I do mean people I've met from other parts of the country.

I'm not sure if it's possible to answer the question scientifically, it's hard to do that with human behaviour isn't it. Maybe there are just more humans so we're bound to annoy each other more because the world is more crowded.

i find people so hard to talk to because having to remember what offends and what doesnt

mind you , people say much more harmful things to us than what we probably ever said to them so dont really know what im worrying about

No need to worry about the justice of the exchange, but much need to worry about the hostility of the response.

I'm delighted reading all you posts in this thread. This discussion about the apparently ncreasing intolerance during the last decade, reminds me of how society could be under a totalitarian regime. In such a system I can imagine that people on the spectrum are the most vulnerable ones. Because we are the most likely to make "socially inappropriate" mistakes. I think that's why this increasing intolerance is something that concerns us.

What it's been good at illustrating is that totalitarian environments don't just come from governments and dictators, they can come out of coercion from all kinds of sources.

Can't be the sociologists then, if they're any good at social science. At least I always thought that understanding how people tick would help keep people immune from the ego problems that (I presume) cause people to be offended. OTOH, there are probably plenty of shrinks with ego problems.

Or maybe it's coming from those who fund the sociology? There was (I think) a problem in that direction at the university I worked for. I couldn't understand why they kept renaming buildings after obscure bigwigs, until somebody told me that the bigwigs were people who had bequeathed a lot of money to the university and that it was therefore an expedient thing to feed their egos by preserving their memories in that way like the pyramids with the pharaohs. Nor could I understand at first why the management bothered to create a highly right-on (and rather false) image of the university, but then I stumbled on the theory that the august bodies who supplied grants might be the ones who insisted on it.

I think you'll have to explain it to me, assuming my conjectures and analogies have missed the target.

I get reprimanded on this site every now and then. Once it was for repeating a joke I heard on national TV maybe 20 years ago. It was acceptable on national TV then, but not acceptable on a forum like this now. So I suppose that the world is more 'sensitive' now than it used to be. But I havent had the urge to become recluse or a mute because of it.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 01 Jan 2023, 9:30 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Certainly in the UK the output of television is more strictly (?self-)regulated than it used to be, as evidenced by the BBC holding back from re-screening certain sitcoms with arguably racist and homophobic content. I've barely noticed it myself because I don't watch live TV, and absolutely wouldn't depend on it for seeing sitcoms. But then some elements of UK television content seem to have become more accepted - e.g. I don't think they'd have got away with "Bottom" at one time in history, and I think religion is no longer held to be as unlampoonable as it once was. So maybe this new sensitivity thing is quite selective, and some strands of it are less regulated than they used to be?

Overall it seems that older Americans are less likely to feel that the gov should be able to prevent people saying things that "are offensive to minority groups" than younger ones are, so maybe that reflects a shift over time towards less "free speech." I wouldn't be surprised if that was true in the UK as well. Another statistic is that Americans on the whole are more supportive of such "free speech" than the British.

I think it's also understandable that older people who remember more freedom about certain kinds of speech see any tightening of the taboos as arbitrary and therefore needlessly authoritarian. I guess the argument runs: "we were allowed to say that in my day and the world didn't collapse." That's often been my gut reaction to a lot of general restrictions that never used to happen. Sometimes I hear reasons that make sense to me for the change, sometimes I don't.

Last edited by ToughDiamond on 02 Jan 2023, 1:52 am, edited 1 time in total.

There. Fixed it for you. And yes. Seems to apply to autism boards to the extreme as well.

That last is another point.

Back in the late Sixties many taboos collapsed. Suddenly Hollywood was allowed to put four letter words into, and to show nudity in movies.

Now prudery is coming back into vogue. But its a different kind of prudery about different things. Its okay to cuss, and make fun of religion, and have nudity. But you cant insult the LBGTQ community, or Pakistani immigrants, etc.

Were just substituting one form of prudery for another. So maybe the question is 'which kind of prudery is better?".