References:
American Psychological Association. (n.d.). APA Dictionary of Psychology. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://dictionary.apa.org/confirmation-bias
Arguedas, A. R., Robertson, C. T., Fletcher, R., & Nielsen, R. K. (2022, January 19). Echo chambers, filter bubbles, and polarisation: a literature review. Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://reutersinstitute.politics.ox.ac.uk/echo-chambers-filter-bubbles-and-polarisation-literature-review
Brenan, M. (2021, August 13). Americans Remain Distrustful of Mass Media. Gallup.Com. Retrieved March 28, 2022, from https://news.gallup.com/poll/321116/americans-remain-distrustful-mass-media.aspx
Broockman, D., & Kalla, J. (2022). The manifold effects of partisan media on viewers’ beliefs and attitudes: A field experiment with Fox News viewers. OSF Preprints. https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/jrw26
Buchler, J. (2016, April 5). When covering elections, journalists face a debilitating dilemma. The Conversation. Retrieved March 23, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/when-covering-elections-journalists-face-a-debilitating-dilemma-54533
Cambridge Dictionary. (2022, April 6). Echo chamber definition. Retrieved April 7, 2022, from https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/echo-chamber
Diethelm, P., & McKee, M. (2008). Denialism: what is it and how should scientists respond? The European Journal of Public Health, 19(1), 2–4. https://doi.org/10.1093/eurpub/ckn139
El-Bermawy, M. M. (2016, November 18). Your Echo Chamber is Destroying Democracy. Wired. Retrieved February 25, 2022, from https://www.wired.com/2016/11/filter-bubble-destroying-democracy/
Facebook. (n.d.). PROMOTING SAFETY AND EXPRESSION. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://about.facebook.com/actions/promoting-safety-and-expression/?utm_source=Search&utm_medium=google&utm_campaign=USPublicAffairs&utm_content=Search-facebook%20content-571021546250
Ferber, D. (2018, February 17). Fighting back against ‘alternative facts’: Experts share their secrets. American Association for the Advancement of Science. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://www.science.org/content/article/fighting-back-against-alternative-facts-experts-share-their-secrets
Festinger, L. (1962). Cognitive Dissonance. Scientific American, 207(4), 93–106. https://doi.org/10.1038/scientificamerican1062-93
Garimella, K., de Francisci Morales, G., Gionis, A., & Mathioudakis, M. (2018). Political Discourse on Social Media: Echo Chambers, Gatekeepers, and the Price of Bipartisanship. Proceedings of the 2018 World Wide Web Conference on World Wide Web - WWW ’18. https://doi.org/10.1145/3178876.3186139
Hoppin, S. (2016). Applying the narrative paradigm to the vaccine debates. American Communication Journal, 18(2), 45–55. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/327800385_Applying_the_narrative_paradigm_to_the_vaccine_debates
Jiang, J., Ren, X., & Ferrara, E. (2021). Social Media Polarization and Echo Chambers in the Context of COVID-19: Case Study. JMIRx Med, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.2196/29570
Leonhardt, D. (2019, January 31). Opinion | The Six Forms of Media Bias. The New York Times. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/2019/01/31/opinion/media-bias-howard-schultz.html
Ling, R. (2020). Confirmation Bias in the Era of Mobile News Consumption: The Social and Psychological Dimensions. Digital Journalism, 8(5), 596–604. https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2020.1766987
McLeod, S. (2018, February 5). Cognitive Dissonance. Simply Psychology. Retrieved March 25, 2022, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/cognitive-dissonance.html
Mynatt, C. R., Doherty, M. E., & Tweney, R. D. (1977). Confirmation Bias in a Simulated Research Environment: An Experimental Study of Scientific Inference. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 29(1), 85–95. https://doi.org/10.1080/00335557743000053
Nguyen, T. C. (2019, September 11). The problem of living inside echo chambers. The Conversation. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://theconversation.com/the-problem-of-living-inside-echo-chambers-110486
Noor, I. (2020, June 10). Confirmation Bias. Simply Psychology. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.simplypsychology.org/confirmation-bias.html
Shearer, E., & Grieco, E. (2019, October 2). Americans Are Wary of the Role Social Media Sites Play in Delivering the News. Pew Research Center’s Journalism Project. Retrieved February 28, 2022, from https://www.pewresearch.org/journalism/2019/10/02/americans-are-wary-of-the-role-social-media-sites-play-in-delivering-the-news/
Specter, M. (2010). Denialism: How Irrational Thinking Harms the Planet and Threatens Our Lives [E-book]. Penguin Books.
