Information Cascade in the Wake of a Tragedy
In the wake of a tragedy, everyone scrambles to learn more about what happened. The story is new, and exciting, and people feel more comfortable when they know more. This happens on any scale, from people crowding around a fight in high school to a tsunami that affects many different countries. Media rushes to get to the scene of an incident to report live, often prioritizing speed of information transfer or accuracy and completeness of that information. And with the internet, information can spread at an exponentially higher rate. However, all of these different mediums can fall victim to information cascades, where people listen to what they are being told, even if it goes against what they know. The more people that hop on board to the new information, the stronger the information cascade becomes. The attached article discusses many different examples of information cascade in different scenarios. After terrorist attacks in Paris, many rumors spread quickly. A photo of a Sikh man wearing a bomb vest was distributed, even though it turned out to be photoshopped. People spread the rumor that the Eifel tower turned its lights off in mourning, when in fact the lights go out at 1am every night. These are examples of information spreading quickly, with the truth of the information playing no factor.
This article directly discusses information cascades, which we have covered in class. The kind of information cascade that the article discusses is slightly different however, because the networks are much more open. Instead of people making decisions sequentially, it has to do with information spreading through much larger networks, such as the Internet. This lowers the purity of the information cascade, as people don’t simply make a decision based on probability, but on many other factors. Confirmation bias is a large factor here, since people are more likely to think something is true if they already believe it, or something similar. For example, it might have been easier for the photo of a Sikh man to spread because people already associate men wearing head coverings as terrorists.
https://www.engadget.com/2015/11/19/paris-and-the-trail-of-social-media-misinformation/