My project proposal lays at the intersection of a couple different phenomena: discoveries in social psychology and behavioral economics, the prevalence of denialism on important issues in society and the emergence of the networked public sphere. To understand why, let’s look at each of these phenomena individually.

The Nudge Unit

In 2010, the UK government established the Behavioral Insights Team, colloquially dubbed ‘The Nudge Unit.’ Their goal was simple: save the UK government money. Yet the methods they used to accomplish that goal were far from simple: apply known theories and cognitive biases from psychology and behavioral economics to change the behavior of citizens without restricting their freedoms in any way.

Seems tough right? To see how the theory behind this works, let’s look at a contrived example that is used at the opening of Nudge, the book after which the Nudge unit was named. Look at the two tables below. Which one is longer?

 

If you are like the overwhelming majority of the world, you would say the table on the left is longer than the table on the right.  If you were in a position where you had to place a bet on which table is longer, you would be crazy not to bet on the left.  Now take a ruler or a piece of paper and measure the sides.  To your astonishment, you will find that the dimensions of the table are exactly the same, as we can see in the rotated tabletops below:

In visual illusions like the one above, the presence or absence of factors like rotation and the shape/angle of table legs bias human perception and lead to a predictable convergence in decisions that are made from the perceived information.  If you were betting on this, you would have lost money because of your bias in perception.  And if I were arranging this bet, I would know in advance that you were going to lose.

These sorts of cognitive biases are not limited to the visual system – they fundamentally underlie how humans think and act in the world.  The fields of social psychology, cognitive psychology and behavioral economics have spent the past century developing a strong understanding of many of these cognitive biases.  The ‘Nudge Unit’ uses that understanding to influence the population of the UK to act in ways that save the government money by exploiting these cognitive biases to create a predictable convergence in decisions towards what the government thinks is best for the population.

Denialism

Let’s table the above information while we explore another contemporary issue: Denialism.   Before defining it, I’ll lay out a few of the most common examples: “HIV does not cause AIDS.  The world was created in 4004 BCE.  Smoking does not cause cancer.  And if climate change is happening, it is nothing to do with man-made CO2 emissions,” [2].  Dangerous views like those listed above are surprisingly prevalent in society despite the overwhelming body of scientific evidence and consensus against them.  Denialism is a concept which attempts to understand that question and understand how rhetorical arguments can give the appearance of legitimate debate where there is none.

Most scientists are baffled when they hear the numbers of people afflicted with Denialism.  A 2004 Gallop poll, for example, showed that 45% of Americans believed that “God created human beings pretty much in their present form at one time within the last 10,000 years or so,” [3].  The knee-jerk response of most scientists confronted with such cases of Denialism is to attempt to respond with all of the facts explaining why the afflicted individual is wrong.  Interestingly, many studies have shown that this actually tends to reinforce the individual’s original beliefs rather than persuading them to consider other views [4][5].

So how does one combat this?  The answer seems to lie in the same type of research that the Nudge Unit relies on.  As The Debunking Handbook eloquently phrased it, “It’s not what people think that matters, but how they think,” [6].

The Networked Public Sphere

Let’s again entertain a different train of thought, keeping the other two in the back of our mind as we explore a set of issues that has previously been discussed in class: The Networked Public Sphere.  In the days following Robert McCulloh’s announcement of the Ferguson grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson in the shooting of Michael Brown, protests on the streets were accompanied by a lively debate on Twitter.  Emma Pierson, a reporter for Quartz, mapped out the conversation in the graph below:

In this image, red dots are active tweeters who describe themselves as “conservative” while the blue dots are active tweeters who describe themselves as “liberal.”  As we can see in the graph, they are mostly talking to themselves, reinforcing their own beliefs about the situation.  Pierson also points out that in the few cases of red dots interacting with blue dots, the interactions were far from civil. [7]

The Ferguson interactions on Twitter are an example of a more common trend that tends to emerge from social media: echo chambers.  People exhibit a confirmation bias which leads them to filter out information that is contrary to their viewpoints, yielding information and debates that proliferate within bubbles of like-minded people and convincing them that their views are ubiquitous throughout the world [8].

