The Dark Side of Information Proliferation
The Dark Side of Information Proliferation
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DOI：
10.1177/1745691618803647
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发表时间：
2019-05-01
影响因子：
12.6
通讯作者：
Hills, Thomas T.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Hills, Thomas T.
众所周知，我们处理信息的能力受到心理上的限制。随着信息激增--信息的消费和共享--通过社交媒体和其他通信技术增加，这些限制造成了注意力瓶颈，有利于更有可能被搜索、关注、理解、编码和随后重现的信息。在信息丰富的环境中，这一瓶颈通过认知选择的四种力量影响信息的演变，即选择信念一致的、消极的、社会的和可预测的信息。对信念一致的信息的选择会导致平衡的信息支持日益两极分化的观点。选择负面信息会放大有关下行风险的信息，并挤出潜在的好处。对社会信息的选择推动了羊群效应，损害了客观评估，并减少了对难题解决方案的探索。对预测模式的选择会导致过度拟合、复制危机和寻求风险。本文总结了这些认知选择力量的负面影响，并提出了八个警告，它们代表了天真的“信息食肉”、加速的极端主义、歇斯底里、羊群和错误信息的扩散的严重陷阱。
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 article summarizes the negative implications of these forces of cognitive selection and presents eight warnings that represent severe pitfalls for the naive "informavore," accelerating extremism, hysteria, herding, and the proliferation of misinformation.