🍄 What's the Consensus?

Everybody knows about echo chambers (and not to feed the trolls), but have you had an ‘intuit moment’ or felt the ‘false consensus effect’?

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“Be curious, not judgmental!” — Ted Lasso

Hello, we’re Alice and we are always in a state of wander. I think we can all agree on one thing … or can we? ‘Us versus Them.’ ‘We versus They.’ As a society’s access and participation in media becomes more open, the information space becomes intrinsically more diverse, and mathematically more divisive. “The Internet broke the information space into a million shards, from 500 channels to more than a billion websites,” writes Richard Gingras, Global Vice President of News at Google, on Medium. “We can choose, and do choose, the voices that reflect our view of our world, the voices that reflect and confirm our biases — good, bad, and indifferent.”

The false-consensus effect?

Consensus bias is the social psychological finding that people tend to assume that others agree with them. It’s a bias where we overestimate how widely held your own beliefs are, like when people believe that the political views they support has more support among other people than they really do. “It is hard for many people to believe the false consensus effect exists,” reports Spring “because they quite naturally believe they are good ‘intuitive psychologists’, thinking it is relatively easy to predict other people’s attitudes and behaviors.”

In today’s world, false consensus is perhaps an illusion made worse by the so-called tribe mentality and algorithmic media. This illusion occurs when people believe there is consensus across multiple sources, but the sources are the same—and yet, there is no "true" consensus. Is it misinformation or is it “true”? That’s a debate that will heat up as more AI-based intelligent agents designed to augment metacognition on social media generate and share its views.

Researchers from Tokyo Institute of Technology explored the roles of trust (attitude) and reliance (behavior) as key elements of “XAI”, a term coined by DARPA researchers in 2017, to make AI decision-making and other fundamental behavior more understandable to people by providing a human-readable explanation. The researchers looked at its effect on the user experience and whether trust and reliance influenced the illusion of consensus. Interestingly, they found there was no effect of trust; but there was an effect of reliance or behavior on consensus-based explanations. Meaning that you may share it on your social media regardless of whether you trust it or not. The goal of their research is to inform the design of anti-misinformation systems that use XAI, especially on social platforms where people share opinions.

Judge and Fury

Mónica Guzmán, author of I Never Thought of It That Way: How to Have Fearlessly Curious Conversations in Dangerously Divided Times [Penguin Random House, 2022], is the daughter of Mexican immigrants. “We’re living in a time that’s very on-demand and one of the ways that this has infected our conversation is we tend to think that alright, I am going to have this conversation with my uncle, and I expect to change his mind,” Guzmán tells TED Audio Collective. “Why? Well here’s this glittering beautiful reason that I’m holding in my hand for why I believe what I believe, and it’s awesome, and when I understood it, it did everything to me. All I have to do is hand it over to him. If I just hand it over to him, it will have the same impact on him, and then when it doesn’t have the same impact on him, we’re infuriated and we begin to repeat ourselves except louder and louder.” Guzmán is Director of Digital Storytelling at Braver Angels, the nation’s largest grassroots, cross-partisan organization dedicated to bridging the political divide. 

‘It’s manifestly obvious that you think your beliefs are true, just as other people think their own beliefs are true,’ continue Aikin and Casey in Psyche. ‘This is what makes them beliefs rather than hopes, desires or fears. This starting point can make it difficult to even contemplate the possibility that someone else’s opposing belief is correct.’ 

“We forget that people have these roots that go down through the roots of their lives,” says Guzmán. “That their opinions are not just something they put on like a shirt, it’s something they’ve grown into so it’s really hard to talk someone out of something in the course of a conversation.”

Intuit moments

Guzmán shortens the title of her book to Intuit moments, meaning “the rewards of a curious conversation, when you think or say, ‘I never thought of it that way,’ it’s proof that some perspective has crossed that chasm between someone else’s mind and your own.” “You don’t know what impact it will have but you’ve noticed it and that’s saying something. It’s the result of having interacted with difference and something now looks richer, something has had an added dimension to it, some idea has gotten complicated for you because of that ‘I never thought of it that way moment.’ So the way to get that moment is to have more curious conversations."

Ideas are energy

The idea that we are all part of a collective memory has been the basis of many spiritual, mythological, social and scientific theories. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), a Jesuit priest and paleontologist, believed this. He called the next evolutionary stage of planetary development, the Noosphere. His theory suggests that the planet will develop a cerebral cortex, or a meta-brain, and experience a self-conscious awakening. 

