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The dark side of information proliferation
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Hills, Thomas Trenholm (2019) The dark side of information proliferation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 14 (3). pp. 323-330. doi:10.1177/1745691618803647 ISSN 1745-6916.
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Official URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691618803647
Abstract
There are well-understood psychological limits on our capacity to process information. As information proliferation—the consumption and sharing of information—increases through social media and other communications technology, these limits create an attentional bottleneck, favoring information that is more likely to be searched for, attended to, comprehended, encoded, and later reproduced. In information-rich environments, this bottleneck influences the evolution of information via four forces of cognitive selection, selecting for information that is beliefconsistent, negative, social, and predictive. Selection for belief-consistent information leads balanced information to support increasingly polarized views. Selection for negative information amplifies information about downside risks and crowds out potential benefits. Selection for social information drives herding, impairs objective assessments, and reduces exploration for solutions to hard problems. Selection for predictive patterns drives overfitting, the replication crisis, and risk seeking. This article summarizes the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection and presents eight warnings, which represent severe pitfalls for the naive informavore, accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.
Item Type: | Journal Article | |||||||||
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Subjects: | B Philosophy. Psychology. Religion > BF Psychology H Social Sciences > HM Sociology |
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Divisions: | Faculty of Science, Engineering and Medicine > Science > Psychology | |||||||||
Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Information technology -- Psychological aspects, Communication and technology -- Psychological aspects, Information behavior, Information retrieval, Public opinion, Risk perception, Information society -- Psychological aspects | |||||||||
Journal or Publication Title: | Perspectives on Psychological Science | |||||||||
Publisher: | Sage Publications Inc. | |||||||||
ISSN: | 1745-6916 | |||||||||
Official Date: | 1 May 2019 | |||||||||
Dates: |
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Volume: | 14 | |||||||||
Number: | 3 | |||||||||
Page Range: | pp. 323-330 | |||||||||
DOI: | 10.1177/1745691618803647 | |||||||||
Status: | Peer Reviewed | |||||||||
Publication Status: | Published | |||||||||
Reuse Statement (publisher, data, author rights): | Posted ahead of print. Hills, Thomas Trenholm (2018) The dark side of information proliferation. Perspectives on Psychological Science . Copyright © 2018 The Authors. Reprinted by permission of SAGE Publications. | |||||||||
Access rights to Published version: | Restricted or Subscription Access | |||||||||
Copyright Holders: | The Author(s) | |||||||||
Date of first compliant deposit: | 24 August 2018 | |||||||||
Date of first compliant Open Access: | 24 August 2018 | |||||||||
RIOXX Funder/Project Grant: |
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