> If we include virtual interactions, the range of people a person interacts with each day continues to grow. This essentially means that the number of opportun

> If we include virtual interactions, the range of people a person interacts with each day continues to grow. This essentially means that the number of opportunities to “simulate” strategies for interacting with others continues to grow. If being nice is the winning strategy in modern society, then the increasing number of interactions will increase the speed at which people “learn” to adopt this strategy. I'd certainly like this to be true, but the past couple of decades have shown that unmoderated internet fora can tend to get pretty toxic, so it's hard to be so optimistic. Part of this could probably be explained by algorithms promoting contentious content for page views. But such toxicity was also present before the rise of modern algorithmically controlled news and social media, such as USENET newsgroups in the 90's and early 2000's.