Information Cascades in ‘Echo-Chambers’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-world-isnt-as-bad-as-your-wired-brain-tells-you-1535713201
Christopher Mim’s article focuses on the reasoning behind why individuals believe the world is, generally, a ‘bad place.’ Mim’s uses Facebook’s algorithms example to explain the spread of certain biases through ‘echo-chambers.’ To explain this phenomenon, Mim’s concentrates on three biases: Availability, Extremity and Confirmation bias.
Availability bias is the idea that whatever instances one is more familiar with is representative. Extremity bias being the spread of instances that are more extreme. Lastly, confirmation bias is the idea of finding information that agrees with one’s views and discounting information that contradicts it.
Mim’s explains that social media sites, such as Facebook, use a user’s engagement to suggest new content and, unknowingly, fuel availability, extremity, and confirmation biases. For example, someone who is in a Facebook group may only receive information and articles that possess information that agrees with that stance. The danger of this is that misinformation can quickly spread and affect the decisions of other individual’s wellbeing.
This article directly connects to the concept of Information Cascades covered in lecture. An Information Cascade is when an individual makes a decision based on the decisions of others. In some cases, this individual does not know the outside information of the other individuals in the cascade, rather just their decisions. Using the example of the Facebook algorithms, when an individual engages with certain content, it can potentially create an information cascade. If one person in a Facebook group, for instance, makes a claim and that claim gains traction and others start agreeing, one might feel compelled to also agree with the claim without doing proper research. As Mim’s highlights in his article, there are “few checks on its spread.” Therefore, an individual can be presented with misinformation and there will be no checks on the validity of that information. Thus, this would create an incorrect Information Cascade.