Suls, J. (n.d.). Leon Festinger - Cognitive dissonance. Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved April 6, 2022, from https://www.britannica.com/biography/Leon-Festinger/Cognitive-dissonance
Szetela, A. (2021, July 13). The problem with liberal echo chambers on college campuses. BostonGlobe.Com. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://www.bostonglobe.com/2020/12/31/magazine/problem-with-liberal-echo-chambers-college-campuses/
The Week Staff. (2015, January 9). Made-up minds. The Week. Retrieved April 6, 2022, from https://theweek.com/articles/484765/madeup-minds
Thornton, B. (2013, June 12). A Brief History of Media Bias. Hoover Institution. Retrieved March 26, 2022, from https://www.hoover.org/research/brief-history-media-bias
Walther, M. (2021, July 21). Facebook is the world’s largest publisher — and that should terrify us all. New York Post. Retrieved April 5, 2022, from https://nypost.com/2021/07/20/facebook-is-the-worlds-largest-publisher-which-should-terrify-us/
Wollebæk, D., Karlsen, R., Steen-Johnsen, K., & Enjolras, B. (2019). Anger, Fear, and Echo Chambers: The Emotional Basis for Online Behavior. Social Media + Society, 5(2), 205630511982985. https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305119829859
Research
My work on perspectives started with my curiosity about human behavior and searching for logical explanations as to why people act the way they do. This began as a search for a way better create characters and stories, as well as a way to aid my directing technique by learning how to approach a wide variety of characters and actors. But my curiosities kept growing. I wanted to see how my work on perspectives could be used in persuasion and if this work could influence the audience and incite a want for change in them. In the last decade, it has felt as though the political divide between the left and the right has increased drastically with the conspiracy theories surrounding the Covid-19 pandemic showing the dangers this divide has created. I, therefore, wanted to dive further into researching this divide, and especially the media phenomenon “echo chambers”, and investigate what this is, how it came to be, how they work, and whether the arts might help dissolve them.
Echo Chambers
In everything from political debates to Harry Potter fan forums, we experience opinions and even facts being discarded by people attacking the person behind them. This can be as simple as people believing that the earth is flat attacking opposing believers in comment sections of Facebook posts or demonstrating against schools teaching children differently. These people’s strong beliefs often come from groups and communities called “echo chambers”. Assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Utah, C. Thi Nguyen has been researching the phenomenon of echo chambers and explains them like this:
An echo chamber leads its members to distrust everybody on the outside of that chamber. And that means that an insider’s trust for other insiders can grow unchecked. (…) Echo chambers isolate their members, not by cutting off their lines of communication to the world, but by changing whom they trust. (2019)
With this explanation, we can see that an echo chamber is a group of people that shares the same belief, like that the earth is flat or that Gryffindor is superior to Slytherin, and together they disregard all opposing facts from people on the outside of their group. They are echoing like-minded people and only trusting facts and opinions that are supporting their own beliefs. So, how come people can disregard facts? And how can we break people out of these chambers?
Echo chambers do not just exist to mislead their members or attack people who believe in something different than themselves. When looking at the Cambridge Dictionary's definition of an echo chamber as “a situation in which people only hear opinions of one type, or opinions that are similar to their own” (n.d.b) one can argue that even a university with people referencing each other’s work could be an echo chamber. One could also argue that most of us are already living in a type of echo chamber just by reading newspapers that support our world views. Some even believe that our social media and search engines are showing us the material the algorithms believe is most suited for us personally.
An echo chamber is a form of bubble, but the term does not prejudge why some people might live in such bubbles – it is possible, for example, that some actively chose to (…) A filter bubble, on the other hand, is an echo chamber primarily produced by ranking algorithms engaged in passive personalisation without any active choice on our part, a possible outcome of specific aspects of how news and information is distributed online. (Arguedas et al., 2022)
Through this explanation, we can see that the distinguishing factor between an echo chamber and a filter bubble is how voluntarily the people involved are in the decision to join such a community. This again can say something about how to treat the members of these communities. “To break somebody out of an echo chamber, you’d need to repair that broken trust. And that is a much harder task than simply bursting a bubble.” (Nguyen, 2019).
What is the media’s role?
