WK3 Reading The Darkside of Information Proliferation

• Information proliferation


  The consumption and sharing of information, increasing through social media and other communications technology
• There are well-understood psychological limits on our capacity to process information
• As information proliferation increases


  It creates an attentional bottleneck, favoring information that is more likely to be searched for, attended to, comprehended, encoded, and later reproduced
• Information-rich environments


  • They influence the evolution of information via four forces of cognitive selection:
• Selection for belief-consistent information


  Leads balanced information to support increasingly polarized views
• Selection for negative information


  Amplifies information about downside risks and crowds out potential benefits
• Selection for social information


  Drives herding, impairs objective assessments, and reduces exploration for solutions to hard problems
• Selection for predictive information


  Drives overfitting, the replication crisis, and risk seeking
• The cognitive life cycle of information provides a framework for understanding how cognitive selection shapes the evolution of information as it progresses from one mind to the next
• Information proliferation influences the evolution of information by:
• Misinformation has an advantage in competitive environments because it is freed from the constraints of being truthful, allowing it to adapt to cognition's biases for distinctive and emotionally appealing information
• Lies proliferate faster than the truth
• Faster generation times accelerate adaptation
• Cognitive selection can produce beneficial outcomes by selecting for valuable information, but the focus here is on selective forces that drive unwanted outcomes of information proliferation, such as extremism, hysteria, herding, and misinformation
• Belief-consistent selection encompasses tendencies to seek out, encode in memory, and reproduce information consistent with prior beliefs
• Giving people balanced information on ideological issues frequently leaves them more polarized
• When like-minded people share views - even when they all have the same information - these views tend to be held with more confidence
• As information proliferation increases


  Belief-consistent selection becomes more prevalent
• Algorithms personalize information and avoid belief-inconsistent information through recommender systems and search engines guided by browser history
• On social media, tendencies for in-group selection lead to filter bubbles and echo chambers that further reduce individual exposure to information diversity even as they increase diversity across social media as a whole
• Groupthink has been blamed for numerous political and economic fiascos
• Information proliferation now extends the capacity for groupthink globally, organizing and polarizing groups from political ideologues to international terrorists