Exacerbating the lack of trust in news and the dubious influences of social media is the sheer volume of information at our disposal. Living in our interconnected, indeed overconnected online world, we are exposed to a relentless, inexhaustible feed of information coming very quickly from lots of different sources. As recent studies have shown, when large volumes of information are contradictory and confusing, people struggle to distinguish between spoof and real news stories.45 How do we know what is good information and what is bad? How do we extrapolate information from the noise surrounding it? Social media have their virtues, but they cloud information. Twitter trends constantly shift, and within a minute we can accumulate dozens of tweets conveying different pieces of news or opinion – and it is often, and increasingly, hard to differentiate one from the other. Under these conditions social media have a lot of power, most effective when they tap directly into our System 1 quick thinking processes, so we will often process this confusing volume of information unconsciously.
It therefore makes sense for voters to decide on grounds not directly related to objective facts, because objective facts are neither available nor reliable. Like the restaurant-goers choosing between restaurants, voters, when they have very little reliable information to draw on, tend to follow a herd of like-minded people and/or a persuasive leader with whom they most readily identify. Or they rely on information from those closest to them – the echo chambers, in which people’s views and opinions are reinforced by those who already agree with them. Social media magnify this effect.46 On Facebook, Twitter and other platforms we tend to read the posts of those in our family and friendship groups who are like us and who we like. Our views are further clouded by confirmation bias. We circle around our own opinions – following those whom we have selected to follow, often because we already agree with them.47 Similarly, we can easily fill our screens with preferred media outlets, whether BuzzFeed, Breitbart or Reddit, which match our existing views of the world, confirming our prejudices with large volumes of information day and night. Mistrust, confirmation bias and social media collide, leaving us in politically dangerous situations.
We might say that we want honesty from our political leaders, in the same way we want our scientific experts, doctors and lawyers to be honest; but ultimately perhaps we want our political leaders to represent us and our beliefs. In this our System 2 logical, deliberative assessment of facts is less important than the System 1 emotional, identity-focused impact that our leaders have on us. Our political decisions are not dictated by a reasoning search for the truth. The dominance of subjective over objective influences in our political choices means that we are less concerned about how honest our politicians are about specific facts, and more concerned with the convictions that they communicate.48
In today’s ‘post-truth’ political era, the clever shaping of politicians’ public profiles to tap into our quick, emotional System 1 instinctive decision-making is effective in manipulating our choice of leaders. Fake news suits the System 1 thinking style well. It is designed to be digestible – usually consisting of simple, emotive messages that we can easily process using quick decision-making heuristics. When we have little trustworthy information to engage our more logical and deliberative System 2 thinking, it is not surprising that System 1 thinking dominates and sways the crowd’s political opinions. Populist politicians build support via an appeal to System 1 emotions and instincts, and social media are a very effective conduit for these. Their emotive messages capture our imagination and connect with our identities much more immediately than any information we might gather from trawling through manifestos or unpicking the finer points of political policy changes.
We have seen in previous chapters that we are copycats in many aspects of our everyday lives. Whilst contrarians are (obviously) a minority group, copycat followers and contrarian leaders are often mutually dependent. Copycats joining together in crowds and herds need contrarian leaders to lead them together in one direction. But, perhaps less obviously, contrarian leaders need copycats too. Leaders cannot be leaders without followers. As we have seen in this chapter, our politicians have a talent for encouraging political tribalism and they rely on copycats for their success in building their political tribes. Today’s social media platforms mean that political leaders can build this tribalism in myriad ways. Social media have also empowered individuals who would be excluded from the political process in previous eras.
Overall, are we always contrarian leaders or copycat followers? It is likely that our choice, to the extent that we have one, will depend on the context in which we find ourselves. Our different inclinations to follow or lead will also be driven by a combination of System 1 emotion and instinct and System 2 logic and deliberation. This is a crucial insight more generally, as we have seen throughout this book. A delicate balance between System 1 emotion and System 2 reason not only propels our decisions to copy or rebel, it also determines the copycat and contrarian roles we choose.
Conclusion
COPYCATS VERSUS CONTRARIANS
In this book, we have traced a path from economics through psychology and sociology to neuroscience, behavioural ecology and evolutionary biology. We have explored what drives copycats and contrarians from a range of different perspectives. Mostly our copycat natures dominate, encouraging us to herd. Sometimes we herd purely out of self-interest in a clever and analytical way. At other times our herding is more a collective phenomenon, driven by instincts and emotions. Sometimes herding is a mixture of these different influences.
