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How to Survive Thanksgiving in a Postelection, Social Media World

So, it's Thanksgiving, and you're back at home, passing the mashed potatoes to your Aunt Jenny, whom you haven't seen in person in nearly a year. But you are friends with her on Facebook, so you know quite a lot about her thoughts on the election. Like ... every thought. Way too many thoughts.

How do you reconcile the smiling woman across the table with the conservative warrior or liberal firebrand you've been seeing on social media? Is Aunt Jenny's frothing Facebook persona her real self, or just a piece of her personality? And how do you talk to her if her views happen to fundamentally clash with yours?

The problem of political reconciliation around the Thanksgiving table is not a new one, but a particularly contentious and personal election, plus the ubiquity of social media, have made family harmony increasingly fraught.

"I think people may have caused some damage in relationships just because of the way that they interacted on social media," said Jaclyn Cravens, a marriage and family therapist and assistant professor at Texas Tech University. "Now, the holidays are coming up, and we may potentially have to sit down face-to-face with these individuals.

We don't have the option of unblocking, unfollowing, defriending." [The 6 Strangest Presidential Elections in US History]

Online versus in person

For more than a decade, psychologists have been documenting a phenomenon called the online disinhibition effect. As described in a 2004 paper, people "loosen up" online; they're less restrained and more willing to express themselves openly.

Sometimes, this is beneficial: People can show great kindness and generosity or open up about emotions and experiences that they otherwise might have kept hidden. That's benign disinhibition. Other times, online disinhibition is terrible: People threaten each other, throw out insults and hurl abuse. That's toxic disinhibition.

Disinhibition isn't the only way offline and online discussions can differ. A 2012 paper in the journal New Media & Society — one of the few studies to directly compare internet and real-world discussions of political issues — found that online participants of political dialogues were more likely to be male, younger and employed full time than those who attended public forums on politics in person. They were also less knowledgeable, less trusting, less tolerant and less interested in politics overall. Online discussion also appeared less likely to build consensus: Whereas 53 percent of offline-discussion participants said their last meeting ended in a decision to take an action, only 17 percent of online-only participants said the same.

Of course, that study compared online discussions to formal political meetings, not around-the-table chats between citizens. In this regard, research shows that your Facebook feed is probably more likely to be flooded with political debate than your real-world conversations. In a 2012 study, researchers analyzed the 2008 election and found that people talked about politics pretty frequently: At least in the run-up to a national election, it was the most-discussed topic among family members and the second-most-discussed topic among nonfamily members.

Nevertheless, the researchers found that people assiduously avoid political disagreements: Only 29 percent of pairs of people who disagreed with one another said they talk about politics frequently, compared with 71 percent of people who agreed with one another.