You are a tourist

Apologies for my behavior on vacation and on the internet

The tourists generally leave before the hurricanes come. That space between the end of the tourist season and the beginning of hurricane season is one of my favorite times to have a quick vacation myself, traveling from my tiny beachless island to a bigger island, with beaches, across the way.

We get some tourists on my island, too, but not nearly as many as the beachy island I vacation on does. The tourists on the beachy vacation island are mainly North American, with some Europeans thrown in, too. On vacation, I swim in the ocean and drink my fruity drinks on the beach and judge the tourists.

That is not a deserted island.

And there is so much to judge. Their confident ignorance (“That island is completely uninhabited,” a woman on a beach chair declaims to her companion, pointing to my house). Their phobia of animals (no, iguanas are absolutely not aggressive.) Their impatience (it has been 10 minutes since you placed your order.) Their profligate use of water. And, my God, their baggage, dragging so much stuff from place to place.

I was thinking these thoughts while at the beach, penning a snippy response to a Substack post by an author I’ve respected for decades—because obviously, a way one spends one’s time when she has both wifi and crystalline turquoise waters to swim in is to snipe at strangers on the internet. I was not alone: lots of people in beach chairs were staring at their phones rather than the peaceful waves or the majestic seabirds—not that that’s a defense.

The content of the post had to do with why people are jerks to each other on the internet.

The argument being advanced in the post was that one of the reasons that people behave badly on the internet is because we see others behaving badly on the internet, disabusing us of the naive notion that other people are generally nice.

Virginia Postrel

’s correspondent John Thrasher writes:

Other customs and norms that constitute being a decent human being are also like this. People have never wanted to conform to these norms, but they believed that everyone else was conforming to them and expected them to as well. Social media shows us that most people don't have that expectation, and the conformity rate to many norms is much lower than we expected. We thought that everyone was more decent and norm-following than we were, but social media punctured that PI [pluralistic ignorance] balloon. We got to see behind the curtain and realized that no one was really following the norms or expecting that anyone else was either. 

Pluralistic ignorance, as used here, is the idea that individuals know about themselves, but not others, and therefore assume that other people are different than they themselves are, when in fact folks are pretty much the same. And everybody else similarly knows themselves but not others, so we’re all in the dark together. But I don’t have to convince anyone that we are awful on the internet; you’ve probably more than familiar with that argument, and have probably lived it, too.

But you don’t have to go on the internet to see niceness norms get violated. You could also go on vacation.

People push each other out of place in the airport queue. They skip out on the bill at the beachside restaurant. They harass the waitresses, and insult the locals. And why not? They’re on vacation; they don’t have to worry about social consequences, because they’ll never see these people again. There’s a rich history of psychological research correlating anonymity and bad behavior¹ , and this has been widely proposed as a mechanism for why people are awful to each other on the internet, too.²

I order another fruity drink and take my phone back to the hotel room, where I let its battery run out on purpose.

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It’s worse when I vacation in the United States, back in the place I used to call home. It’s an atomized, anonymized culture, where no one hitchhikes or even says “good morning; God bless” to the people you pass on the street. Honking car horns means anger, not “hello” or “thank you,” and it happens all the time. It’s so loud there. Every public place is playing pop music, as if they’re trying to discourage patrons from talking to each other. Not that anyone needs to be discouraged: try striking up a conversation with an American in line at one of their disconcertingly large and sterile grocery stores. You’re better off trying to talk to one of those creepy self-checkout kiosks. It’ll take your picture without your consent, too, but at least it won’t try to get you cancelled.

I think of a line from a pop song I listened to when I lived here:

And if you feel just like a tourist
in the city you were born
Then it's time to go

So off I go, back home to my islands and my fruity drinks, obsessed with thoughts about how people became so awful.

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But of course, people generally aren’t awful, whether online or on vacation. Most people reading things on social media are lurkers, rarely or never commenting—just like I am. American culture has changed since I lived there, but most Americans have the same worries about that societal change as I do³. For almost all of the tourists at the beach, their biggest crime is fixating on their phone instead of the ocean, just like me. As pluralistic ignorance predicts, we’re all pretty similar both in our mundane goodness and in our petty vices, if unaware of that similarity.

The epistemic problem isn’t that the internet reveals bad behavior that I wouldn’t have been aware of otherwise; it’s that it allows me to know about others’ misbehavior without knowing anything else about them, and then imagine that’s all there is to know. Like my judgment of the tourists at the beach, I can draw a stereotype based on all the things I find irksome because I never get to know all the things I would find charming about them as unique individuals. And that’s on me, not them.

“It wasn’t me,” Shaggy sings in his anthem to gaslighting on the beach hotel speakers. But it is, and always was.

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Back at home, our people have got problems, too. Our rumor-mongering. Our phobia of animals (no, that snake is not venomous, but it is endangered, so please leave it alone.) Our profligate use of alcohol. And, my God, our baggage, dragging so many stories from place to place.

And there are so many stories⁴: A woman I fought with bitterly over our COVID vaccination campaign works with me tirelessly on an environmental project. A serial philanderer patiently mentors developmentally disabled adults. A reckless motorcyclist organizes a relief effort for families affected by a disaster on another island. An inveterate gossip finds homes for stray animals, caring for them herself until she can. A crank and conspiracy theorist rescues a lost hiker. A poster of reliably hateful content on social media tutors children struggling with school for free, and reads to residents in the nursing home.

All those awful people I don’t know on the internet are probably as magnanimous as the people I do. I just don’t know about it. It’s not that social media pops our pluralistic ignorance bubble, giving us license to be awful because our eyes are opened to the awfulness of others; it’s that it blinds us to the everyday goodness of people who can also be bad.

In real life, and in a small community, there is no anonymity, and so there is no pluralistic ignorance of our bad behavior. But there is also no ignorance of the good. It may well be true that anonymity causes antisocial behavior, but at minimum it allows us to judge others through an antisocial lens.

But I can choose not to look only through that lens, or at least I can try⁵.

You are a tourist, the song reminds me, like everyone else:

Because when you find yourself
the villain in the story you have written
It's plain to see
That sometimes the best intentions
are in need of redemptions
Would you agree?

1. See, for instance, Dawson, J. (2018) “Who Is That? The Study of Anonymity and Behavior,” Association for Psychological Science.

2. For a review, see Kim et al. (2023) “Anonymity and its role in digital aggression: A systematic review,” Aggression and Violent Behavior 72:101856. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.avb.2023.101856

3. In particular, Americans share my anxiety that social media is making things worse. For instance, see Pew Research Center (2020) “64% of Americans say social media have a mostly negative effect on the way things are going in the U.S. today.”

4. Details have been scrambled to help protect the identities of the people. But the bad things and the good things listed here are real.

5. I admit I will have to try very hard for travelers on Winair flight 677, though.