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How technology and psychology can alter your decisions

A democratic system comes with a privilege of giving people the ability to elect their leaders but with that privilege comes certain biases that can significantly alter your decisions and mend your perceptions. How we make decisions is a complex architecture but to make decisions there are two major variables involved, one is what information we consume and second is how we process that information.

How technology manipulates what information we consume :

Gone are the days where newspapers, radio and TVs were the only source of information of what’s happening around the world. A major population consumes information or news through social media which raises two substantial issues,

1. Content/Feed personalization : Facebook, Twitter, News, etc. are the breeding grounds of personalized information. You see content based on people you follow, the posts you engage with, communities you’re a part of and the interests you share. Due to this these platforms show you the most relevant content to you which means if you scroll kitten photos on Instagram, you’ll be recommended the kitten photos on Instagram and most probably you’ll spend time scrolling those recommended feed. So if you follow a certain political party, chances are you’ll be engaged more with the preferred political party’s supporters and won’t see the other side of people genuinely criticising the party. Without realising it, you’re likely to develop tunnel vision when the personalization is based on your last click and like behaviour. So in a nutshell you’re shown what you want to see, not the reality.
2. Fake News : You open your News feed, you see a post saying, ‘Man admitted to hospital after eating burger from ****** outlet’. What will be your reaction? You’ll develop a negative bias towards that outlet mentioned, if you already didn’t like that outlet then this post will make you hate that outlet even more, you’ll tell others not to visit that outlet, you’ll start judging the hygiene of that outlet, etc. But wait, did you try to verify whether that news was even true!? Chances are you didn’t. Why you didn’t because it takes time and effort to validate the news and who has so much time in this busy life to validate such news. Well that’s what’s happening too even in politics. Fake news, fake stories, fake statements, false accusations, just to name a few. Now this develops your opinion towards a certain political party positively or negatively depending upon the news you consumed.

Together these two problems develops a totally different perspective for the consumer, hiding facts and other relevant information. And if technology hadn’t yet made the things worse yet, let’s take a look at how psychology can.

How psychology affects how we process the consumed information :

It’s true that all the world exists in your head, the meaning to what you consume through the surroundings happens in your brain. With that comes some associated biases in this cognition,

1. Confirmation Bias : The confirmation bias is a cognitive bias that causes people to search for, favour, interpret, and recall information in a way that confirms their preexisting beliefs. So no matter what you’re presented with when you want to see something what you want to you’ll do that only and be blind to the contradicting facts and evidences. This can make you favour a political party subsiding their failures or loopholes. And moreover you’ll defend those beliefs resulting in pointless debates and accusations.
2. Social Proof : Social Proof, sometimes termed as herd instinct, dictates that individuals feel they are behaving correctly when they act the same as other people. I other words, the more people who follow a certain idea, the better (truer) we deem the idea to be. So if your friends or family or certain people seem to follow a political party, chances are you’ll be inclined to follow that party too.
3. Availability Bias : Availability bias says that we create a picture of the world using the examples that most easily come to the mind. we attach too much likelihood to spectacular, flashy or loud outcomes. Anything silent or invisible we downgrade in our minds. So a political party can take advantage of campaigning on some flashy or loud or even loud recent happenings and divert the attention towards that and hide more relevant and important details significant to the responsibilities of the government.
4. Liking Bias : Liking Bias states that the more we like someone, the more inclined we’re to buy their ideas and support them. So if people like some political leaders personally, they’re likely to support them because they like them not because of how well they handled the responsibilities.
5. Framing : It’s not what you say but how you say. Framing is a technique of communicating the information in different ways so that it can be perceived in different ways. So a political party can can easily frame a particular idea or intent by simply modifying the way they say it. So if you prefer food that is 99% fat free over the food that has 1% fat, you’ll definitely fall for this framing bias.
6. Association Bias : Let’s say you wore red socks today at work and you had a pretty bad day, then after work you think of what and why that happened, what different I did that lead to the bad day. Chances are you may think..maybe that’s because of my red socks and hence you reject the idea of wearing red socks. There may be no relationship between them but these false connections are the work of association bias, which also influences the quality of our decisions. So if you criticise or find some flaws in a political party, the people will try to find connection as to why you’re doing that and here comes the master stroke when the association as to why you’re criticising a party is because you’re anti-progress or anti-something or in the worst case… anti-national.

How to evade these biases and make wise decisions:

Well technology is neither bad or good it’s just a matter of how we use it and yeah we can have better guidelines and models for the content of these publishers and platforms but in the meantime we can avoid biases by searching for contradictory views, clicking other posts, listening to opposition and of course validate our feed information. Also don’t share something unless you have certain confidence for that content to be true else it’ll multiply false information beyond control.

About the biases associated with Psychology, simply being aware of those biases will enhance your decision making abilities and it’s a wise saying that we should challenge our beliefs and see what’s left of it.

Well, Democracy gives people power to elect and we should make wise use of that power because it’s the matter of our nation, it’s the people, it’s us together who’ll grow as one.