Paper Overview
- Field: NLP
- Authors: Patrick Gerard, Julia Mendelsohn, Kristina Lerman
- Published: 2026-09-17
- arXiv: 2609.20808
- Structurally, boundary construction and threat construction anchor the entire system of hostility mechanisms.
- Temporally, the mechanisms tend to follow a regular sequence: boundary construction, derogation, and action orientation tend to appear early; dehumanization and threat construction later; and scapegoating last.
Summary
Hostile rhetoric toward social groups can normalize exclusion and justify mistreatment, as well as contribute to rising polarization and political violence. Efforts to moderate hostile rhetoric in online speech draw on foundational theories in social and moral psychology, and political science. However, these theories were developed largely in parallel, often propose different and sometimes conflicting accounts of how hostility develops, and have rarely been tested against each other in real discourse. The result is a fragmented understanding of the rhetorical mechanisms of hostility, without a clear sense of how they appear, and relate to each other, in real-world discourse.
Using 2.86 million posts from TikTok, Truth Social, and Twitter/X during the 2024 U.S. presidential election, the authors model the mechanisms of six foundational theories of intergroup hostility—boundary construction, threat construction, scapegoating, negative evaluation, dehumanization, and action orientation—within a common empirical framework to recover the larger organizational structure of intergroup hostile discourse.
Key Findings
Significance
Mapping how these theoretical frameworks actually manifest in discourse bridges long-standing divides across social science traditions and provides computational social science with a clearer empirical foundation for modeling intergroup hostile rhetoric beyond single-label detection.
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