In The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler proposes a theory on how information spreads throughout the topology of such a networked public sphere:

“Sites cluster around communities of interest… Local clusters – communities of interest – can provide initial vetting and “peer-review-like” qualities to individual contributions made within an interest cluster.  Observations that are seen as significant within a community of interest make their way to the relatively visible sites in that cluster, from where they become visible to people in larger (“regional”) clusters.  This continues until an observation makes its way to the “superstar” sites that hundreds of thousands of people might read and use,” [9].

If Benkler’s theory is correct, this gives us some intuition as to how these echo chambers form and how they gain a growing influence within the networked public sphere.  Interestingly, Benkler’s theory also provides the basic roadmap of a mechanism to garner significant attention for a chosen argument within a networked public sphere: identify relevant communities of interest, infiltrate those communities and proliferate arguments that are likely to rise to the top of the cluster.

My Proposal: Facilitate ‘Networked Community Infiltration’ and Persuasion with the help of A Private Nudge Unit

So where am I going with all of this?  My hypothesis is that Benkler’s clustering effect is the cause of the perceived echo chambers.  If this is true, that means there may exist a mechanism to inject messages into those echo chambers.  And what if we could carefully design those messages such that they exploit cognitive biases in their readers?  And what if that echo chamber is a primary source of information for those afflicted with Denialism?

I’m proposing that we develop a civic media technology which enables individuals who care about the ramifications of Denialism to easily construct counter-information grounded in psychological principles and cognitive biases similar to The Nudge Unit.  A Private Nudge Unit which can be useful at an individual level instead of a government level.  Yet instead of setting defaults for behavior like the policies of The Nudge Unit, these arguments will shift defaults for thought in a population engrossed in misinformation which is fueling their thought.  There are a couple forms which this tool could take, but the overall purpose is to allow its users to understand some of the important psychological phenomena at play and provide a set of strategies for persuading different categories of people afflicted with Denialism.

Once we have such a tool, we could use Benkler’s theories on how information spreads throughout the networked public sphere to influence communities of Denialism in mass.  We can study these small but influential communities of interest which proliferate Denialism and understand what types of articles are likely to garner attention within them.  If we can understand that, we can then ‘infiltrate’ these networked communities by implanting articles into their echo chambers which we know will garner attention but also contain subtle mechanisms to create cognitive dissonance and shift how they think about the issue over time.

Is this extremely far-fetched?  Absolutely.  Will it work as planned?  Almost certainly not.  But if any progress is made with any of these components we may be one step closer towards combatting Denialism.  And in either case it would be fundamentally fascinating to attempt to understand and play with the complex mechanisms involved here.  And who knows, maybe it’ll even empower me to win my standard Thanksgiving political debate this year.

References

[1] Nudge – Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler (2008)

[2] Denialism: What is it and How Should Scientists Respond? –  Pascal Diethelm , Martin McKee  (2009)

[3] Third of Americans Say Evidence Has Supported Darwin’s Evolution Theory – Frank Newport (2004)

[4] Motivated skepticism in the evaluation of political beliefs – Taber, C. S., & Lodge, M. (2006)

[5] There Must Be a Reason – Prasad, M., Perrin, A. J., Bezila, K., Hoffman, S. G., Kindleberger, K., Manturuk, K., et al. (2009)

[6] The Debunking Handbook – John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky (2011)

[7] See How Red and Blue Tweeters Ignore Each Other on Ferguson – Emma Pierson (2014)

[8] Homophily, Group Size, and the Diffusion of Political Information in Social Networks: Evidence from Twitter – Yosh Halberstam, Brian Knight (2014)

[9] The Wealth of Networks, Yochai Benkler (2007)