Every day there is some new conspiracy coming out of social media….from eating babies to flat earth to voter fraud to alien half breeds….it seems the least capable of critical thinking are the ones holding the day.
Why is this?
New research published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied suggests that people often overestimate their understanding of political facts. This tendency to be overconfident appears most common among individuals who actually know the least about politics and those who lean conservative. The findings provide evidence that psychological traits, like a desire for quick and definitive answers, help explain why some voters struggle to accurately judge their own political knowledge.
Erika K. Fulton, an associate professor of psychology at Idaho State University and head of the META Lab, led a team of scientists to investigate how well people gauge their own grasp of political information. The research team noticed a gap in the existing scientific literature regarding this specific type of self-evaluation. Most prior studies on political knowledge were conducted by political scientists, who often use different analytical methods than cognitive psychologists.
The scientists wanted to apply the strict measurement standards of cognitive psychology to political knowledge. As the researchers explained, “Metacognition is broadly defined as thinking about one’s own cognition. The type we studied is called metacognitive monitoring accuracy, or the degree to which judgments of what one knows matches what one actually knows.”
In simpler terms, this concept refers to a person’s ability to accurately recognize when they are right and when they are wrong. “People tend to be overconfident regarding what they think they know, and this has serious consequences in the political realm, such as when people vote on candidates and issues that they don’t understand as well as they think they do,” the researchers stated.
“We couldn’t find any political metacognition studies conducted by cognitive psychologists, specifically metacognition researchers, only by political scientists,” the researchers told PsyPost. “Experimental psychology has very specific measurement criteria that guide our study designs, and we wanted to employ those for a fuller, more nuanced understanding of political metacognition.”
Fascinating! Social media is driving this erroneous thinking.
The reason social media is so influential is a person’s attention span….
In 2004, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, found that the average attention span on any screen was about two and a half minutes, Houlihan explained in the clip. By 2012, it had shrunk to 75 seconds.
In the last 10 years or so, the average attention span has plummeted to an abysmal 47 seconds, with the median being roughly 40 seconds.
What better place to tap into the short attention span to influence people than social media.
There is the problem that needs repair…..but sadly in a world that demands instant gratification we will not find the repairs we need.
The turmoil we face today will be with us for a very long time no matter the damage it does to the people….
And that is the name of that tune…..
I Read, I Write, You Know
“lego ergo scribo”