Facebook Is Making Us Stupid, Says Study
Facebook is making people ‘stupid’ as they seek out information that confirms their beliefs and ignore anything that says the opposite, says a new study.
Known as ‘confirmation bias’, the research suggests that people end up in virtual gated communities with people who share their views, so that they rarely get to see differing opinions on a variety of subjects from science to politics.
The study by Italy’s Laboratory of Computational Social Science, analysed the behaviour of Facebook users from 2010 to 2014.
Specifically, the researchers looked at how Facebook users spread conspiracy theories and science news, as well as false information spread by online trolls.
The results shows that people are more likely to share posts that fit their beliefs and ignore those that don’t.
While the study focussed on Facebook, the same affect has been observed on other social networks, especially Twitter.
Bloomberg columnist Cass R. Sunstein explains: “when like-minded people speak with one another, they tend to end up thinking a more extreme version of what they originally believed.
“Whenever people spread misinformation within homogenous clusters, they also intensify one another’s commitment to that misinformation”.
Image credit: Oleksiy Maksymenko / imageBROKER/REX Shutterstock
