Purity spiral

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Social feedback loop leading to extremism

A purity spiral is a hypothesized form of groupthink in which members of a group compete to demonstrate increasingly extreme commitment to a particular value, while expressions of doubt, nuance, or moderation are punished.^[1][2] This self-reinforcing feedback loop is sometimes called "moral outbidding".^[3]

A purity spiral is argued to occur when a community's primary focus becomes implementing a single value that has no upper limit, and where that value does not have an agreed interpretation.^[4] Notable historical examples to which the term has been applied include the French Revolution, the Moscow Trials, and the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

The term purity spiral was coined in one of the first systematic sociological accounts of victimhood culture, The Rise of Victimhood Culture: Microaggressions, Safe Spaces, and the New Culture Wars, where it is described as a form of infighting among both activists and members of victim groups.^[5]

In a 2020 BBC documentary about purity spirals, British journalist Gavin Haynes said that purity spirals punish people for "the most minor transgressions," and noted that they make it socially unacceptable to express a preference contrary to that of the group.^[3][4] Haynes has compared it to the idea of preference falsification put forward by Turkish-American academic Timur Kuran in his 1995 book Private Truth, Public Lies, with Kuran saying in 2020 that incentives and systems are needed to disrupt the process, and observing that even a small amount of opposition or doubt can lead to a greater wave of questioning within the group.^[3] Haynes sees French philosopher René Girard as having described many of the principles of the purity spiral, including mimetic rivalry and the scapegoat mechanism, in his 1972 book Violence and the Sacred.^[3]

Haynes and others have given several examples of historical settings, groups, and eras in which they perceive purity spirals to have occurred:^[3][1]

• The French Revolution, which historians Katrin Redfern and Richard Whatmore label "perhaps the greatest [purity spiral] in history"^[6]
• The Puritan Revolution^[6]
• The Chinese Cultural Revolution, with its Red Guards and mass denunciations^[3]
• Moscow trials^[7] - demonstration of increasingly extreme loyalty tests required to maintain normalcy
• The actions of the Khmer Rouge^[3]
• McCarthyism^[3]

Haynes also points to more recent examples on social media, including:

• Instagram knitting circles in 2020, where some felt that an attempt to promote cultural diversity had led to the online bullying of transgressors^[4]
• The young adult fiction community in 2018, where the #ownvoices diversity movement led to people leaving bad online reviews of a book they had not read, accusing it of "white saviourism"^[7]

• Chilling effect – Discouragement of exercising rights by threats of legal sanctions
• Group think – Psychological phenomenon that occurs within a group of peoplePages displaying short descriptions of redirect targets
• Herd behavior – Behavior of individuals acting in a group
• Herd mentality – Tendency to adopt group beliefs and behaviors
• Moral panic – Fear that some evil threatens society
• Spiral of silence – Political science and mass communication theory
• The Power of the Powerless – Political essay by Václav Havel
• René Girard – French anthropologist and philosopher (1923–2015)
• Violence and the Sacred – 1972 book by René Girard