Speaking during the MRS Annual Conference’s closing keynote on Tuesday 10^th March, the author of The Psychopath Test and The Men Who Stare at Goats said his role requires ‘empathetic objectivity’.

“It’s so important to come to this job with empathetic objectivity,” Ronson told the conference. “Don’t be an idiot, don’t slide into that thought process so much that you start to believe harmful things that hurt people, but at the same time, remember that … we are all capable of cruel and irrational behaviour.”

Nowhere was this behaviour more evident than in Ronson’s 2015 book So You’ve Been Publicly Shamed, inspired by the story of Justine Sacco, a Twitter user who posted an ill-judged joke on the platform and subsequently had her life dismantled by trial by social media.

More than a decade later, Ronson said we are now in a society dominated by ‘the unashamed, the vice signallers’.

“I think that story was a real harbinger of everything that happened since 2013. Trump got elected, everybody hardened, instead of seeing people as complicated, nuanced human beings, we defined them by just a sliver of information about them.

“One consequence of all of this is that transgressors hardened. I liken it to hospital superbugs – we sanitised and sanitised the hospital to the extent that superbugs became impervious to treatment. That’s what we did to transgressors – we shamed and shamed transgressors until they said, ‘we’re going to be as unashamed as we like’.”

Ronson said ‘transgressors’ now refuse to be shamed, which he said was “healthy if the shame was inappropriate”, but added: “But now people are just brushing off the shame, no matter what they did. We’ve contributed to a world where the unashamed, the vice signallers have taken over … I think we’re mutating from unashamedness to a new level – disinhibition.”

During a fireside chat with Channel 4 research manager Katya Des-Etages, Ronson said curiosity had been core to his approach. “If you fill your head with instant, cold judgement, there’s no room for curiosity,” Ronson said. “If you take judgement out of your brain and meet people with curiosity, it can lead to the most extraordinary places.”

Discussing how researchers could get to objective truth, he said: “Be curious instead of judgemental. It’s really important to see people within the context of societal changes, to be empathetic and curious, but keep your feet on the ground, keep your critical thinking and don’t give people an easy ride.”

In a polarised world, and one in which more extreme views are shifting into the mainstream, journalists and broadcasters tread a careful line when determining how critically to treat a subject. Ronson said: “There is an obvious danger when you do what I do, or what Louis Theroux does, is that we give people too easy a time.

“The question is, what’s the benchmark? When do you empathise, and when do you treat something more critically? I guess the question is, ‘who is hurt?’.”   

Responding to a question about whether mainstream media is doing enough to challenge opinions and verify facts, Ronson said: “One of my bugbears is ideological journalism. Our job as journalists is to come to something with objectivity and curiosity, and I’m sure it’s the same for people in this room. It behoves people whose job is objectivity to be objective.”

He said he recently got into an ‘ideological fight’ with an editor, who he said had told him: ‘I hope the story reflects your truth’. “I shook when I heard the phrase ‘your truth’,” he said. “I wanted to say to her, ‘the story doesn’t reflect my truth, it reflects the truth as much as I could possibly get to it’.”

Ronson added: “With the phrase ‘your truth’, anything goes. That sort of postmodernism – where there’s no such thing as objective truth – couple that with AI, and we’ll be in real trouble if we lose our critical thinking skills.”

• Research Live will publish a profile interview with Ronson next week.