We need meaning not memes

“For me ideas are coherent patterns of information that can be used for particular forms of action; either embodied action or to realize a particular form. This is the reason why I take the view that ideas are not memes.” —Brian Goodwin

“The meme originally defined by Richard Dawkins is a unit that competes with other memes in the same way that organisms are seen to compete with each other in the course of evolution according to Darwinian theory. The notion that memes are independent entities, I find fundamentally wrong. And then my question is ‘where did they come from, how did they originate, how were they produced in the first place, who was responsible for these memes?’ You notice what the notion of meme does, it isolates it from the source and just says, well, it has an independent existence and jumps from person to person. And if it is a very good idea then it will replicate fast and if it’s a bad idea it won’t. And therefore, you have a kind of dynamic of competition. This concept reduces history to these irresponsible memes and nobody needs to take responsibility for them because they all are just propagating by their own dynamic. And therefore, it’s a kind of transformation of the whole idea of cognition. Which is for me deeply connected with the idea of responsibility. You have an idea, you need to be responsible for it. In other words, there’s no sense of cooperation or responsibility between members in a meme ecosystem and therefore everything becomes mechanical. For me the meme idea is just another of these devices to turn the world into something that is completely mechanical, amoral, without responsibility, without participation, without cooperation. And so, it just doesn’t work for me at all.” —Brian Goodwin, PhD (1923-2009), visionary biologist on understanding organisms as dynamics wholes, ALICE 2006 Interview.

Be a builder

Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky says building a better world comes down to having the right mindset. During a TED Talk, he spoke about fighting "toxic polarization," whether in communities or in business environments. Lubetzky urged his audience, and viewers, to adopt the mindset of a "builder," which he defined as someone who "takes action to unite, to create, and to bring light to the world," rather than a "destroyer," someone who "takes action to divide, demolish and diminish.” 

"Instead of us versus them, what if we understood it as all of us versus extremism?” — Daniel Lubetzky

What else we’re wandering…

🧠 Builders Movement 
The Builders Movement is an initiative that empowers people to make change in their own communities. The organization has initiatives in the U.S., Middle East, and Ukraine, and includes projects such as Citizens Solutions, a "civic experiment" that aims to empower citizens to solve difficult political problems, and Builders Media, which makes content that celebrates problem-solving and a diversity of perspectives. 

🧠 Dignity neuroscience
From The Magna Carta to The Declaration of Independence, written records throughout recorded human history have always proclaimed that people deserve freedom, security and dignity. Scholars at Brown University have now found that brain science bolsters these long-held notions that people thrive when they enjoy basic human rights such as agency, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. ‘We further propose these rights and protections are rooted in fundamental properties of the human brain,’ writes Tara White, assistant Professor (research) of Behavioral and Social Sciences at Brown, in a scientific paper published in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 2021. “We provide a robust, empirical foundation for universal rights based on emerging work in human brain science that we term dignity neuroscience. Dignity neuroscience provides an empirical foundation to support and foster human dignity, universal rights, and their active furtherance by individuals, nations, and international law.” The science also supports the idea that when societies fail to offer their citizens such rights, allowing them to fall into poverty, privation, violence and war, there can be lasting neurological and psychological consequences.

📱Doe-ing things differently 
“Our world encourages us to engage with what we know and reject what we don’t understand,” says The Doe, a digital publication sharing anonymous, heart-centered narratives to promote empathy across divides. ‘And when you tack on social media algorithms, internal biases and a 24-hour news cycle, echo chambers are all but inescapable. The Doe is passionate about changing the way people engage with content on the web. The Doe is  a space for unfiltered stories—to promote open-minded interactions and repair civil discourse.

🙌 Starts with Us is a movement to empower millions of Americans just like you — tired of our culture of contempt and energized to foster critics; thinking and constructive communication across our lines of difference.

🧠 Polarization Detox Challenge 
Detox From the Political Polarization Trap, overcome the toxic polarization harming your health, your relationships, and our country’s ability to thrive, starting with one short exercise a day.

❤️ Breaking the Cycle of Resentment: Adding love to school curriculum in three conflict-ridden countries leads to less anger and depression. (John Templeton Foundation)

Craving more?

📘 Alice in Futureland books
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