The Self Illusion

by Bruce Hood

  Consider decision-making and the problem of analysis paralysis which occurs when there are too many choices. Much of that problem is solved for us on the Web. When was the last time you made a purchase online and ignored the ratings and comments left by others? When did you choose the third or fourth rated item on a list? I expect never. Whether it is choosing a book, film, hotel or microwave, we ignore the expert review and pay more attention to other users’ feedback, as we trust their experience as being more honest. They have no vested reason to lie. Everywhere we are invited on the Web to give our opinion with gladiatorial thumbs up or down to make pronouncements. According to the 2010 Neilson report mentioned earlier, up to one in five Web users regularly provides feedback on movies, books, television, music, services and consumer products. The collective experience of multiple users produces a consensus of opinion that shapes our decisions. Of course, you are the one making the choice, but it is a decision based on what others think.

  This hive mind process is not flawless, however, as we tend to follow the herd mentality as evidenced by stampeding, but this compliance effect is much reduced on the Web. There is more honesty and dissent when we can remain anonymous online. Of course, there are always those who attempt to subvert the process with false recommendations and condemnations, but they are eventually rumbled with time. Last year there was an almighty hullabaloo in academia when eminent British historian, Orlando Figes, was accused of trashing other historian’s books on Amazon in the guise of an anonymous reviewer who simply called themselves ‘Historian’. Figes threatened to take legal action only to discover to his embarrassment that it was his own wife who had been writing the reviews to discredit her husband’s competition.23 Some would call that charming wifely support.

  With all its benefits, the spread of the Web will be relentless. Over the next few years, accessing the Web will no doubt improve in ease, efficiency, speed and volume as platforms increase our ability to interact with each other. We may even one day make the unsettling transition of being integrated to the Web through biologically compatible interfaces, but the basic fundamental change that is most important to human civilization is that, in the West, we are all now potentially connected to each other. We can benefit from the wisdom of the crowd – the collective power of billions of brains. We have become the human equivalent of the Borg – the science fiction race of cyborgs from the Star Trek series who are all simultaneously interconnected. But we are not drones. We are independent autonomous individuals – or at least that’s what we think.

  Mining the Mountain of Data

  The march of the Web may be relentless but there is a big problem with it – literally. Natural selection tells us that when something increases in size it becomes inefficient. In the case of the Web, it is becoming too big – too unwieldy. Cisco Systems, the worldwide leader in networking, estimates how much data are generated and stored on the Web. According to their Chief Futurist, Dave Evans, one of the guys who plans the future strategy of the company, ‘Humans generated more data in 2009 than in the previous 5,000 years combined.’24 With numbers like that, you might as well say the whole history of humankind. There is simply too much information out there to process. Most of it is junk – nuggets of gossip or titillation. As social media scientist danah boyd (she avoids capitalizing her name for some reason) has commented, ‘If we’re not careful, we’re going to develop the psychological equivalent of obesity. We’ll find ourselves consuming content that is least beneficial for ourselves or society as a whole.’ 25 Much of what is on the Web is the equivalent of information junk food so search engines like Google sift the knowledge for the relevant information using clever modelling algorithms. Whenever we look for information, search engines analyse Web pages that have been viewed by other users seeking similar information and then rank the most relevant pages for review. It harnesses the power of the crowd to establish what we are looking for. This is wonderful. We can use the collective knowledge of others to mine through the impossible mountain of data to filter out what is not relevant to us.

  The problem is that filtering excludes information. Every time we surf the Web, the search engines are recording what we do and what information we provide about our selves. It’s not evil. It’s not spying or an attempt to control our behaviour. The machines are simply trying to provide us with the most relevant information. However, Eli Pariser thinks this is a big problem. In his book, The Filter Bubble: What the Internet Is Hiding from You, he explains why search engines are potentially dangerous.26 Try this out for your self. Log on to Google and search for information about ‘Egypt’. Then call up a relative or friend in a different part of the country and ask him or her to do exactly the same thing. What Eli noted was that his friends received totally different lists of links.27 This difference is important because most people only look at the first page of links. In other words, they are not being allowed to see the full picture.

  The reason for this discrepancy is that Google produces a personalized search result tailored for each user by using a filter. According to an unknown engineer from Google to whom Pariser spoke, the filter is based on a profile created from fifty-seven variables known about the user. (One wonders if the engineer was pulling Eli’s leg given the famous Heinz marketing ploy of fifty-seven varieties!) Eli noted how personalization was distorting the sorts of information that were being retrieved for him. For example, in an attempt to broaden his view on issues, Eli had deliberately followed Conservatives on his Facebook account even though he mostly had Liberal friends. However, after a while he noticed that the Facebook software was deliberately filtering out the postings from the Conservatives because these were deemed less relevant than the majority of his Liberal friends. Filtering software was encapsulating him inside a bubble of ignorance about contrasting views. This was the filter bubble.

