Rebel Ideas- the Power of Diverse Thinking

by Matthew Syed

  It sounds ironic, but it is quite predictable. In the smaller universities, there are fewer available choices, and people have to make connections with people who are comparatively more different. When the campus size is big, on the other hand, there is a greater opportunity for students to ‘fine-tune’ their social network. They can pursue people who are very similar to themselves.8

  Bahns’s experiment has parallels with other studies, in many parts of the world, and in different contexts. In one experiment led by Paul Ingram, a professor at Columbia Business School, one hundred business people were invited to an after-work mixing event in New York.9 It took place at 7 p.m. on a Friday evening at a reception hall of the university, and the researchers could not have done more to encourage intermingling. In the centre of the room was a large table of hors d’oeuvres, by one wall there was a table with pizza, and by another wall there was a bar serving beer, wine and soft drinks.

  The participants, on average, knew about a third of the people in the room, but were unknown to the majority. This, then, was an opportunity to broaden their social network, to connect with diverse people. Indeed, many of the attendees specifically said in a pre-mixer survey that their main purpose in attending (alongside winding down) was to make new contacts. All attendees were fitted with electronic tags, which could not hear what was being said, but which could track the encounters, along with their duration. This enabled the researchers to ‘build a dynamic network that captured encounters throughout the event’.

  What happened? Who did the attendees end up talking to? Did they seek out new people and expand their networks, as per their stated objective? In fact, the opposite happened. As the researchers put it: ‘Do people mix at mixers? The answer is no – or not as much as they might . . . Our results show that guests at a mixer tend to spend the time talking to the few other guests whom they already know well.’

  The most powerful constraint on the growth of the collective brain in our species’ early history was social isolation. Nomadic groups of hunter-gatherers were often geographically dispersed and had few means of communication. When groups started living closer together following the agricultural revolution, sociality was constrained by the many barriers that can exist between human groups, both physical and psychological. We noted that Tasmania went backwards when it was separated from the broader Australian ecology.

  Today, however, we live in a radically different era. People are connected not just socially but digitally. The Internet has created a hyperspace that spans the globe and can be triggered instantly. We have unprecedented access to diverse opinions, beliefs, ideas and technologies, all at the click of a mouse. This was, of course, the original vision of the Internet by Tim Berners-Lee: a place where a scientific community could share research and ideas. And this has driven all manner of recombinant innovations. The Internet has been a positive in many profound ways.

  But high diversity in the overall network has the potential to create paradoxical effects in local networks. This is as true in the digital world as in the social world. At a cosmopolitan university such as the University of Kansas, it can lead to homogenous friendship groups. At a mixer purposely set up to encourage people to mingle, it led to fine-grained assorting.

  These insights help us to grasp one of the defining paradoxes of the modern age: echo chambers. For all its promise of diversity and interconnection, the Internet has become characterised by a new species of homogenous in-groups, linked not by the logic of kin or nomadic tribe, but by ideological fine-tuning. This is a thoroughly digital incarnation of the insular dynamics of the Neolithic era, with information circulating within groups rather than between them. In many cases, echo chambers are nothing to worry about. If you are interested in fashion, you want to join a forum where you can converse with like-minded others. It would undermine your enjoyment if people kept posting about architecture, or football or fitness. Diversity is not just redundant but irritating in such forums.

  But when one is seeking to become informed on complex subjects such as politics, echo chambers are inherently distorting. By getting their news from Facebook, and other platforms, where friends share cultural and political leanings, people are more exposed to people who agree with them, and evidence that supports their views. They are less exposed to opposing perspectives. The dynamics of fine-sorting can be magnified by a subtler phenomenon: the so-called filter bubble. This is where various algorithms, such as those inside Google, invisibly personalise our searches, giving us more of what we already believe, and further limiting our access to diverse viewpoints.10 This is the digital equivalent of the Bahns experiment, but at a higher level of gearing. The sheer interconnectivity of the Internet has facilitated enhanced political fine-tuning.

  The precise extent of echo chambers is a matter of some debate, with different studies pointing in slightly different directions. The mathematician Emma Pierson analysed how the troubles of Ferguson, Missouri were covered on social media in 2014, after a white police officer called Darren Wilson shot and killed a black man, Michael Brown. She found two, distinct clusters. ‘Blue tweets’ expressed horror at Brown’s death and criticised the oppressive police response, while the ‘red tweets’ argued that the policeman was being scapegoated and the protesters were looters. As Pierson puts it:

  The red group says they would feel safer meeting Darren Wilson than Michael Brown, and says that Brown was armed when he was shot; the blue group sarcastically contrasts Darren Wilson with the unarmed Michael Brown. The red group talks about mob justice and race baiting; the blue group talks about breaking the system. The red group blames Obama for exacerbating tensions and forcing the Missouri governor into declaring a state of emergency; the blue group says the state of emergency must not be used to violate human rights.11

  Perhaps most tellingly of all, these two groups had virtually no interaction with each other. They were only seeing tweets from people who agreed with them, a demonstration of how the segmentary dynamics of the Internet can filter information. ‘When it comes to Ferguson, two groups with very different political and racial backgrounds ignore each other,’ Pierson writes. ‘This seems likely to cause problems, and in fact it does. For one thing, the two groups think drastically different things.’FN1

  Other studies led by Seth Flaxman of Oxford and the Pew Institute offer a different lens on the digital world. These find that when you look at overall Internet use, digital users have higher average exposure to the views of their own side, but nevertheless get to see the views of opponents, too. Perhaps that is not surprising. Even in the clan systems that emerged after the agricultural revolution, the various in-groups were not completely shut off from each other.