The question we have yet to answer is whether or not it is good to be living in a world so dominated by copycats herding together and following leaders. In a primitive world, our strong tendencies to copy and follow probably served us well enough. Our antediluvian instincts evolved to help us survive in harsh natural environments, not just to ensure our survival as individuals but also reflecting evolutionary pressures to ensure survival of groups and tribes, genes and our species as a whole. Whether these herding tendencies work well today is much less clear. We might think that our daily lives are easy compared with those of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Resources are relatively plentiful. Information and connections move and develop rapidly via modern technologies. We can easily build social relationships with people we have never met, and yet our conformist instincts can play a powerfully destructive role.
But there is a dark side to modern progress. Whilst modern technologies may seem to have enabled substantial improvements in our standards of living, they have also hijacked our old evolved survival strategies. Conflicts between our modern selves and our evolved selves are made more destructive when our evolved instincts to copy each other are rapidly channelled via modern technologies uninfluenced by the personal social sanctions and limits that small groups can and did impose when we lived in more concentrated communities. In our modern, computerised, globalised and deeply interconnected world – in which money, information and expectations move so fast – herds can build enormous momentum which is difficult to monitor and control. The pace of technical innovation and the changes to our artificial environments have been much too fast relative to evolutionary timescales and we have not had time to evolve new forms of adaptive advantage. Are we really fit to survive in a globalised world in which our tendencies to herd and conform are magnified by all the high-speed technologies that human ingenuity has invented? Perhaps not.
If we take a more critical look at the impacts of specific modern technologies, we might notice that some technologies have made our lives harder, not easier. There is no doubt that some technologies have made enormous, positive contributions. Medical advancements in particular have transformed both the length and quality of our lives – and a Luddite approach is not going to solve problems. What we do need to think about is how new technologies have disrupted the equilibrium between individual and social interests. Today, these are not as easily aligned as they were at the dawn of civilisation. What is best for the individual is dive
rging further and further away from what is desirable for economies and societies as a whole. The case for unfettered markets is less clear in a world of computers, big data and social media. Our evolved herding and copying instincts have enabled the growth of inefficient, counterproductive and, at worst, destructive forms of behaviour that could not have emerged in primitive settings in which the number and range of person-to-person connections was limited in reach and complexity.
Social media have had a particularly destructive influence, hints of which have appeared in all the previous chapters. Social media are conduits for fake news and false information, and this disrupts even the most rational social learning processes associated with System 2 self-interested herding. Social media tap effectively into quick System 1 thinking and the emotive, impulsive forms of collective herding, at the same time disrupting the balance between collective and self-interested herding.
Whilst in many senses social media have helped us to build our stores of knowledge and understanding, these platforms can also disempower contrarians, and in this way we are losing a richness and diversity of information and opinions. Conventional views are cooked up, reinforced and replicated in the echo chambers of Twitter, Facebook and other news-sharing sites. Online ‘town hall’ conversations shut down controversial or contrary views – like ‘no-platforming’ speakers in university debates. Balancing controversial opinions is tricky. We have good reasons to curtail immoral and unethical opinions, but the boundary between what is unethical and offensive to almost everyone and what is offensive just to a specific group is fuzzy. Contrarians are hounded by Twitter trolls. The polarised debates around Brexit are an example of this. Whether a ‘Remainer’ voting to stay in the EU or a ‘Brexiteer’ keen to leave, expressing opinions about the Brexit vote catalysed vicious reactions from the opposing group. Social media distort the dissemination of expert insights, such as those to do with medical and scientific breakthroughs. The sheer volume of noisy, contradictory information distributed via these platforms means that it is difficult to judge the evidence effectively, even for someone who might aspire to be completely logical and objective. Social media give leaders another weapon to use in manipulating and controlling their followers. Leaders can tap into the herding instincts of their copycat followers to manipulate their choices, with wide negative consequences – for instance, in promoting political tribalism, as we saw in the last chapter.
Fragile, unstable and unreasoning attitudes towards experts, elitists and migrants, and the rise of extreme political positions, are all partly formed by strong instincts to follow public opinion in an emotive way rather than focusing on the facts presented. Social media almost appear to be custom-built to serve this quick, instinctive and unreasoning behaviour. Citizens’ confusion and mistrust about information and news reflects the fact that, in the modern, ‘post-truth’ social media age, the usual news outlets have been replaced by information conduits that are not confined within the bounds of traditional journalism’s fact-checking protocols. Without reliable information sources, copycats can be led by their contrarian leaders down paths that from the outset they neither understood nor anticipated.
