How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out

#102 · ✸ 84 · 💬 134 · 2 years ago · www.niemanlab.org · jitinnair1 · 📷
In the news context, there are plenty of reasons why knowing how people operate in echo chambers is important. For the purpose of the experiment, the researchers used IQ scores, which are subject to the natural bias and motivated belief that people want to believe themselves smarter than they perhaps are. Optimistic people were more likely to slide that scale higher than their pessimistic counterparts. "The basic argument we make based on lots of little pieces of evidence in the data is that when you're in an echo chamber, you don't really know how accurate the other person's beliefs are," said Ryan Oprea, the Maxwell C. and Mary Pellish Chair of Economics at UCSB. "You really don't know whether this person making a good-sounding argument is really smart, is really educated, or whether they're just reading off something that they read on Twitter." Without outside input or context of any kind, people in the chamber are left to their own devices to gauge the credibility of the other people, or in this case, the one other person, in the chamber with them. With some exceptions, "All of this echo chamber stuff in the experiment, most of it seems to disappear." In other words, when people lose the scope to have to assign their own accuracy, people also lose the tendency to want to respond to information through motivated reasoning. Ultimately, motivated beliefs are what gain a foothold when there is wiggle room in people's ability to try and make sense of information without context. The erosion of public trust in media over the past few decades has meant that people don't have those public signals anymore, signals that they can instinctively trust to be true and unbiased.
How people reason their way through echo chambers and what might guide them out



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