A while back, my Twitter blew up with people getting offended at a man named Tom Nichols, who’d quote tweeted a controversial opinion. Well, seemingly too controversial:

https://twitter.com/radiofreetom/status/1198349042683658241

Look, as an Indian myself, I get it. It’s one thing to say Indian food is terrible, it’s another to say ‘we’ pretend it isn’t. But the responses to his tweet seemed slightly overdone:

I get that his tweet was quite culturally insensitive, but I don’t think an opinion about food deserves even close to such an outcry. This is people calling him a racist because he doesn’t like a cuisine.

But this isn’t specific to this example. From J.K Rowling to Kevin Hart, It seems like ‘outrage’ is becoming an extremely common occurrence on the internet. I wrote this to make it clearer to myself why it happens, and how to avoid jumping on the outrage bandwagon myself.

I’m lucky enough to go to an international school with students from several different countries and backgrounds. On a given lunch table, I expected that there’d be a mix of many cultures. In my mind, each table should have had the same average diversity as the entire school

But I realised this isn’t the case at all. Apart from some variations, most groups are filled with similar people. Asians group with Asians, Indians group with Indians, Eurasians group with Eurasians. This doesn’t mean that anyone actively avoids other groups or students from other cultures. Just that generally, students spend time with people who look like them.

And for a while, I was confused as to why this was happening. School as a whole is mixed evenly. Classes are mixed evenly. Why was it that when given a choice, students don’t group evenly? But I think I got an idea of why. I call it the lunch hall effect:

Humans tend to group together with people they agree with, and agree with people they’re grouped with.