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arxiv: 2605.05651 · v3 · pith:AWX3GPECnew · submitted 2026-05-07 · 💻 cs.HC

The Capacity to Care: Designing Social Technology for Sustained Engagement With Societal Challenges

JaeWon Kim , Lindsay Popowski , Louisa Conwill , Elizabeth `Lizzie' Li , Meryl Ye , Jiaying `Lizzy' Liu , Jose A. Guridi , Theia Henderson
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Bingxu Han Dennis Wang Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang Susan Wyche Yasmine Kotturi Gillian R. Hayes Angela D. R. Smith
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Pith reviewed 2026-05-25 06:20 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.HC
keywords social media designcare ethicssustained engagementsocietal challengesplatform architecturemoral psychologydigital wellbeingworkshop
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The pith

Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase, blocking sustained engagement with societal challenges.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper claims that people already care about large-scale problems such as climate change and injustice, yet sustained engagement remains rare because it is psychologically costly. Current social media designs heighten awareness without supplying routes to responsibility, competence, or community response, producing distress and eventual disengagement. Tronto's care ethics framework is used to show that genuine care requires all four elements, not awareness alone. The central argument is that platform architecture itself interrupts the sequence early and that redesign can change this outcome.

Core claim

Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Platforms built for attention capture rather than constructive response therefore amplify overwhelm while offering few pathways to meaningful action, especially for young users encountering global issues.

What carries the argument

Tronto's care ethics framework, which defines care as a process needing awareness, responsibility, competence, and community responsiveness.

If this is right

  • Designers can identify specific platform features that deplete or support the capacity to care.
  • New design directions can produce engagement that users maintain over time without burnout.
  • Social technology can be shifted from amplifying awareness alone to enabling the full sequence of caring.
  • Insights from moral psychology and platform studies can be applied to reduce distress caused by exposure to societal problems.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • If the architecture claim holds, changes limited to user education or external support would produce smaller gains than interface redesign.
  • The framework could be tested by measuring whether redesigned platforms increase reported sense of competence and community connection around the same issues.
  • This line of work could extend to measuring long-term mental health outcomes tied to platform use during crises.

Load-bearing premise

Platform architecture is the main barrier to sustained engagement rather than individual psychology or outside constraints, and Tronto's care ethics framework translates directly into concrete design requirements for digital systems.

What would settle it

An experiment in which users given access to redesigned interfaces that explicitly support responsibility and competence still show the same rates of disengagement and burnout as users on standard platforms.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2605.05651 by Angela D. R. Smith, Angel Hsing-Chi Hwang, Bingxu Han, Dennis Wang, Elizabeth `Lizzie' Li, Gillian R. Hayes, Jaewon Kim, Jiaying `Lizzy' Liu, Jose A. Guridi, Lindsay Popowski, Louisa Conwill, Meryl Ye, Susan Wyche, Theia Henderson, Yasmine Kotturi.

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: Tronto’s phases of care. Good care is a cyclical view at source ↗
read the original abstract

People care about climate change, injustice, and humanitarian crises. The challenge is not apathy but capacity: sustained engagement with large-scale problems is psychologically costly, and social media architecture often amplifies awareness while providing few pathways to meaningful action. The result is rising distress, overwhelm, and disengagement -- particularly among young people who encounter global suffering through platforms designed for attention capture rather than constructive response. This workshop examines how social technology design shapes the conditions for sustained engagement with societal challenges. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics framework and research in moral psychology and platform studies, we ask why caring at scale is difficult and how social media can both exacerbate and potentially mitigate this difficulty. Tronto's framework shows that good care requires more than awareness: it demands responsibility, competence, and community. Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase. We invite researchers and designers to identify platform designs that deplete or support the capacity to care, and to develop design directions for sustainable care: engagement that people can maintain over time without burning out.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

1 major / 0 minor

Summary. The paper claims that the primary challenge in engaging with societal issues like climate change is not apathy but limited capacity for sustained action, exacerbated by social media architectures that amplify awareness (attentiveness) while offering few pathways to responsibility, competence, and community. Drawing on Tronto's care ethics, it argues that dominant platforms stall the caring process at its earliest phase, leading to distress and disengagement, and calls for design research to identify features that support or deplete the capacity to care.

Significance. If the proposed translation of Tronto's framework to digital platform effects can be rigorously developed, the work could provide a useful interdisciplinary lens for HCI and platform studies on designing technologies that enable sustained rather than burnout-prone engagement with large-scale problems.

major comments (1)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: The central claim that 'Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase' treats Tronto's four-phase sequence as directly portable to attention-economy interfaces without deriving the mapping, comparing it to psychological or structural alternatives, or showing selective blocking of later phases. This isomorphism is load-bearing for the argument yet remains unexamined.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

1 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their careful reading and constructive critique of our workshop proposal. The concern about the portability of Tronto's framework is substantive and we address it directly below, indicating the revisions we will undertake.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Abstract] Abstract: The central claim that 'Dominant social media architectures stall the caring process at its earliest phase' treats Tronto's four-phase sequence as directly portable to attention-economy interfaces without deriving the mapping, comparing it to psychological or structural alternatives, or showing selective blocking of later phases. This isomorphism is load-bearing for the argument yet remains unexamined.

    Authors: We agree that the abstract states the central claim concisely without deriving the mapping in detail. The full proposal text grounds the claim in Tronto's phases (attentiveness, responsibility, competence, responsiveness) by linking platform affordances—such as algorithmic amplification of awareness—to the first phase while noting the absence of features supporting responsibility (e.g., sustained action pathways) or competence (e.g., skill scaffolding). To address the referee's point, we will revise the abstract to include a short clause indicating the basis of the mapping and expand the proposal body with an explicit derivation section. This section will compare the care-ethics lens to alternatives such as moral disengagement theory and compassion fatigue models, and will articulate how platform architectures selectively enable attentiveness while constraining later phases through design choices like ephemeral content and lack of community accountability mechanisms. These revisions will be made in the next version. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No significant circularity; argument applies external frameworks without self-referential reduction

full rationale

The paper advances a conceptual position by invoking Tronto's care ethics framework (an established external source) alongside moral psychology and platform studies research. No equations, fitted parameters, self-definitions, or self-citation chains appear in the abstract or described structure that would reduce any claim to its own inputs by construction. The mapping from interpersonal care phases to platform effects is presented as an interpretive application rather than a derived result that loops back on itself. This is the typical non-circular case for a workshop proposal in HCI that synthesizes prior literature.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The argument depends on the applicability of Tronto's care ethics and moral psychology findings to platform design without new evidence supplied in the abstract.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Tronto's care ethics framework (awareness, responsibility, competence, community) accurately describes the requirements for sustained engagement with societal challenges
    Invoked directly in the abstract to diagnose why social media stalls caring.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5779 in / 1090 out tokens · 40295 ms · 2026-05-25T06:20:22.894699+00:00 · methodology

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Reference graph

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