Information cascade from Paris terrorist attack to a simple spy game
Social media is where plenty of information goes in and out, including those that are not accurate. It is the perfect place for information cascade to occur and the place that contains the most misinformation. For example, a Sikh man was photoshopped wearing a suicide bomb vest and holding up the Quran when he was just holding his iPad. Also, rumors spread that Eiffel Tower turned black to commemorate the victims of the Paris terrorist attacks, when it actually turns dark after 1am everyday. However, some examples are more extreme and can cause harmful impacts to certain people. For example, Ryan Lanza was misidentified as the shooter of the Sandy Hook massacre, when the culprit is actually his brother.
This phenomenon can be explained with three reasons. First, humans tend to make cognitive shortcuts by following the information that people agree with most without doing their own research. As a result, post A with 20 likes on facebook would be more popular than post B with 2 likes, even if the post B is the one with the accurate information. In the end, it would be most likely that post A would get from 20 likes to 40 likes and even to 80 likes, whereas the amount of likes on post B would stay around the same. Second, since there is too much information on the internet, we tend to put more trust on the first piece of information that we encounter. This phenomenon is called anchoring. As seen on facebook, posts that get relatively more attention from the public would appear at the top of our newsfeed, and that piece of information would be the one we assume to be the accurate. What we do not realize is that there are many more perspectives towards an issue, which we might be agree with. Third, the article states that we spread rumors because we want them to be true. For example, people are circulating the photoshopped picture of a man who wears a turban in suicide bomb vest and Quran, because people wanted to warn the public with the misconception that men who wear turbans are terrorists.
After reading this article, I could apply these three reasons to a simple game that I played yesterday with my friends called Who is the Spy. In this game, there are 8 players with 6 normal players, 2 spies and 1 blank. Each person gets a word except for the bank player. All words are the same, but the spies get a word slightly different from the majority. In each round, each player would have to describe his/her own word and vote out the person that they think is the spy or blank at the end. The rounds keep going until there are three people left in the game. If the spy or/and blank is still alive, the spy or/and blank wins. As I was playing this game, I realize that when it comes to the voting round, the people who hesitated to vote would point to whoever has the most votes in the end, because they fell for the trap of cognitive shortcut. Also, at the beginning of the voting round, when someone first claims that a person is the spy, everyone else would assume that the person is the spy. People who have similar description as the accused person would assume they are spies too, while people who have the opposite description as the accused person would think they are normal people. However, the person who voted first might be a spy himself/herself. In this case, you can see that anchoring is a very common phenomenon. Lastly, when a person knows that he/she is a spy, he/she might vote and accuse a normal player, so that everyone else will believe that the normal player is the spy. It is very interesting to see that information cascade occurs everywhere around us. Therefore, we must not fall into the trap of information cascade by learning to do further research on an issue, instead of believing whatever is presented in front of you.
Website:
http://www.engadget.com/2015/11/19/paris-and-the-trail-of-social-media-misinformation/