Tribal Brain: Cognitive Bias and the Curious Case of Content Curation

Source: Shutterstock/Diego Schtutman

Human perception is a remarkable mechanism. Meaningless information enters our five senses and is transformed via transduction. Our sensations are disassembled, using bottom-up and top-down processing, and reconstructed into a functional external world model.

While we believe our brains accurately perceive objective reality, evidence¹ from neuroscience indicates this understanding is misguided. Rather than perceiving an unbiased representation of the outside world, our brains filter information based on our past experiences. In other words, our brains construct our perceptions which can lead us astray—consider the relationship between distance and size. Because of this cognitive imprecision, all human perception is biased.

Why Is Perception So Faulty?

Evolutionarily, it was important for humans to conform to tribal beliefs and behavior for safety. Physical threats abounded. While perception is inexact, our perceptual filters lead to decision-making based on what we have previously encountered—a sound strategy in the chaotic world of our ancestors.

Human perception evolved to reduce uncertainty and increase predictability. To maintain this certainty, our perceptual filters push us to conform. This facet of perception also drives us to discomfort—usually in the form of anxiety— when we step outside the normative behavioral manifestations of our tribe. Being an iconoclast and disproving the thoughts of your tribal leaders was undoubtedly a bad idea.

Modern humans no longer traverse the world frightened of predators, so is this evolutionary artifact of our past cognitive development less advantageous? While the cognitive imprecision may be beneficial from an emotional vantage point, for most of us, the physical danger of leaving the herd has been minimized significantly.

Decision-Making and Our Biased Brains

In the 1970s, as psychologists aligned the human brain's functionality to computer models, Tversky and Kahneman began investigating how people make decisions. Humans have limited time, information, and cognitive capacity. Because of this, the researchers determined we often rely on simplistic strategies or shortcuts to make decisions. As they were named, these heuristics led us to navigate the world more readily. However, their utilization also often leads to errors in decision-making via biases in our cognition.

Seek, and Ye Shall Find

Tversky and Kahneman's research triggered psychologists to uncover many cognitive biases over the past several decades. One bias plays a prominent role in our modern struggle to adapt to the world of social media and biased conventional news media. Confirmation bias is the inclination to seek information that supports our presumptions, typically by interpreting evidence to confirm existing beliefs while rejecting or ignoring any incompatible data. The tendency toward conformity combined with our propensity to verify our beliefs affects human behavior in a digitally connected world driven by social media and one-sided news media.

Content Curation

Never before have we been as in control of the information we consume. Social media and biased news sources, in general, have given us the ability to curate our reality. Between algorithmic content curation by big tech and our innocent clicks or channel changing to block out opposing voices, we can now construct a highly biased reality that does not challenge our belief system.

Is Our Content Curation Problematic?

Anyone living in the current political atmosphere has recognized that our political tribes appear to be moving toward the extremes. This phenomenon is likely fueled by our propensity toward conformity and confirmation bias combined with our modern technological capabilities.

"We find comfort among those who agree with us—growth among those who don't." – Frank A. Clark

Many of us intuitively recognize Clark's words as insightful. Despite this recognition, we struggle to translate their meaning into daily life as we scroll through media feeds. It is uncomfortable to allow our firmly held beliefs to be challenged, while it is comforting to encapsulate our existence into filter bubbles—in which we purposefully shield ourselves from differing views. This filtering likely leads to extreme political ideologies and disgust toward people in political "outgroups."

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What Can We Do?

While we can't fully unbias our brains due to our perceptual wiring, we can become aware of the tendency toward conformity and confirmation bias. Before you block someone on Twitter or Facebook, stop and ask why you are doing it. If you find yourself answering that you disagree with the person's views, consider whether you could use those alternative ideas as a potential opportunity for growth. It is essential to consider that physical threat is not equivalent to cognitive discomfort—and that experiencing the latter may lead to recalibrating your thoughts and perceiving new possibilities.

While our evolutionary movement toward conformity and confirmation may have kept us safe from saber tooth tigers or threatening tribes, as we progress deeper into the inter-connected twenty-first century, our tribal wiring may be disadvantageous as it combines with our preference for social media and one-sided news sources.

So, before you block, unfollow, or unfriend, consider the type of society within which you would like to live.