How come people living in the information age, where you can get the answer to any question within seconds on your mobile device, choose to disregard the facts that scientists and researchers have worked on proving for thousands of years? We are living in a time where the notion of news catered to your preferences is more real than ever (Kavanagh et al., 2019). In the age of social media like Facebook and Twitter, finding like-minded people with the same preferences as you can be done with just a simple keyword search. “According to Pew Research, 61 percent of millennials use Facebook as their primary source for news about politics and government, but Facebook refuses to acknowledge its identity as a news source.” (El-Bermawy, 2016). This means that Facebook, where you connect with your peers, plays a big role in the variety of news millennials get access to daily, without having to operate under the regulations of a media company. A more updated report state:
Majorities say that social media companies have too much control over the news on their sites, and that the role social media companies play in delivering the news on their sites results in a worse mix of news for users. (Shearer & Grieco, 2019)
Even though Facebook (n.d.) states on their website that they now reduce the distribution of content that has been rated false and provide a context to allow the reader to make up their mind about what to trust, they are not giving out information about their algorithms that shows who receives what kind of news. Whether Facebook should be defined as a publisher is widely debated (Walther, 2021), but it is an important source of information for many people, which is why knowing how they distribute their news is of interest.
The notion of news catered to your belief system is not a new one created by social media as Buchler explains about the American media industry: “In the 19th century, newspapers were party-owned operations who made no pretense to independence or objectivity” (2016). Thornton (2013) goes on to explain that an uprising of people demanding objective reporting became stronger during the 1900s. The media companies slowly started moving away from their known party affiliation (Buchler, 2016), which might be seen reflected in Gallup polls where Americans’ trust in the media has been documented annually since the 1970s. During this time, the trust in the media was held by around 70 % of the population, but the poll from 2019 showed the trust had decreased to 40 % (Brenan, 2021). The big media companies trying to hide their bias might be a part of why people are decreasing their trust in these companies. “We now operate in something closer to the old system, with a media landscape infested with party-aligned outlets. However, many don’t even acknowledge their leanings, complicating voters’ decisions.” (Buchler, 2016).This shows that the biggest change from the old system is the transparency the media companies have for their audience. The invention of social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp have also played their part in the public’s growing distrust. “Facebook is far and away the social media site Americans use most commonly for news. About half (52%) of all U.S. adults get news there.” (Shearer & Grieco, 2019). These social networks have become a Petri dish for echo chambers by connecting like-minded people and creating platforms where the users are creating the narrative (Garimella et al., 2018).
The demand for objectivity in journalism has put the media in a difficult situation when trying to figure out what that means in reality, which again has caused problems on its own.
Unless they want to be accused of bias, journalists must pretend that the objective truth is always the precise midpoint between the Democrats’ and Republicans’ positions based on the premise that the parties are equally extreme, equally dishonest, and equally guilty of all other political sins. (Buchler, 2016)
Here, Buchler explains how the American two-party system has become a clear image of the dangers of staying in the middle and not taking clear sides. Leonhardt posted an opinion piece in the New York Times looking into different types of media bias: “Too often, journalists confuse centrism with fairness, objectivity or common-sense truth. But centrism is none of those. It is a point of view, and it can be wrong, just as conservatism or liberalism can be.” (2019). Here Leonhardt points out another way of failing to report objectively by falling into another political stance while trying to avoid being too liberal or conservative. Going back to Buchler, where he explains the dangers of this perceived media objectivity:
The more often conventional journalists insist that both parties are equally guilty of all sins in order to avoid accusations of bias, the more voters believe it. The more they believe it, the more likely they are to discount any future claims that one party is more dishonest. (2016)
It becomes clear that true objectivity is hard to achieve, and that political strategists have learned to use this ethical dilemma that journalists are facing to their advantage, thus playing up this media bias. This again leads to the growing distrust in the media, which fuels the echo chambers.
What psychological elements are at play?
