People overestimate support for “cancellation”

Social exclusion has long served as a mechanism of norm enforcement. However, in contemporary discourse, there is a common narrative about “cancel culture” that implies an overextension of social exclusion – often driven by social media. Given the ambiguity surrounding what cancellation entails and how often it occurs, people may struggle to accurately judge their own likelihood of being cancelled for expressing controversial views. Across two preregistered studies (N_S1 = 753, N_S2 = 753), we examined judgments of cancellation using naturalistic statements that participants (N = 49) in a pretest believed could get them “cancelled.” We found that people think they are more likely to get cancelled for making statements than is warranted, both when compared with other people’s judgment of the same statement and with others’ expressed willingness to impose such sanctions. Their estimates are also only weakly related to how others judged the same statement. Although participants generally judged cancellation as similarly likely whether they imagined themselves or another person making a statement, this self-other asymmetry emerged once cancellation was framed explicitly as taking place on social media: participants then perceived a greater likelihood of cancellation when simply imagining themselves, rather than another person, making the same statement. Together, these findings suggest that people systematically overestimate the risk of being cancelled and raise the possibility that concerns about cancellation are fueled by inaccurate beliefs about others’ willingness to impose social sanctions.