Under the Influence
You are not unbiased
A couple of weeks ago, Axios published a piece summarizing research done by the Annenberg Public Policy Center on the influence of an individual’s preferred news media diet and the level of trust they have for public health officials. The conclusion of the research was that the gap between those who trust groups like the FDA and Dr. Fauci and those who distrust them was widening based entirely on where people tended to get their news. The research was focusing mainly on vaccine hesitancy and misinformation, but it was not hard to miss the correlation on the other side too. The overarching conclusion was that one’s news media consumption had a direct impact on whether or not they trust health officials when it comes to the COVID-19 vaccine.
But there is a bigger lesson to learn from this: not a single one of us is free from outside influence.
This same topic is a recurring theme in the latest episode of Armchair Expert with Dax Shepard. We all think we approach the world as a clean slate when in reality we are an amalgamation of everything around us. Every life experience. Every song we have heard. Every movie we have watched. Book we have read. Teacher we have learned from. Friends. Family. Religion. Whether we live in the city, the suburbs, or the country. All of that has worked together to make us into the people we are today.
When ancient traditions speak of their God being the potter and the individual being the clay, this is what they are talking about. People are moldable. Humanity has known this for as long as we have been here. We are essentially created by everything around us.
As I sit here typing, I realize that I am literally saying the same thing over and over again. I am even searching Google for other ways to say it. The idea here is important though for helping us understand each other better.
This pliableness of the human mind is played out in various ways. One of the most obvious is our desire to be a part of a group. All of us, whether online or in person, seek out other people who think like us or express ideas like ours. But something else we do, when we see a group that we wish to be a part of, is we take actions, consciously and subconsciously, to make ourselves fit in with them.
We may watch the videos they watch, read the books and articles they read, and begin to use their group terminology. And in the process, for better or worse, we may find ourselves becoming one of them. But now that we are a part of the group, there are certain expectations that must be met, otherwise we risk being pushed out.
In the Armchair Expert interview mentioned above, an example Maya Shankar and Dax Shepard use is the maskers vs anti-maskers. It is very likely that many of the anti-mask crowd really do not have a huge problem with masking personally. But they have to express certain ideas about it because otherwise they will be ostracized by the group they are a part of.
This is the kind of group-think that we see in our Facebook feeds. Nuance goes out the window when certain topics come up, especially when multiple people of the opposing viewpoint show up together.
This is the big problem with the idea of people “doing their own research”, which is becoming a common way for people to say that they have an opposing viewpoint. What they define as “research” is simply reading some articles and watching some videos from an alternative viewpoint. Then they come back and repeat verbatim talking points that someone else has devised as rebuttals. The more of this someone does, the more they come to trust their alternative sources and the less they come to trust the mainstream ones.
When I was just out of college, I began to question some of the policies and ideas that were being put forward by the Obama administration. What is interesting about this fact, though, is that it was not that I had my own questions about them. Rather, an acquaintance shared an article on the infowars website with me, and the questioning statements in the article made perfect sense to me. So I started questioning and watching videos and went down what I eventually, luckily, saw as a dangerous rabbit hole. During this time, I started seeking out Facebook groups and other people who believed the conspiracies and began using their language. Once my own walls built against those things had come down, it became easy to be influenced and blown about wherever they wanted the thoughts to take me.
This same concept is true for all of us. I have watched as once level-headed friends have gone off on tangents, embracing ideas that they likely at one time would have thought were crazy. At the same time, I have seen their friend groups change, as they removed those who believed differently or have become more involved with those who think and speak the same way, to the neglect of the others. And this happens both consciously and subconsciously. Some of these changes happen without us even noticing.
When I was spiraling down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theories, I was unaware of the impact it was having. It eventually got to a point where I was just accepting ideas presented to me by alternative media sources just because they were not mainstream sources. I also felt like I was privy to some kind of secret knowledge that everyone else was missing out on because they watched CNN and I did not. (All told, I think it was realizing that I was blindly accepting whatever the alternative media said that acted as a kind of wake-up call. The fact is this: Just because a media outlet is an alternative, that does not mean that it is automatically more trustworthy in the same way that just because an outlet is mainstream, it does not automatically become less trustworthy. And vice versa.)
For better or worse, this is the human experience. Every single one of us can relate to this. We have all been influenced, and are continuously influenced, by the people we surround ourselves with and the ideas we immerse ourselves in. Some of those ideas are going to be good and some of those ideas are going to be bad. Some of those people are going to be good for us and some of those relationships are going to prove unhealthy.
We will discuss the implications of acknowledging this about ourselves next time.
