The flow of information is so huge that we can hardly process it adequately. But this is half the trouble. The most interesting thing is that from this stream we isolate what we already know or what confirms our beliefs.
«Well, that’s what I thought!» — concludes he (a) and dives back into the Internet. A familiar picture? Hanging out on forums for hours, young parents or abandoned lovers find more and more arguments in favor of the fact that vaccinations are useful (harmful), and all men (women) are bastards. Other points of view are easily filtered out: when there is too much information, something must be discarded, otherwise it cannot be sustained. Our cognitive system tends to seek confirmation of hypotheses that have already been put forward, instead of subjecting them to critical testing. Let’s say a friend confidently informs you that fat people are more emotional than thin people. Which of your friends do you remember first?
- Are we deceiving or are we deceived?
I’ll bet that some funny girlfriend with magnificent forms, and not at all a nervous skinny neighbor. And it also happens that we interpret the same facts in support of opposite points of view. Once the American psychologist Eldar Shafir (Eldar Shafir) conducted a very remarkable experiment. The participants were introduced to the circumstances of the couple’s divorce, and they had to decide with which parent the child would remain. The first parent in all respects was quite suitable for this. About the second, it was known that he had a wonderful relationship with the child, but at the same time he had to go on business trips for a long time. When the participants were asked to whom the child should be given, the majority pointed to the second parent, who is the one who has the best relationship with the child. When it was necessary to decide who to refuse, again everyone pointed to the second parent: he would have to leave the child alone for a long time. The mind creates an information «trap» for itself and falls into it itself.
The flow of information is huge, but it is up to us to decide what exactly we will choose from it.
The more information, the more difficult it is to navigate. You can not have a TV at home (like me, for example), but without the Internet at the present time, nowhere. Search engines, news feeds, social networks, forums, and more break into our personal space. In addition, evolution has endowed humans with the desire to share information that is not inherent in animals (every blogosphere resident has encountered dozens of republishings of some important news in his “feed”)*. What to do? As digital technology expert and author of the information diet, Clay Johnson, points out, we cannot limit the flow of information, but we can decide what we will choose from it**. And the first small step that can be taken here is to prefer information that complements or expands our ideas about ourselves and about the surrounding reality, and not just confirms what we already believe.
* For more details, see: M. Tomasello «The Origins of Human Communication» (Languages of Slavic Cultures, 2011).
** C. Johnson «The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption» (O’Reilly Media, 2012).