You have witnessed it, probably this week. A stranger correcting another stranger’s behavior. A comment on someone’s parenting, posted for an audience of thousands. A heated exchange over a parking spot that somehow becomes a referendum on someone’s character. The neighbor who reports another neighbor’s hedge height to the township. The pile-on that turns a stranger’s bad day into a national referendum, complete with their employer tagged in the replies.
Correcting other people, publicly, confidently, often cruelly, has gone from a private and occasional act to a constant, visible feature of American life. It shows up in the small moments and the large ones, in the small satisfaction that flickers when we get to be right about someone else’s wrongness, the little hit of righteousness that arrives before the guilt does.
Why do we do this? And what is it costing us?
The drive to correct is a drive for control
At its root, correcting other people’s behavior is rarely about the other person. When someone behaves in a way that violates expectations, it makes the world feel less orderly. Pointing it out, correcting it, condemning it, is often an attempt to restore that order, to reduce the anxiety produced by unpredictability.
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This is not pathological; it is recognizably human, and one plausible account for why traces it to our evolutionary history. Humans evolved in small groups where shared norms held cooperation together, and the instinct to notice and correct a violation, an unsafe choice, a broken agreement, likely helped keep those groups functioning. Whatever its precise origin, the impulse to enforce norms shows up early, automatically, and across cultures, which suggests it runs deeper than any single belief system.
Beneath that impulse sits a second layer: identity. When someone’s behavior contradicts our values, political, religious, cultural, it can register as a threat not just to the social order, but to who we are. Defending the norm becomes indistinguishable from defending the self. This is why disagreements over seemingly small things can escalate so quickly. The stakes feel existential because, psychologically, they are.
Sometimes it isn’t defense. It’s power.
But it would be too generous to attribute all of this to anxiety. Some of it is something blunter: an assertion of power.
There is a particular pleasure, rarely admitted, in making someone else flinch. In watching an apology get extracted. In knowing that a few words, posted at the right moment, can cost a stranger a job, a friendship, a reputation built over years. This is not the trembling defense of a threatened self; it is the opposite. It is the discovery that ordinary people, with no institutional power at all, can now wield something that functions like power: the ability to punish.
For people who feel they have little control over the actual conditions of their lives, their wages, their housing, their standing, their future, the ability to make a stranger suffer for a transgression, real or imagined, is available in a way that almost nothing else is. It costs little. It requires no permission. And it delivers, however briefly, the feeling that one is not powerless after all. This is not a flattering theory of human nature, but it is hard to look at the texture of online cruelty, the relish in it, the speed, the way the actual offense often barely matters once the pile-on has its own momentum, and conclude that fear is the whole story. Often, it looks much more like appetite.
When the stranger becomes one of them
That appetite finds its fuel in a separate trend: the disappearance of what sociologists call cross-cutting identities, the overlapping roles, neighbor, coworker, parent, member of the same church or union or softball league, that once gave people who disagreed something else in common. As those overlaps thin out, identity sorts more cleanly into opposing camps, and the people on the other side of any given line increasingly turn out to be on the other side of every line.
This matters because cruelty toward a person and cruelty toward a category feel completely different from the inside. It is hard to enjoy hurting someone you recognize as a full person, with a story and a context and a bad day of their own. It is much easier once they have been abstracted into a type, a permanent stand-in for an idea you’ve already decided is dangerous. Once that happens, punishing them stops registering as cruelty at all. It registers as justice. It can even register as a contribution, a small act of service to one’s own side in a larger fight. This is, in no small part, the engine of the country’s visible nastiness: not that people have become more sadistic, but that the targets of their hostility have stopped, perceptually, being people.
When institutions stop holding the line, individuals pick it up
Underneath both the anxiety and the appetite for power sits something even less visible: a vacuum where trust used to be.
For much of modern history, institutions, government, religious bodies, community organizations, the press, even extended family structures, performed a quiet but essential function: they absorbed uncertainty on our behalf. We did not have to personally adjudicate every dispute, defend every norm, or settle every question about how the world should work. The institution did that work, and we trusted it to. This freed enormous psychological bandwidth. A person could disagree with a neighbor and still feel, underneath it, that some larger structure was holding the perimeter, so the disagreement didn’t have to become a battle.
