Thomas T Hills, Director, Bridges-Leverhulme Doctoral Training Centre in Mathematical and Social Sciences, University of Warwick, will be giving a talk on Wednesday, 4 December  (12:00-13:00, Seminar Room 00.008, ground floor, Missionsstrasse 64a) as part of the SWE colloquia.

The dark side of information proliferation

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 belief-consistent, 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 talk will summarize the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection representing severe pitfalls for the naive “informavore,” accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.