How does bias work in connection with the echo chambers, and in what way does it fuel them? Watching a screen with stationary objects in different shapes and sizes with particles moving around the objects, the subjects in Mynatt, Doherty, and Twenty’s study had to come up with and test hypotheses. The scientists’ findings were that the majority of the experiments that the participants conducted were confirmatory ones, and they did not try to disprove their hypothesis. Even when the scientists actively tried to manipulate some of the subjects to use a falsification strategy they kept going for the confirmatory approaches (Mynatt et al. 1977). This study included the first documented use of the phrase confirmation bias, which The American Psychological Association defines as: “The tendency to gather evidence that confirms preexisting expectations, typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence.” (n.d.). The definition explains how confirmation bias makes us use the information we receive so it will fit into our conception of how things work, both by searching for information to support existing beliefs and by filtering away information that does not fit. This can help explain the issues with the distrust in the media companies and how confirmation bias both by the writer and the reader is a big problem the media industry is facing. People tend to search for and interpret information in line with their existing beliefs (Noor, 2020). The desire to read news catered to your viewpoints is then created by confirmation bias and it can create distrust in media companies presenting news with opposite beliefs to one’s own. Confirmation bias therefore also becomes a key factor in understanding how echo chambers work and why they are so difficult to break out of.
The world is filled with bias, everything from memories to scientific research is all based on what the relator believes to be true (Noor, 2020). With the quick access to facts, we have recently seen the rise of “alternative facts”, a term coined by former US President Donald Trump’s spokesperson Kellyanne Conway after being confronted by NBC-host, Chuck Todd. This term "seemed to launch a new era of degraded public discourse, in which falsehoods become "alternative truths," and unwelcome news for politicians becomes “fake news.”" (Ferber, 2018). The people’s distrust in governments and media outlets has been clarified further after the COVID-19 pandemic took hold on society in 2020, where the rise of echo chambers with pandemic skeptics got a loud voice in the media debate offering “alternative facts”. This online behavior has been studied by Jiang et al. to benefit public health campaigns in the future:
We observed that right-leaning users were noticeably more vocal and active in the production and consumption of COVID-19 information. (…) we found that information rarely traveled in or out of the right-leaning echo chamber, forming a small yet intense political bubble. In contrast, far-left and nonpartisan users were much more receptive to information from each other. (2021)
The fact that some information rarely traveled in or out of some of the echo chambers is of big concern since this highly contagious illness was a threat to public health. When small groups of the society have a different set of “facts” that they act upon it could potentially cause a severe threat to themselves and the rest of the society. This observation clarifies the dangers of echo chambers and how they can result in disbelief in scientific research, and that some echo chambers create their truths based on their confirmation bias.
Imagine believing the world is going to end so strongly that you quit your job. You tell all your family and friends, you do your best to convince them, and when they do not believe you, you decide to leave them behind because your faith is so strong. You sell all your belongings and live fully like there is “no tomorrow”. Then you wake up the next day and the world did not end. How would it be for you to face that reality? This is exactly what Leon Festinger studied when he infiltrated a cult and stayed with them the day they believed the world was going to end in 1957. This research led to his introduction of the term cognitive dissonance (Suls, n.d.).
The simplest definition of dissonance can, perhaps, be given in terms of a person’s expectations. In the course of our lives we have all accumulated a large number of expectations about what things go together and what things do not. When such an expectation is not fulfilled, dissonance occurs. (Festinger, 1962).
With this Festinger is saying that dissonance is what occurs when an expected outcome is not met, for example, when the world did not end. So, how did the people react? They announced that because their faith had been so strong, God had decided to save the world (The Week Staff, 2015). “Festinger's (1957) cognitive dissonance theory suggests that we have an inner drive to hold all our attitudes and behavior in harmony and avoid disharmony (or dissonance). This is known as the principle of cognitive consistency.” (McLeod, 2018). Here we can get a greater understanding of why the cult decided to alter the narrative, they were avoiding inner disharmony by “interpreting information in line with existing beliefs”. This story shows how strongly the dissonance wants to be avoided, which can be an added explanation to the spread of “alternative facts” and the rise of echo chambers.
How should they be approached?
To break an echo chamber may seem like an impossible task, especially when looking at the way they are structured, to comfort and create cognitive harmony for its members. There is also the backing from the media and social media, and the potential problem of not the members not responding to scientific research as explained by Diethelm & McKee:
The normal academic response to an opposing argument is to engage with it, testing the strengths and weaknesses of the differing views (…) A meaningful discourse is impossible when one party rejects these rules. Yet it would be wrong to prevent the denialists having a voice. Instead, we argue, it is necessary to shift the debate from the subject under consideration, instead exposing to public scrutiny the tactics they employ and identifying them publicly for what they are. (2008)
Echo chambers should be allowed a voice in society to avoid closing them off even further, but there needs to be a balance in them having their opinions heard without being able to recruit a bigger following. Exposing the tactics might be a way to avoid further recruitment and even break people out of the belief system, but it must be done in such a way that it still shows respect in order not to boomerang and reaffirm the belief instead. The form of denial the echo chambers are showcasing has been studied widely and might be an aid in how to treat these communities. “Denialism is denial writ large—when an entire segment of society, often struggling with the trauma of change, turns away from reality in favor of a more comfortable lie.” (Specter, 2010). Finding out the cause of the denial might be a step closer to finding the right response to the echo chambers and possibly expose the leaders, their motives, and their methods.
