The mechanisms of motivated reasoning will ALWAYS be with us. But social media is a new environment with no natural predators where the bestiary of biased thinking can proliferate. Confirmation/disconfirmation bias are invasive species, and the ecosystem is out of balance. 1/8
The persuasiveness and pervasiveness of fake news, alternative facts, filter bubbles, and in-group/myside bias isn't new. Some of the oldest research in psychology quantified all these tendencies in the 1950s: "They Saw a Game" by Hastorf and Cantril demonstrated this well. 2/8
The solution will never be more facts, or better facts. That's the information deficit model, and it doesn't work. The solution is better arguments. We were shaped by natural selection to be persuaded by them. Reasoning is social. We are social animals. More: @hugoreasoning 3/8
Our psychology isn't going to change. So the solution has to be two-fold. One: We must become better users of social technology, more literate, more skeptical, more empathic and so on. That will happen in time, as it has many times before (read "Understanding Media"). 4/8
Two: We must admit that tribal tendencies are a basic human drive and factor that into any digital domain where discourse and deliberation are likely to occur. @changemyview, @kialo, @LilyMasonPhD, @dankahan, and @ChenhaoTan are leading the way here. 5/8
The effects of fake news are small, the reach of modern propaganda is weak. These are not intractable problems. See work of @BrendanNyhan and @JasonReifler for details. 6/8
Arguing, deliberation, reasoning, and rationality got us here, and it will get us out of this epistemic crisis. The truth wins when we reason together. See work of @tomstafford on this. 7/8
But we currently reason alone AS IF we are reasoning together, and that's like throwing napalm on a house fire. When you argue with yourself, you win. We must build better tools that prevent us from reasoning alone together. The way out is reasoning together, even when alone. 8/8
Epilogue: I'll be speaking about this at #FWD50 / @fwd50conf in Ottawa later this week. I'm very optimistic. I think this weirdness is an extinction burst. I believe these surges in strangeness will serve as inoculations as we grow even more connected. END
