Alan Jacobs: I’ve spent all my adult life as Christian — I’ve been in churches, often evangelical ones — and I’ve been an academic. I have 30 years of experience dealing with these communities, both of which I belong to and which don’t understand one another and often don’t want to understand one another.

So I thought that, out of that experience, I could write something that’s of more general value about how, without abandoning your convictions, you can avoid willful misunderstanding of other people and really try to understand what their point of view is and give it serious and appropriate considerations.

Jacobs: First of all, all those books are incredibly useful. I have read them and I have learned from them. But I thought what we really needed was not a general account of our cognitive biases but some guidance for the moment.

Especially if you’re on social media, you’re being presented with stimuli all the time, stimuli that are demanding a response from you. If that’s the case, how do you navigate that moment? The thesis of the book is that, in reality, we don’t want to master those impulses. We don’t want to, because by responding to those stimuli in an instinctive way, we can signal our belonging. But we ought to resist those stimuli, because the social and personal costs of not resisting those stimuli are enormous.

Jacobs: Your general point is really important there. New technologies always have this distancing or disintermediating effect. When we’re using a new technology to communicate, it seems, for at least a while, to diminish the humanity of the people we’re encountering. That’s a very old story.

Today, though, I think that what all the social media platforms have in common are two things. One is that speed is instant. And the second is that the platform are built in such a way that they encourage you to give responses immediately after stuff shows up. So you have the speed — but it’s not just that it comes at you at a certain speed, but everything encourages you to respond equally quickly.

When that tweet comes in, what comes along with it is a serious of buttons, one of which will let you reply, one of which will let you retweet, one of which will let you favorite. You’re being invited to make one of those responses, and to make it quickly because something else is coming in 10 seconds later. It’s that combination that I think is new. We’re like rats in the cage, pressing the button to get food. It really is a classic experiment in operant condition. We’re in Skinner boxes.

Jacobs: It’s actually Twitter that I know much better. In March of 2007, I deleted my Facebook account and started my Twitter account. I hated Facebook. And what I hated about it was the reciprocity. The idea that, if I friend someone, they’re going to automatically friend me. I thought that there were people whom I wouldn’t mind sharing details from my life, but I didn’t need to know what was going on in their lives all the time.

I love that on Twitter, relationships are not reciprocal. The problem is that one of the things that that does is put you in a situation where you’re following someone to whom you’re not accountable and who is not accountable to you, because there’s no mutuality there. That’s kind of understood. We’re not there to gather. It’s nonreciprocal and asynchronous. So you’re already at a distance from people.

And then there’s the fact that there are a lot reasons to follow people. There’s the hate follow for one, where you follow people specifically because you despise them and you want to have that dislike or hatred fed. If that’s what you do, then you love it when they say something that’s repulsive, because it confirms the view of them that you had all along. That’s an especially nasty side of Twitter, because its really easy to have all of your worse suspicions about people confirmed, while also avoiding any people who have a more reasonable articulation of those views you disagree with. You can control the influx of information in ways that confirm your priors.

Jacobs: Why do you hate-follow people? You hate-follow them so you can hate-retweet them. That’s why so many liberals follow Donald Trump on Twitter. It’s this weird thing where you signal boost people you hate so you can signal to people in your circle that you’re one of them. So there’s this kind of perverse incentive there.

Jacobs: Journalists are human beings, and they have that same impulse that everyone else does. But they have the additional incentive that, when people say really outrageous things, it’s newsworthy. So you get a situation where they both retweet something with their own commentary, but they can also use that tweet down the line as fodder for a post or article.

It’s really interesting to think how quickly embedded tweets have emerged as not only standard but universal in journalism. Every story, it seems like, has them. And often the tweets that are embedded are the most likely to be controversial and therefore the most clickworthy. Journalism is continually faced with the issue of becoming parasitic on Twitter.

Jacobs: I think that a superb tool is already out there — I just don’t know how make people use it: It’s called RSS.

I love RSS, and I loved it even before Google Reader was a thing. With RSS, everything I see there, I see the context of medium-to longform posts and articles, something that’s going to take me a few minutes to read. When I see those same articles on Twitter, what I’m seeing is this kind of bulletpoint version surrounded by many other bulletpoint versions of other things.

What happens is that when people access what you’re doing on Twitter, what they’re getting is a reduced and oversimplified version. We all know that, if you post something that links to a long article, people will respond to your tweet without reading the article.

I know this is utopian, but I would love to see news organizations say, “if you want to follow us on Twitter, great, but we have an RSS feed that gives you a deeper understanding of what’s going on.” Granted, most people don’t want that. They want the bullet points. But I think that if you can nudge people towards RSS, you’d be nudging them towards a tool that has different and better affordances and fewer perverse incentives. It’s utopian, as I said, but I’m not going to give up on RSS.

Jacobs: I don’t think there’s any question about it: “Give it five minutes.” If people don’t take anything else away from the entire book, it should be that. Every incredibly regrettable thing that I have said on social media, I have said within the first five minutes of something showing up. I would feel a lot better about my history as a social media user if I had had a five-minute delay. And I think Twitter would be doing a great service to humanity if they put a five-minute timer on tweets before people could respond to them. Of course, they won’t do that.