Heated arguments and sometimes abusive exchanges are happening all over the Social media, particularly between Left-leaning activists and rightist supporters on various social and political issues. This blog is an attempt to understand how these polemic debates and narrative-creation affects our larger social discourses. Let us try to understand this social media phenomenon using few tools of behavioral science.
Contrary to conventional wisdom, human beings are neither perfectly rational in our acts nor perfectly neutral in our attitude. In reality, we all are biased in our reasoning and opinions, but with varying degree. We are endowed with limited attention span, limited computational capacity, and biased reasoning. This is what Nobel laureate economist Herbert Simon described as Bounded rationality.
We all like to hear and focus on news that confirms our already existing believes and seek the company of people who conform to our views. This kind of cognitive bias is called Confirmation bias. In the pre-social media era, we all were interested in reading newspapers which were supportive of our core beliefs which we believed as morally right. Mainstream newspapers had to satisfy either side of political ideology to retain their readership and were doing a fine balancing act.
When social media (SM) came, people got an opportunity to express themselves obviating the intermediary role of a newspaper editor. Ordinary people, who were having a strong opinion and were heavily biased, got an opportunity to broadcast their opinions and ideologies. Earlier, these same people were helpless consumers of an ‘expert’ opinion, but now they can be ‘creators’ as well. Millions of ‘ordinary’ men and women, whose voices mattered little till then, became ‘new generation’ movers and shakers.
Social media (SM) disrupted information exchange mechanism like never before. Co-ordinated efforts of like-minded individuals could now create new narratives and discourse. These narratives are very much vulnerable to manipulations as they are being framed by a set of people, well networked, ideologically opinionated and hence heavily biased. They can easily hijack an agenda and create more polarisations.
SM not only gives us a platform to express ourselves but also gave an opportunity for networking with likeminded people, having similar biases and opinions. This ‘ideological band of brothers’, who would have remained complete strangers in a pre-SM era, got connected through SM platforms and together they are setting new narratives. The increased amount of interaction between these like-minded individuals ends up in reinforcing each other’s biases and we can see Confirmation bias in full play here.
Let us now examine the possible pathways by which a well designed social media campaign can attract and mobilize ordinary people which were not possible earlier.
A)-Selective and manufactured outrages-
As said earlier, we have limited attention span and limited computational capacity. Hence, we give attention to issues only when it is ‘framed‘in such a manner that will appeal to our hearts and souls. An intelligent social media user can frame an incident according to his ideological disposition and hence can over/underemphasis its seriousness and implication. A particular way of framing an incident helps us to interpret it easily as per our ideological latitude.
Unfortunately, we have inherited a neural mechanism which helps us to identify threats easier. Our brains are designed in such a way that it gives priority to bad news. This frugal and fast way of thinking (or ‘System 1’ according to Daniel Kahlman) is designed to protect us from upcoming threats. Bad information is processed faster, bad stereotypes and bad impressions are easily formed than good ones. Hence, if an incident is framed as a ‘threat’ to me or to my community, it can attract a lot of negative attention.
By default, we tempt to believe most of the things what we see or read. Our System 1 is gullible and is biased in that regard. It is the job of our Rational faculties (or System 2 ) to verify and ‘un-believe’ if necessary. However, much mental effort and energy are required for dis-believing and disconfirmation and hence a lot of effort is needed to counter fake news. Hence fake news pedaling is relatively easy and people often fall to pray to it. This is particularly true if the same is about any bad information, framed as threatening own life or limbs.
B) Closeness.
Every incident and injustice happening in this world does not stir our consciousness. We all are selective in our approach and prejudiced in our outlook. We are ruthlessly indifferent to things when tragedy happens to people whom we are not closed to or don’t know about. A 100 people killed in an earthquake happened somewhere in Bolivia won’t arouse much sympathy compared to a dozen got killed in a road mishap in our district. This is because we are ‘close’ to the victims and they are from ‘our’ territory and we consider their tragedy as ours. However, Closeness here refers to is not necessarily a geographical closeness but is a psychological closeness.
Social media enhances or sometimes distorts this ‘closeness’ factor by manipulating the very nature of this tragedy. Viral videos and posts can often invoke a feeling that the tragedy is happening to our ‘own’ community and that too in our near neighborhood and not in some distant land.
C) Vividness-
However, in social media, interested and intelligent parties have full freedom and are ‘empowered’ to give vividness to the incident/tragedy so that it can stir anybody’s soul. For example, a detailed storytelling of the incident with right kind of narration, the exact motivation of the perpetrator, sequence of events, past incidents of similar nature, right kind of images etc add to the vividness of the narrative.
D) Coherence and context-
People often believe in stories that are coherent, compelling and simple. We like to empathize, love and hate actors who are in stories which are coherent in nature. A lot of information need not be necessary if the stories are coherent in nature. Social media offers a platform to bring such coherence to an incident. Rather than mentioning the incident in an abstract manner, ‘social media entrepreneurs’ comes out with coherent stories which grab our emotional attention.
Conclusion-
We, human beings, are not looking for answers to every problem in this earth nor for truth, facts, and information for taking a decision and making opinions. We are looking for coherent stories which can sit perfectly within in our long-held beliefs and prejudices. Rest of the information that doesn’t sit into it is mostly ignored. Social media gives a perfect platform to search for stories we like to believe and connect with people who believe in similar stories. Hence such stories appear to be more trustworthy than others. As author Yuval Harari said, "we should never underestimate human stupidity and it is one of the powerful force in human history".
