Published by: Scientific American
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Key Take Aways
Understanding cognitive biases—such as trust in in-group sources, confirmation bias, and social conformity—is essential for recognising how social media and algorithms exploit these vulnerabilities.
Digital platforms amplify innate biases through personalised content curation, reinforcing echo chambers, polarisation, and misinformation.
Limited attention span among users leads to a winner-takes-all virality pattern, where most information remains unnoticed, and a few pieces dominate spread regardless of intrinsic quality.
Social media algorithms prioritise popularity over quality, often resulting in the dissemination of low-quality or false information.
Confirmation bias obstructs objective decision-making; individuals tend to seek, recall, and share information confirming pre-existing beliefs, impeding rationality.
The formation of echo chambers facilitates highly polarised communities that are...
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