The Internet, Extremism, Confirmation Bias

I have a theory, and I'm going to tell you about it.

When the internet first arrived it was rightly lauded for being the biggest source of information the world had ever known. One of thine things that was going to be great about the internet was that the amount of different voices telling people what was going on was going to dramatically increase. Instead of a few news outlets from your own country you could access the ideas of people from the street to the most scholarly article within minutes. This has indeed happened and if you want to find out about something there are more opportunities to do so then you may be able to read.

There was a wide-spread opinion that this vastly greater diversity of information was going to lead to a greater acceptance of different people through the breakdown of stereotypes. It's a little tricky to think that all Iranians are fanatical Muslim terrorists when you are debating whether Gears of War or Fable III is a better X-Box 360 game with a student from Tehran. I think when people first get onto the internet this is true. The power of Google and Wikipedia to diffuse silly stereotypes about things is enormous.

On the other hand there is the rather unpleasant trait of people known as confirmation bias. This means that people generally prefer and seek out information and opinions that confirm their own beliefs. The danger with this and the internet is that no matter how crazy you are there's an excellent chance you can find someone on the internet who agrees with your beliefs. There may be only two hundred people in the world who think Joe Biden is Satan and needs to be stopped, but on the internet those people can see that they are not alone, therefore they are right, and then they can get together and try to stop Joe Biden.

Over time people tend to simply go back to the same web sites over and over again. Once you have decided something is a good site, you tend to simply use that site for that purpose. So, there may be ten thousand different sources for news, but we tend to go back again and again to the same two or three sources to get all our information. What constitutes a good site for people is generally one that confirms their own feelings on subjects. When we go to sites with competing viewpoints I feel that we look for ways in which their opinions are false, thus confirming our original beliefs.

Over time what happens with the internet is that groups of like-minded people get together and then become almost entirely the only source of trusted information for each other. No longer are people moderated by the approval or disapproval of their local community. As with all things if those people are right and smart and have the greater good at heart they can create new wonders like never before. If those people are paranoid, violent crazy people they confirm each others positions, intensify them and possibly unleash the consequences upon us all.

Are you aware of your own confirmation bias? Try this for an interesting experiment. Go to a web site with which you disagree generally. Find a subject where you are pretty sure you will disagree with everything said. Then go through it sentence by sentence and consciously decide whether you can agree with that sentence or not. By the end of the article count up how many sentences with which you have agreed. It may surprise you to find out that you agree with half or more of an article which previously you would have dismissed as totally wrong.