Global events in the 21^st century with its technological and information advancements often cause on a psychological level affective and cognitive reactions marked by feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, or even apathy, a state of cognitive dissonance, and on the other hand strategies to down-regulate or counter-balance these adverse feelings such as denial or over-simplification. The discursive polarization around these issues has been portrayed to be rising throughout the last decade to the point of damaging “societal tissue” and questioning the functionality of democracies – partly as an impact of social media algorithms (Harris, 2016) which are used as a major source of information about global events. Analysts contend that social media platform dynamics and their capacity to optimize user behavior for the sake of increasing platform engagement leads to a “race to the bottom of the brain stem”, activating fight, flight, or freeze impulses in response to these global events. Hence, they exacerbate the affective charge of the challenges – next to a sense of isolation and loneliness and a decrease of attention span with increased mind-wandering – that impede individual and collective capacity to face these events constructively. Thus, they highlight the significance of a digital practice of global social witnessing, which emphasizes affect-regulation, cognitive perspective-taking, mindfulness or presence of mind – and a “community of witnesses” which support each other and serves as a buffer against overwhelm and the pull towards “quick fix” or compensatory strategies.

In regard of these challenges, one way to understand the practice and the goal of global social witnessing is to view it from the lens of social cognition. Social cognition as an academic field is concerned with the way human beings make sense of another human being’s state of mind. While Social Cognition is usually focused on individuals, and dyadic or group interactions, we use its insights here to frame how humans make sense of the domain of global events and how they affect the “others”.

Global events in the 21^st century with its technological and information advancements often cause on a psychological level affective and cognitive reactions marked by feelings of overwhelm, anxiety, or even apathy, a state of cognitive dissonance, and on the other hand strategies to down-regulate or counter-balance these adverse feelings such as denial or over-simplification. The discursive polarization around these issues has been portrayed to be rising throughout the last decade to the point of damaging “societal tissue” and questioning the functionality of democracies – partly as an impact of social media algorithms (Harris, 2016) which are used as a major source of information about global events. Analysts contend that social media platform dynamics and their capacity to optimize user behavior for the sake of increasing platform engagement leads to a “race to the bottom of the brain stem”, activating fight, flight, or freeze impulses in response to these global events. Hence, they exacerbate the affective charge of the challenges – next to a sense of isolation and loneliness and a decrease of attention span with increased mind-wandering – that impede individual and collective capacity to face these events constructively. Thus, they highlight the significance of a digital practice of global social witnessing, which emphasizes affect-regulation, cognitive perspective-taking, mindfulness or presence of mind – and a “community of witnesses” which support each other and serves as a buffer against overwhelm and the pull towards “quick fix” or compensatory strategies.

In regard of these challenges, one way to understand the practice and the goal of global social witnessing is to view it from the lens of social cognition. Social cognition as an academic field is concerned with the way human beings make sense of another human being’s state of mind. While Social Cognition is usually focused on individuals, and dyadic or group interactions, we use its insights here to frame how humans make sense of the domain of global events and how they affect the “others”.

This ladder presents a sequence of rungs, different forms of social cognition, with more “connected” states lower on the ladder, and the higher on the ladder, the more “disconnected”. In the teaching of the use of this tool, the various rungs are being outlined – which is beyond the scope of these paragraphs here. However, for the practice of witnessing, an important ingredient is to become aware of which “rung of the ladder” one is operating from, that is developing a meta-awareness about one’s own social cognitive habitual reaction tendencies in response to global events. The practitioners’ guiding questions are: “Which situations, cues, events, lead me to jump ‘up the ladder’ towards disconnected states?” “What helps me to ‘climb down the ladder’ again?” “How can the practice of DIG GSW help me ‘climb down the ladder’?”

The witnessing of complex and challenging issues requires the development of a ‘vertical literacy’, i.e. the capacity to know and act on one’s own inner condition in response to global events, and to make inferences and try to sense from which “rung of the ladder” systemic actors which are players in global events seem to operate. Importantly, the first step with such a tool is to use it for self-knowledge, since it is easy in affectively charged fields to weaponize such tools of vertical literacy by finger-pointing who is operating from which state – and thereby, add to the polarization!
Thus, we have seen how a social-cognition perspective can help to both analyze scientifically, how human beings make sense of world events, and what is more, it can be one element – among many others – which supports individuals and groups in their practice of global social witnessing.

References
Ladder of connectedness:
Boell, M. & Senge, P. (2018). Compassionate Systems Framework. Introduction Workshop, M.I.T., Boston, June 2018
https://systemsawareness.org/
Social Neuroscience of empathy, compassion, and perspective-taking:
Singer, T., Lamm, C., (2009). The social neuroscience of empathy. Ann. N. Y. Acad. Sci. 1156, 81–96.
Singer, T., Klimecki, O.(2014). Empathy and compassion. Current biology, 24, 18,R875-R878
Kanske, P., Böckler, A., Trautwein, F.-M., & Singer, T. (2015). Dissecting the social brain: Introducing the EmpaToM to reveal distinct neural networks and brain behavior relations for empathy and Theory of Mind. NeuroImage, 122, 6−19
Social Media:
Harris, T. (2016). How technology hijacks people’s minds—from a magician and Google’s design ethicist. Medium Magazine.