  Birds of a Feather

  The vision of being connected to everyone on the Web to get a broad perspective on life is false. The software that is necessary for sifting through the impossible volumes of information is only showing us what it thinks we want to see. But we can’t blame the software. In real life, we also filter whom we pay attention to. People tend to social network with like-minded individuals who share the same values and opinions and reciprocate communications. We tend to befriend those who are most like us. We tend to read the same newspapers, like the same TV shows and enjoy the same pastimes. This homophily may lead to increased group cohesion but it also isolates us from other groups who share different values. In other words, it fosters increasing polarization. For example, in one study on attitudes about global warming, Republicans shifted from 49 per cent who believed the planet was warming up in 2001 to 29 per cent in 2010. In contrast, Democrats increased from 60 per cent to 70 per cent who believed it was a problem over the same period.28 It was if they were living on different planets.

  One might think that the Web should counter this tendency of homophily and broaden our minds to different viewpoints. Indeed, Twitter activity encourages total strangers to become connected. If your followers like or dislike what they hear, they can comment or communicate by ‘mentioning’ you in an open post. That way you can tell whether anyone is paying any attention to you. Twitter users ‘retweet’ messages and links they like. It’s like saying, ‘Hey everybody, look at what this person over here is saying,’ thereby spreading the influence from someone they follow to other users not directly connected to them. If you say something influential it can spread more rapidly across the ‘Twittersphere’ than conventional channels. This is how Twitter users were made aware of the top secret US assault on Osama Bin Laden’s complex as it was happening in May 2011: one Twitter user, Sohaib Athar a.k.a. @reallyvirtual, who lived near Bin Laden, live-tweeted the raid without realizing what was going on. He later tweeted, ‘Uh oh, now I’m the guy who live-blogged the Osama raid without knowing it.’ Prior to the raid, Sohaib had 750 people following him. After the raid, he had over 90,000. No wonder Twitter makes surfing blogs
and the Web look boring and long-winded. You don’t even have to be at a computer terminal as these social networking sites are now all accessible on mobile phones. Twitter is the crack cocaine of social networking.

  Despite the ease of Twitter connectivity, it leads to homophily, with people of the same age, race, religion, education and even temperament tending to follow each other and unfollow those with different views. For example, in one study of over 102,000 Twitter users who produced a combined 129 million tweets in six months, researchers analysed their posting on measures of positive or negative content.29 Upbeat tweets were things like, ‘Nothing feels like a good shower, shave and haircut … love it’, or ‘thanks for your follow, I am following you back, great group of amazing people’. Those of a more miserable disposition posted tweets such as ‘She doesn’t deserve the tears but I cry them anyway’ or ‘I’m sick and my body decides to attack my face and make me break out!! WTF’. When the researchers analysed the social networking of the group they found that those who clustered together shared the same dispositions. This type of clustering is illustrated in Figure 10. Happy users are connected to other happy users and unhappy users are connected to other miserable sods. It was as if there was emotional contagion between Twitter users, like the mimicry of the mirror system we encountered earlier only this time the transfer was entirely virtual. Of course, this type of clustering increases polarization. An analysis of 250,000 tweets during the US congressional midterm elections in 2010 revealed that liberals and conservatives significantly retweeted partisan messages consistent with party line, but not those from the opposing camp.30

  Furthermore, the promise of communication with thousands of users is not fulfilled because of one major stumbling block – our evolved human brain. When the tweets of 1.7 million users over six months were analysed, the researchers made a remarkable discovery.31 As the number of followers increase, the capacity to interact with others becomes more difficult in this ‘economy of attention’. We cannot have meaningful exchanges with unlimited numbers of other people. There simply is not enough time and effort available to respond to everyone. It turns out that within this vast ocean of social networking the optimum number at which reciprocal communication can be maintained, peaks at somewhere between 100 and 200 followers. Likewise, on Facebook, the average user has 130 friends. Does that number seem familiar? It should. It’s close to Dunbar’s again, which describes the relationship between the primate cortex and social group size. It turns out accurately to predict our social activity in the virtual world of social networking sites to be as much as in the real world.

  Figure 10: Analysis of communication on Twitter reveals significant grouping (based on a study by Bollen et al., 2011. Copyright permission given).

  Time for Our Self

  Technology was supposed to liberate us from the mundane chores in life. It was supposed to make us happier. Twentieth-century advertisements promised a world of automaticity and instant gratification. When the computer first came along in the 1960s and then into many Western households during the 1980s and 1990s, we were told that we would have increased freedom to pursue leisure and entertainment. We were supposed to have more time for each other. The computer has certainly made many tasks easier, but paradoxically many of us spend more time alone at our computers than engaging with the people with whom we live and work. My colleague, Simon Baron-Cohen, an expert on autism, has estimated that he answers fifty emails a day and has spent over 1,000 hours a year doing so.32 I think that my online time is much worse. I don’t get as many emails as Simon but I am online every day and cannot remember the last time I had a day offline. Even on holiday or trips, I am connected.