As trust in those structures has eroded, the uncertainty they once absorbed has not disappeared. It has fallen to the individual. The boundary-management that institutions used to do collectively now falls, by default, on each person alone. This is a heavier psychological load than most people are built to carry, and it produces a low-grade, often unconscious unease: not about any single issue, but about whether anything will reliably hold the line anymore.
In that state, new ideas, unfamiliar behavior, or simple cultural change stop registering as neutral information to be evaluated. They start registering as incursions, impositions on a perimeter the person now must defend personally, because no one else seems to be defending it for them. The person who is perceived to breach what another accepts as normative is no longer just different; they are a threat. And once someone feels they are guarding a breach alone, the line between correcting a violation and punishing the violator gets very thin, very fast.
A paradox that isn’t really a paradox
This same vacuum may also explain something that looks, on the surface, contradictory. We live in an era that explicitly values authenticity more than most periods in recent history, and yet open hostility, public shaming, and the willingness to punish strangers have also clearly risen. That looks like a contradiction. It probably isn’t one.
Both trends may be downstream of the same loosened restraint. Twentieth-century American culture placed heavy value on keeping your opinions private and avoiding a scene. Contemporary culture places more value on speaking up and refusing to stay silent. That shift has real upside: legitimate grievances get voiced more often than they used to. But it removes the brakes on everyone, including those expressing contempt, prejudice, or simple cruelty. The person publicly condemning a stranger in the name of justice and the person publicly tormenting one for the fun of it may believe they are doing opposite things. Often they are running on the same loosened inhibition, defending the same undefended perimeter, in the same vacuum.
Reframing change as ecological, not moral
So much of the energy behind all of this, the correcting, the punishing, the sorting of strangers into camps, comes from treating social change as a moral event that must be stopped or fought. But change, at scale, behaves less like a moral failure and more like an ecological process. Ecosystems don’t stay fixed. The forest that burns isn’t failing; it’s clearing space for what grows next. Norms and institutions follow the same logic: they’re not static structures to be defended at all costs but living systems that shift whether or not any individual approves. Treating that shift as a personal affront doesn’t stop the world from changing. It just removes you from any say in where it goes next.
Ensuring your place instead of fighting the tide
This isn’t a call for passive resignation; it’s a call to redirect energy from resistance toward adaptation, from holding the line to learning to navigate the current and shape where it goes. It also means being honest about which of our corrections are really about safety, and which are about the colder satisfaction of making someone smaller. The first is worth defending. The second is worth questioning before we indulge it, because that particular pleasure tends to find new targets long after the original grievance is gone.
The instinct to resist change is understandable, wired into us by evolution and culture and sharpened now by a vacuum of trust. But resistance, and the cruelty that often rides along with it, is rarely a winning strategy. The world will keep evolving with or without our approval. The better question isn’t how do I stop this, but how do I find my place in what comes next.
That is not surrender. It is evolution.
Steven Merahn is a pediatrician, health care executive, writer, and advocate for human-centered, clinically integrated care. He serves as enterprise chief medical officer for Perimeter Healthcare, where he leads initiatives focused on children and adolescents with complex behavioral health needs, including autism, intellectual and developmental disabilities, and other neurodevelopmental conditions. He is also the founder of Child Insights, which works with service providers and the health policy community to design systems of care that promote children’s developmental potential.
Throughout a career spanning public health, clinical practice, health system leadership, population health management, and value-based care, he has worked to improve outcomes for vulnerable populations across the life course. A Fellow of the American Academy of Pediatrics, he serves on national committees focused on autism and developmental disabilities.
Dr. Merahn is the author of Care Evolution: Essays on Health as a Social Imperative and writes frequently on health care transformation, behavioral health, systems-based practice, and the human experience of care, including on his Substack. His recent scholarship includes “Treating Invisible Wounds: The Case for Trauma-Informed Care in Autism” in the Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and “Pediatric Residential Treatment as Early Intervention?” in Child and Adolescent Psychiatry and Mental Health. His work explores the intersection of medicine, policy, ethics, and storytelling.
