Overview: Psychology

“It’s so easy to feel you’re special or in on something.” - James Wolfe, 45, who was "introduced [to Qanon] by a friend to the idea in late 2017... [when he] was recently unemployed and recovering from a serious physical injury", and quickly "started spending as much as eight hours a day" before recovering "from QAnon aft…

echo chambers and epistemic bubbles... systematically exclude sources of information... exaggerate their members’ confidence in their beliefs... work in entirely different ways... epistemic bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side...‘epistemic bubble’ …

This month sees the first generation of Hubs (other than mine) go live, so it’s time to imagine what comes next: AI integration? Filter-bubble Piercers? HubBots? Factcheck-driven credibility scores?

How fake news gets into our minds, and what you can do to resist it... to understand why it gets into our mind... by examining how memory works and how memories become distorted.... Fake news often relies on misattribution ... we retrieve things from memory but can’t remember their source... one of the reasons advertising is so effective... Repe…

many activists working to create positive change ... seem to think that if they just get their ideas to “go viral” they will ... dominate the discourse. The great lie of this approach is that no singular discourse exists! Each community is now capable of building consensus with itself, where the like-minded talk to others like themselves while fo…

reddit community called Change My View ... a ready-made natural experiment ... feed it into programs ... to understand the back-and-forth between human beings ... discovered two things: what kind of arguments are most likely to change people’s minds, and what kinds of minds are most likely to be changed. https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/ : po…

concern that social media sites contribute to political polarization by creating ``echo chambers" that insulate people from opposing views ... We find that Republicans who followed a liberal Twitter bot became substantially more conservative post-treatment, and Democrats who followed a conservative Twitter bot became slightly more liberal post-tre…

we evolved to solve complex problems not independently but dependently in a group setting.... the knowledge illusion... much of our “knowledge” is not knowledge in the sense of understanding how things work but ... faith... in other people  -... smart people with PhDs... whatever  -  who I trust to know these things that I do not know.... for tho…

Our findings confirm the existence of echo chambers where users interact primarily with either conspiracy-like or scientific pages.... Only few conspiracy users engage with corrections and their liking and commenting rates on conspiracy posts increases after the interaction.

Fighting people with facts only makes them cling to their beliefs more strongly, further polarising our damaged societies. Different tactics are needed, and they start closer to home than you think.

a “Topics to Follow” box in the News Feed that lets you swipe through a range of themes... Tapping “Follow” brings you to a dedicated feed for that theme populated by a collection of Pages ... tap through to see all the Pages you’ll then see public posts from in your main feed... Facebook could expose people to contrarian views that might make the…

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

there’s plenty of reasons why negativity abounds online... Incivility is a basic human instinct that’s encouraged by anonymity and exacerbated by inequality... anger helps drive participation... anyone who benefits from trolling — whether it’s platforms themselves or populist politicians — have little reason to improve the tone of online chatting…

Groupthink produced a failure of the “wisdom of crowds” and an underestimate of Trump’s chances... political experts aren’t a very diverse group and tend to place a lot of faith in the opinions of other experts and other members of the political establishment. Once a consensus view is established, it tends to reinforce itself ... Social media, esp…

To some liberals, Donald Trump’s inauguration portends doom... to many conservatives, it’s a crowning moment ... as if each side is living in ... a different reality.... information avoidance... all of us ... ward off any new information that makes us feel bad, obligates us to do something we don’t want to do or challenges our worldview... we’re …

A work in progress from an upcoming eponymous post. Another experiment with the enewsletter format: some initial thoughts on this seemingly intractable problem, with some of the source materials I’m studying.

Echo chambers aren’t just a product of the internet and social media, however, but of how those things interact with fundamental features of human nature... Understand these features of human nature and maybe we can think creatively about ways to escape them... our tendency to associate with people like us. Sociologists call this homophily.... t…

Perfectly open communities always go sour. You need filters. Every functional community has them. And that’s where machine learning comes in... If you can detect trolls, you can protect the people they’re trolling by muting or putting a warning over the trolls’ posts... Twitter... already have a way of screening out porn. Why don’t they do the sam…

As Facebook attempted to capture the fast-moving energy of the news cycle from Twitter... it built a petri dish for confirmation bias... Here’s how... ‘Share’ Button ... encouraging people to share quickly and without much thought... “original sharing,” where people post their own photos, text updates... was declining..., content from celebritie…

How to make sense of Donald Trump’s election? Here are some articles which helped me. Maybe they’ll help you.

Brexit, as experienced by a British-Australian comms guy in Brussels.

The filter bubble... has evolved. Algorithms, network effects, and zero-cost publishing are enabling crackpot theories to go viral... impacting the decisions of policy makers and shaping public opinion, whether they are verified or not... Facebook's news feed ... tailored just to us ... to keep us interested and happy... drives engagement and mor…

Ironically, with the widening of (national) news choices that the Internet has spawned, we’re depending on fewer pipelines of news. It’s a narrowing of the filter funnel...t as troubling as the filter bubbles that used to occupy our concerns, but likely more potent. As those pipelines narrow, necessarily, the decision on what is news, and what is …

I spent a few minutes viewing the Twitter profiles of some of the people who've followed me recently and I was struck by how much of their TweetStreams were simply RTs of other people here in Brussels. Don't they have anything original to say?

In which I studiously avoid curating anything about 2016 or David Bowie.

the idea that everyone is like us is called the “false-consensus bias.”... Online it means we can be blindsided by the opinions of our friends or, more broadly, America... morphs into a subconscious belief that we and our friends are the sane ones and that there’s a crazy “Other Side” ... that just doesn’t “get it,” ... not as intelligent as “us.”…

"The Filter Bubble", by MoveOn.org foreign policy director Eli Pariser, shows that the forces creating the Brussels Bubble are about to be reinforced by technology, operated invisibly - and with impunity - by a handful of companies.