Within our social networks, too, our conformist copycat tendencies have been distorted by modern technology. Social networks have grown and changed rapidly with computers and the internet, creating an overconnectedness in the modern world which most of us probably don’t think about too carefully anymore. Before the internet, social networks were largely constructed around the social bonds people had with others close to them, whether relatives, work colleagues or neighbours. Social theorists explain these social networks as a form of social capital built up from our social investments in relationships with others around us.1 These ties are hardened by social norms that evolve alongside our social networks, and often these social norms are rigid, inflexible and resistant to change. They can operate and develop in a diffuse way over long periods of time, for example in the evolution of class hierarchies and social stratifications such as the Indian caste system. Our sense of identity parallels the strength of the ties originating within the in-groups that form part of our social networks.2
We form weak ties with others in our professional networks and associations via online social platforms such as LinkedIn, ResearchGate and Academia. In these networks, we are forming social bridges with other people and different groups – allowing us to make connections we might not otherwise make. These online networks can be useful and productive in a general way, for both the individual and the group. They enable us to exchange ideas quickly, to build our professional relationships and identify new employment or business opportunities. We certainly do not want to return to the rigid hierarchies associated with traditional, discriminatory social network structures. But the view, sometimes propounded by social theorists, that strong ties and bonds between us are bad and weak ties are good is harder to defend when social networks and social media collide. Strong ties and bonds help in-groups to build strength and power. Gangs, for example, are characterised by the strength of the relationships and loyalty between their members. As we saw in chapter 2, these strong ties can have destructive impacts in terms of violence and discrimination against out-groups, in some cases to the extent that we are prepared to put our in-group at a disadvantage in our conflicts with our out-groups.3
But in a technologically dominated world, we should be worrying about weak ties and bridges too. Online, weak ties are just as likely to promote discrimination and negative attitudes and behaviours – Twitter trolls and cyber-bullying, for instance. The innumerable weak ties we develop via social media and the overconnectedness enabled by those platforms also have other negative consequences for our well-being. They mean that businesses can easily invade our privacy and exploit our willingness to share information in the process of impressing others. We can never properly switch off from work when our work email is only a smartphone bleep away. As employees, we suffer the consequences of increased stress and the inability to relax, but our employers suffer too if that erodes our productivity. Online social networks encourage copycats’ obsession with what everyone else is thinking, and at the same time enable the construction of impossibly rosy online profiles. If people only ever look at everyone else’s very best, filtered sides on Facebook and Instagram it’s no surprise that confidence and self-esteem are far harder for young people to find today than they were thirty years ago. Rising teenage suicide rates are some of the saddest consequences of our shift into the copycat-dominated online world.
Taming copycats and contrarians
So: what should we do? What policy tools will work best to tame our herding and anti-herding instincts when they are destructive, or leverage them when they are beneficial? In this book we have explored some of the ways in which our herding instincts can be used to encourage people to follow their neighbours in more constructive behaviours – in the context of energy decision-making and sanitation habits, for example. Using our conformist inclinations as a policy tool for social ‘nudging’ has become very popular. Small changes in the way information and options are presented encourage people to change their choices in a more constructive direction.4 Social nudges are now used extensively by behavioural public policymakers, such as the UK’s Behavioural Insights Team and its spin-offs.5 But given the many ways our copycat natures are fallible, some of which we have explored in this book, perhaps policymakers should focus less on leveraging social conformity and more on controlling it, and/or encouraging mavericks and contrarians when these natures can help us onto a better path.
Using anti-herding as a policy tool is, however, a conceptual and logistical challenge. Almost by definition, it is difficult to manipulate the choices of anti-herding contrarians because their natures incline them to resist persuasion. Even so, at a time when we need mavericks to take risks, policy solutions can be designed around encouraging them. We may want to give more support to the experts espousing a contrarian view, assuming it is founded on good evid
ence. This is an idea that the American philosopher Michael Weisberg has explored. Weisberg found that when there are too few maverick experts relative to copycat experts, then landscapes of knowledge and new ideas are not fully explored. Too many copycats generate too few new ideas, slowing progress and innovation. We need to devise incentives for contrarianism. As we saw in chapter 7, Weisberg argues that there should be additional incentives for risk-taking in scientific research, and perhaps that insight should be extended to a wider range of occupations, including journalism and finance. Potential solutions include developing more rigorous standards for assessing the veracity of news stories or financial advice, and encouraging whistleblowing so that mistakes are identified and corrected quickly. At the same time, we need to ensure high professional standards and/or robust regulation so that gullible or ill-informed copycats, who might not have the expertise to judge the information – for example when digesting scientists’ new research or esoteric economic insights from journalists, economists and financial advisers – are not exploited.
Another feature of modern life is the dominance of committees, but, as we have seen, committees can be hothouses of conformism and groupthink. Encouraging new social norms to encourage all committee members, not just the chairs and senior members, to express contrary opinions would help in reducing these tensions. Clear and transparent rules for deliberation on committees, as well robust guidelines for chairs of committees, might ameliorate some of the problems created by peer pressure, groupthink and copycats’ tendencies to obey authority figures. Encouraging greater diversity on committees, so that different viewpoints are fully explored, could also be part of a solution. Another solution is to institutionalise roles for devil’s advocates on committees, as is already the practice in the US defence and intelligence community.
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