Information Cascade in the US Presidential Election
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/there-really-was-a-liberal-media-bubble/
This blog post by FiveThiryEight discusses the most recent US presidential election. Going into election day, the mainstream liberal media had almost entirely dismissed the possibility of Trump being elected, with normally reliable sources like the New York Times (and even FiveThirtyEight itself) holding Clinton as a very heavy favorite to win. But as the day wore on, jaws slowly dropped to the floor as the unthinkable became a reality and Trump won the presidency. How could everyone have made such inaccurate predictions?
The article draws on a paradigm from James Surowiecki’s book “The Wisdom of Crowds,” which argues that one condition for a group to make good decisions is independence of opinion. Political journalism, the article argues, has “suffered from a pack mentality.” For example, journalists were writing that Mitt Romney had won the first 2012 political debate just thirty minutes into the event. Social media such as twitter can amplify pack mentality by providing an enormous audiences for opinions and storylines. Whether these audiences have the correct impression of the post or even relevant information doesn’t even matter because of information cascade – if a large amount of people hold the same opinion on a post, future viewers are more likely to hold the popular opinion. To increase independence of opinion attitude adjustment will be challenging, the article suggests, but could be started simply by having a little more skepticism about the general opinion and making sure the sources are diverse.
Information Cascade is a topic that we have been covering in class. Just a few impressions of a post can lead to a snowball effect, with viewers using follow-the-crowd logic after a certain amount of people “like” or “retweet” or comment on a post. The issue is that just because the post has been retweeted a lot doesn’t mean that it is correct or even relevant – it only takes a few people in the beginning to cause the chain reaction. As the article says, the main way to prevent falling into this groupthink is to be wary of the facts and sources and be able to think for one’s self because sometimes the crowd can in fact be wrong.