By Dr. Ken Broda Bahm:
With Americans increasingly getting their news online via Facebook and similar platforms, our already divided society is at risk of becoming even more polarized. Some of the blame for that has centered on the computerized algorithms that influence what appears in our online newsfeeds, and have a parallel in the rules that customize our Google searches as well. The so-called “filter bubble” means that liberals are likely to disproportionately receive liberally-slanted information and conservatives are likely to disproportionately receive conservatively-slanted information. As a result, our own views start to seem like normal and mainstream opinions, while the other side looks more and more like a radical minority. The social network’s filter is part of it, but based on new research, (Bakshy et al., 2015) the main culprit is us. The study, published in Science, shows that our own choices in limiting our circle of friends to those most likely to agree with us is the strongest factor in limiting our information universe. As Jessica Leber writes in a Fast Company piece, “If you’re not seeing content on Facebook that challenges your personal views, it’s because of your own choices, not an algorithm.”
To the extent that we all become subject to the limits of our own reference groups, that poses some practical problems to the persuader. What we come to see as reasonable, self-evident and obvious, may just be a product of an artificially restricted information diet. This matters to the legal persuader in particular, because many of the concepts that lie at the foundation of the jury system — views of reasonability and fairness, for example — may not be the common touchstones the law expects them to be. Anyone who seeks to broadly understand and potentially influence a pluralistic audience — and that should include litigators, along with everyone else — should take this finding to heart. A breadth of understanding and experience will not come from a restricted set of relationships or an ideologically curated sample of news and information. Instead, it will come from a conscious effort to diversify our friend lists, both online and in the real world.
Facebook’s Study: You Built Your ‘Bubble,’ Not Us
The study (Bakshy et al., 2015) was conducted by Facebook’s own data scientists, Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic. Relying on data (yes, proprietary data) from 10.1 million Facebook users, and 7 million links shared over a 6-month period, they looked at the question of how often we are exposed to stories from political perspectives that differ from our own. Of particular interest was what they called “cross-cutting content,” meaning stories or comments from friends with contrasting political views.
While they found that Facebook’s algorithm — the coding that determines what articles and posts appear in your newsfeed — does play a substantial role in reducing cross-cutting content, the factor that plays a greater role is just who you choose as your friends. This “Ideological homophily in friend networks,” in the authors’ words, reduces the amount of ideologically challenging information one would otherwise receive if that information were randomly distributed.
The result is that most of the news we get in our feeds (76 percent for liberals, 65 percent for conservatives) will be consistent with what is being shared by others of our own ideological reference groups. Birds of a feather flock together, and read, like, and share the same articles as well. The study concludes, “Our work suggests that the power to expose oneself to perspectives from the other side in social media lies first and foremost with individuals.”
Implications for Persuaders
The individual’s response is important at two levels. Practical persuaders should adapt to the dangers of self-selected information bubbles by trying to get outside of their own bubbles, and by understanding their audience’s bubbles.
Pierce Your Own Bubble
It’s a basic principle of cognitive consistency, or confirmation bias: We like to believe that we are right, and that causes us to seek out, enjoy, and remember the kind of information that confirms our current beliefs. We cannot fully escape that bias, but if we are conscious of it, we can adapt to it by purposefully cultivating a diversity in the information and the people that we voluntarily come into contact with. This might mean:
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- Watching the “other side’s” news network from time to time, not just to critique it, but to understand what they are talking about and why.
- Clicking on news articles on our newsfeeds and other online searches that come from a different ideological starting point. The more such articles we click on, the more we will see.
- Keeping friends who hold different opinions. Instead of avoiding discussions on those differences, try respectfully engaging them. You may not persuade anyone, or be persuaded yourself, but you will emerge with a better and broader understanding.
And Understand that Jurors Might Have Trouble Piercing Theirs
Our audiences should also be trying to diversify their social network, but as a practical matter, they probably won’t be. For that reason, litigators and other public communicators need to address an audience that lives in their own bubbles, created not only by media but also by the limits and homogeneity of their own chosen friend networks. Persuaders need to adapt by framing arguments in terms that reach across the aisles.
Speaking your audience’s language can’t mean just reinforcing what they already believe. But persuasion can mean starting with a premise that your audience already accepts, and then linking that to your desired conclusion. That idea, which is Aristotle’s notion of the enthymeme, suggests that persuaders can’t just make fresh and freestanding appeals to an audience, but instead need to start with a bridge their audience already trusts.
When I wrote previously on this idea of a filter bubble, I ended with some words that are worth repeating: Never assume that what makes sense to you will therefore make sense to any reasonable person. Intellectually, everyone is a foreigner living on a different island and perceiving, speaking, and understanding in a slightly different way. But even as common ground shrinks, the best route to persuasion remains identification: the ability to find and speak to what is shared between you and your audience.
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Other Posts on Adaptation:
- Beware of the Jury’s “Filter Bubble”
- Speak to the Brain’s Politics
- Appeal to Both the Holistic and the Analytic
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Bakshy, E., Messing, S., & Adamic, L. (2015). Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook. Science, aaa1160.
Image credit: See-ming Lee, Flickr Creative Commons