  But what is fascinating – and broadly acknowledged by almost all scholars – is what happens when exposure does take place. Now, you might have thought that by hearing the views of opponents, and seeing the evidence from the other side, opinions would become less extreme. Views would become more nuanced. In fact, the opposite happens. People become more polarised. In Pierson’s study, for example, the limited interaction between red and blue tweeters was explosive. She writes:

  When the red and blue group did talk, it often wasn’t pretty. Consider the things said by members of the red group to one of the most influential members of the blue group – DeRay Mckesson, a school administrator who has played a central role in organizing protests. They described him as a ‘commie boy’ who spread hate . . . saw ‘value in racist drivel’, was armed with ‘guns and Molotov cocktails’, and should get his ‘meds adjusted’.

  A study led by Christopher Bail of Duke University found a similar pattern. He recruited 800 Twitter users to follow a bot that re-tweeted the views of high-profile people from across the political spectrum. What happened? Far from becoming more balanced, the Twitter users became more polarised. This was particularly true for Republicans, who became more conservative. It was as if exposure to different views confirmed their prior convictions.12

  To underst
and what is going on, and to fully glimpse the internal logic of echo chambers, we need to draw a subtle distinction between echo chambers and information bubbles. As the philosopher C. Thi Nguyen notes, information bubbles are the most extreme form of isolation, where people on the inside see only their side of the argument and nothing else. These kinds of social groups have rarely existed in modern history except in cults and other ‘walled institutions’. Echo chambers, Nguyen argues, are different. They may cut some people off from alternative views through informational filtering (research by digital scholars Elizabeth Dubois and Grant Blank found that 8 per cent of people in the UK have such biased media exposure that they experience a distorted version of reality13) but their distinctive feature is that they have not one filter, but two.

  What is the second filter? We will call them epistemic walls.

  III

  In their scholarly book Echo Chamber, Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph Cappella, two experts on the media and politics, examine the core logic of political polarisation.14 They do so through the prism of Rush Limbaugh, a hugely successful conservative commentator whose radio show has a reported cumulative weekly audience of around 13.25 million unique listeners.

  They note that Limbaugh doesn’t seek to persuade his audience to cut themselves off from alternative voices. This would be pretty much impossible in such an interconnected world. Instead, he seeks to delegitimise alternative voices. He attacks the integrity of those who offer different views, and defames their motives. His insistence is not (just) that opponents are wrong, but that they are malicious. He argues that the mainstream media expresses a liberal bias. They have set out to destroy Limbaugh and his followers, because they can’t abide the truth he speaks. Jamieson and Cappella write: ‘The conservative opinion hosts underscore the notion that the mainstream media use a double standard that systematically disadvantages conservatives and their beliefs.’ They argue that Limbaugh seeks to discredit all other sources of information, along with political opponents, through the techniques of ‘extreme hypotheticals, ridicule, challenges to character, and association with strong negative emotion’.

  Now we can begin to glimpse the subtly different properties of information bubbles and echo chambers. With the former, informational borders are hermetically sealed. People on the inside only hear people who are co-inhabitants of the bubble. This creates distortions, but it also confers fragility. The moment a member of the in-group is confronted with outsider opinions, they are likely to question their beliefs. The way to burst an information bubble, then, is through exposure. This is why cults take such lengths to deny insiders access to different voices.

  Echo chambers, with their additional filter, have fundamentally different properties. People on the inside hear more opinions from the in-group, but these views tend to become stronger when exposed to opposing opinions. Why? Because the more opponents attack Limbaugh, the more they point to the errors in his opinions, the more it confirms the conspiracy against him. Opponents are not offering new insights, but fake news. Each piece of evidence against Limbaugh is a new brick in the wall separating the in-group from outsiders. As Nguyen puts it:

  What’s happening is a kind of intellectual judo, in which the power and enthusiasm of contrary voices are turned against those contrary voices through a carefully rigged internal structure of belief. Limbaugh’s followers read – but do not accept – mainstream and liberal news sources. They are isolated, not by selective exposure, but by changes in who they accept as authorities, experts and trusted sources. They hear, but dismiss, outside voices.15

  Perhaps the clinching point is that trust is an essential ingredient of belief-formation. Why? Because we don’t have the time to check the evidence for everything, so we have to take some things at face value. We trust doctors, chemists and teachers. Even experts trust other experts, taking their data and outputs as inputs for their own deliberations, because checking from first principles is virtually impossible. The world of information, somewhat like commerce, is presupposed by trust. As Nguyen puts it:

  Ask yourself: could you tell a good statistician from an incompetent one? A good biologist from a bad one? A good nuclear engineer, or radiologist, or macro-economist, from a bad one? . . . nobody can really assess such a long chain for herself. Instead, we depend on a vastly complicated social structure of trust. We must trust each other, but, as the philosopher Annette Baier says, that trust makes us vulnerable.16

  It is this epistemic vulnerability that echo chambers exploit. By systematically undermining trust in alternative views, by defaming those who offer different insights and perspectives, they introduce a filter that distorts the belief-formation process itself. Alternative views are dismissed not after consideration, but upon contact. Facts are rejected even as they are offered. Perspectives and evidence are repelled somewhat like a magnet repelling iron filings. Nguyen writes: ‘Echo chambers operate as a kind of social parasite on our vulnerability . . . An information bubble is when you don’t hear people from the other side. An echo chamber is what happens when you don’t trust people from the other side.’

  This is not about conservative radio hosts, still less conservatism itself. There are echo chambers not just on the Right, but on the Left and, indeed, beyond politics. ‘The world of anti-vaccination is clearly an echo chamber, and it is one that crosses political lines. I’ve also encountered echo chambers on topics as broad as diet (Paleo!), exercise technique (CrossFit!), breastfeeding, some academic intellectual traditions, and many, many more.’17

  It is the twin filters of information and trust that create an unusually resilient form of in-group cohesion. Where an information bubble is inherently fragile, echo chambers on both sides of the political spectrum are reinforced by the mutual exposure of alternative views, driving polarisation, and leading to competing (and often contradictory) claims of fake news. Each side thinks the other is living in a post-truth age. As Nguyen says: ‘Here’s a basic check: does a community’s belief system actively undermine the trustworthiness of any outsiders who don’t subscribe to its central dogmas? Then it’s probably an echo chamber.’18

  IV

  Derek Black is unusual in that he did not grow up in a digital echo chamber but a real one. At six, he was sent out for Halloween as a white power ranger. A little later, his father hung a poster of the Confederate flag on his wall. He started attending white supremacist conferences at the same time, hearing adults talking about the inherent intellectual inferiority of black people. Eli Saslow writes that: ‘Derek was socialised on Stormfront, and he began spending his nights in the private chat rooms as soon as he could type. After Derek finished third grade, Don and Chloe pulled him out of school, believing the public system in West Palm Beach was overwhelmed with an influx of Haitians and Hispanics.’19

  After that, he was home-schooled, imbibing yet more supremacist ideology, with consistent exposure to the politics of racism. The Black family lived in West Palm Beach, but their house was like an island, surrounded by vegetation that Don allowed to grow high and wild. No visitors were allowed into the house except fellow white supremacists, and family members. It would be easy to assume, then, that Derek’s extremist views were sustained through social isolation. He didn’t question his own beliefs because he was not exposed to any others. In fact, although Derek did lead an unusual life, he was not in a cult. David Duke, his godfather and the de facto leader of American white nationalism, did not seek to prevent him hearing contrary opinions. Neither did his parents. This was not, to use our previous terminology, an information bubble.

  No, this was an echo chamber. Duke and Black did not bar alternative sources of information; rather, they systematically undermined his trust in them. Non-supremacists, of all kinds, were positioned as deceitful, members of a liberal establishment intent on selling out white Europeans to immigrants and Jews, people who couldn’t tolerate the expression, still less the adoption, of the ‘reasonable demands’ of the far right.

  This explains w
hy Derek’s views, far from softening as he was exposed to the Internet, to various TV stations and other sources of information, actually hardened. These contrary voices were not expressing reasonable opinions, but were peddlers of fake news. They were duplicitous manifestations of a politically correct establishment. Saslow puts it this way: ‘[He was] impervious to feedback from strangers . . . His critics were nothing more to him than an anonymous chorus on the other side of a curtain – a circus of “usurpers” and “Neanderthals” . . . If he didn’t respect them, why would he care about their opinions?’20

  At the age of twenty-one, Derek Black left home to go to university. He chose the New College of Florida, one of the top colleges in the state. His chosen subjects were German and medieval history, ‘which he had always associated with the glorious dominance of white Europeans. His parents reminded him that, ultimately, they hoped he would make history and not just study it.’ It is noteworthy that his father was not in the least bit worried that his extremist views might be moderated by exposure to contrary voices. When a caller to the radio show asked about Derek finding himself within ‘a hotbed of multiculturalism’, Don laughed. ‘It’s not like any of these little commies are going to impact his thinking. If anyone is going to be influenced here, it will be them.’

  But the New College of Florida is unusual. It is small. In total, there are only eight hundred or so students. At a large university, Derek might have found a critical mass of friends on the far right of politics. He might have constructed an ideologically similar network. In a small college, there was no such scope for political fine-tuning. Paradoxically, he was about to find himself more exposed to contrary opinions than ever before. The information filters were about to disappear completely.