Looking at how the media has played a part in establishing and maintaining echo chambers through their search for objectivity, they might also be part of the solution when it comes to dissolving echo chambers. “Media may be important in part because it continually ‘replenishes’ people’s partisan loyalties and political beliefs, giving it tremendous ongoing power even if its immediate effects are short-term.” (Broockman & Kalla, 2022). If the media manages to balance its point of view without steering people in one clear direction, allowing its viewers to make up their minds based on the facts presented, they might be able to reach a broader audience and by that possibly break people out of their monotone news cycle. Szetela described in the Boston Globe how it was coming from a conservative belief system into a liberal world of college students and how the change of view became a personal choice:
I believed that immigrants were storming the border and stealing American jobs. But I was persuaded otherwise because no one tried to shut me down when I expressed my viewpoints. (…) Liberal students on my campus understood that you effect change by talking to people and winning them over to your side by the strength of your arguments — not by silencing dissent and vandalizing office doors. (2021)
In not pushing their view onto him, the other students allowed Szetela to make up his mind based on open discussions, and they validated him by listening to his point of view, which is a good way of thinking about the public discourse. It is not about winning, but about opening up and listening.
Another way of dealing with echo chambers could be to look at their use of persuasion, and especially the use of Aristotle’s pathos, how they are playing on strong emotions with their followers. Wollebæk et al. studied how emotions influence echo chambers and argue “that anger reinforces echo chamber dynamics and trench warfare dynamics in the digital public sphere, while fear counteracts these dynamics.” (2019). Looking at these findings, it becomes clear that the anger the echo chambers are feeding off needs to be addressed in society. As Szetela (2021) discussed in his perspective piece, it is important that the people within the echo chambers feel listened to. By knowing how the echo chambers get enforced through emotions and stories, using a similar persuasion technique might be a possible way to fight back.
Walter Fisher’s narrative paradigm proposes that narrative also involves rationality, that all meaningful human communication can be viewed as narration (Fisher, 1984/1987). For Fisher, narrative is not just fictional stories. The narrative paradigm can be applied to all forms of communication that appeal to our reason. (…) Persuasion occurs when people see good reasons for adopting the point of view advocated in an argument. (Hoppin, 2016)
Through the narrative paradigm, it might be possible to create persuasive stories to counteract the stories from the echo chambers. This might be done through a variety of mediums, where the key is to take in their mindset and allow for the audience to feel respected.
Summary
Through looking at different factors of how echo chambers can exist and what fuels them, it becomes clear that Nguyen’s (2019) statement, that echo chambers are hard to break, is true. It is not as easy as just feeding in some new information or attacking the leaders. The foundation of the echo chambers is rooted in a systemic distrust of everything from the outside, and this distrust demands patience to restore. It becomes clear through the research that the groups within the echo chambers often feel excluded from society. When they then are being disallowed to partake in the public discourse, for example, due to the use of “alternative facts”, the exclusion fuels this narrative within the group further, supporting their distrust in the establishment. There is further research needed into the reasons why these people feel excluded from society and how to avoid them falling out in the first place. A deeper look into how the echo chambers organize and how social media strengthens their bond is also important to gain a better understanding of the recruitment process.
I believe that this research shows that opening the public discourse up and allowing people to ask questions when something is uncomfortable or hard to understand can be an important step in breaking these chambers. Taking people’s questions and worries seriously and giving them the time needed to adjust their worldview without causing too much cognitive dissonance is key when working on making everyone feel included in society. This is where I believe the arts could be of great benefit, creating narratives explaining different sides of the stories. Teaching the audience to try and see things from new perspectives and creating a bridge between the world views that allow people to walk across and experience a different way of seeing the world, might be a way to open the door to the chambers. Even if the issue of echo chambers is a systemic problem that needs further research into understanding, I believe the arts could lead us in the direction of a possible understanding, if not a solution, to the problem.