  If I am not researching articles or preparing teaching material, then I am keeping in contact with people through social networking sites. I email, write a blog, tweet on Twitter, talk on Skype, have a LinkedIn profile and drop in and out of Facebook. I have joined Google+, the latest development in social networking. I surf the Web relentlessly. I can do this via my office computer, portable laptop, iPad or smartphone. I am all wired up. Even when I watch some important event on television, I have my social network feed running so I can keep track of what other people’s opinions are on the same broadcast. I estimate that I spend at least half of my waking day online from 7 a.m. to midnight. That’s well over 3,000 hours per year – excessive by anyone’s standards. I know that this level of Web presence is not typical and probably not healthy but, if my teenage daughters are anything to go by, many people in the West are increasingly becoming immersed in their online involvement. Some argue that excessive dependence on Web activity should be considered like any other addiction though psychiatrists are not in agreement that it really constitutes a well-defined disorder.

  My addiction to the Web began in 2009 when I started my online presence and social networking at the request of the publisher of my first book. Initially, I was asked to write a blog – a website where you write stories and hope that people visit and read what you write. From the outset I thought that blogging was a self-indulgent activity but I agreed to give it a whirl to help promote my book. In spite of my initial reluctance I soon became addicted to feedback. Readers could leave comments about each posting and as an administrator of my site I could see who and how many people where visiting. It was not enough to post blogs for some unseen audience. I needed the validation from visitors that my efforts and opinions were appreciated. These were recorded as ‘hits’ – the number of times people visited my site. This feedback process is supercharged by the accelerated nature of communication on the Web. Unlike peer-reviewed scientific papers or critics’ reviews of your books that can take ages and are unpredictable, social networking sites can create instantaneous gratification from feedback. If the public responds positively to something we have written by increasing traffic or leaving kind comments, this makes us feel very good indeed. It justifies our efforts.

  We know the reason for this pleasure from experiments on conditioning behaviour. Conditioning was originally discovered in the 1890s by Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov, who noted that the dogs he had been studying learned to anticipate feeding time because they would salivate before the food arrived.33 He then presented the sound of a buzzer (not a bell as popular culture portrays it) with the food so that eventually just the sound elicited salivation. The dog had learned to associate the sound with the food. This was an important discovery. The experimenter could shape the behaviour of the dog to respond to a variety of different stimuli. They could be trained or conditioned by reward. Conditioning was soon developed into a whole school of psychological theory called Behaviourism, championed in the United States by individuals like J. B. Watson and B. F. Skinner who claimed that any complex behaviour could be shaped by rewards and punishments.34 In fact, we now know that it is not the rewards that strengthen behaviours but rather the anticipation of rewards, which is so satisfying.

  This is because deep inside our brain, close to the brainstem, is a reward system that is invigorated by a cluster of around 15,000–20,000 dopamine neurons that send out long fibres to other regions of the brain. Given the billions of neurons in the brain, it is remarkable that this tiny population is the pleasure centre critical in controlling our behaviour. These neurons enable us to predict and anticipate rewards and punishment.35 Without them, we would be hopelessly inept in decision-making and our behaviour would be erratic. When an animal in a conditioning experiment learns that pressing a lever or pecking a disc will deliver a reward, anticipatory dopamine is released, which reinforces the behaviour rather than the actual reward. We know this because rats with electrodes implanted in the pleasure centre connected to a current will continue to self-stimulate in the absence of any food reward – to the point of starvation.36 The dopamine rush alone is sufficient to condition the behaviour. When patients have electrodes implanted in this same brain region for the treatment of intractable epilepsy, they report feeling pleasure. Like many addictive behaviours from gambling to sex, it�
��s the thrill of expectation that gives us the best buzz.

  What’s more, the best way to strengthen behaviour is to only reward it occasionally – this is called intermittent reinforcement. This is because our brains are always seeking out patterns in the environment. However, information and feedback from the environment is often fragmented and incomplete but our brains allow for such inconsistency. When we do something that seems to cause some form of positive reward, we then repeat the action in an attempt to recreate the pleasure. If this reward is only intermittent we will persist for much longer repeating our attempts. This is the reinforcement principle behind gambling. We gamble more and for longer just waiting for that occasional reward.37 Slot machines only need to pay out every so often on an intermittent reinforcement schedule for players to persist in pumping more coins into them. It’s that dopamine hit of anticipation that perpetuates our behaviour.

  In the same way, conditioning explains our online behaviour. We are compelled to check our emails or look for approval from our online community just in case something really important or juicy comes along. Every time I checked my email or hit activity on my blog, I was like a rat in one of Skinner’s conditioning experiments. At first, the numbers were only a handful but every week they increased. Within a month, I was checking activity every day – thrilled when there was a peak or a kind comment, depressed by the dips and disparaging remarks. Most days there was nothing but every so often, I would be rewarded. The dopamine spurt triggered by associated anticipation had become my drug of choice and I had become a numbers junkie looking for more and more hits.