Abstract
I approach the study of echo chambers from the perspective of veritistic social epistemology. A trichotomous belief model is developed featuring a mechanism by which agents will have a tendency to form agreement in the community. The model is implemented as an agent-based model in NetLogo and then used to investigate a social practice called Impartiality, which is a plausible means for resisting or dismantling echo chambers. The implementation exposes additional factors that need close consideration in an evaluation of Impartiality. In particular, resisting or dismantling echo chambers requires the selection of sufficiently low levels of doxastic entrenchment, but this comes with other tradeoffs.
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Notes
One might object that evaluating a practice by whether it tends to promote or impede truth requires the veritistic theorist to already know (or presuppose) what the truth is. This is not so. Most practices are truth invariant (Olsson 2011). To find out if it will snow in Tahoe tomorrow, John might ask his meteorologist friend Paul. Paul’s reliability, though, does not depend on whether it will in fact snow, since the probability that Paul will say ‘yes’ given that it will equals the probability of his saying ‘no’ given that it won’t. The practice of John asking Paul questions about the weather in Tahoe, then, is good epistemic practice, even if Paul sometimes gets it wrong.
There are other approaches that eschew the use of truth for social epistemology, which might better be called ‘social doxology’. See, for example, Shapin (1994). I do not take up a comparison between veritistic social epistmology and the alternatives, but rather refer the reader to the first part of Goldman (1999), in which these alternative approaches are criticized.
This means that information will travel through a group by pairwise interactions. Social-psychological studies of group polarization can allow for interactions to involve multiple subjects interacting simultaneously. It remains to be seen what significant effects such complications have, if any.
Obviously, people don’t share all of their opinions every time they actually exchange information with someone else. However, I later narrow the focus so that there is only one proposition (or question) of interest, so this simplification is reasonable given the purposes at hand and the means by which they can be investigated at this point.
See Kahneman (2011) for a discussion of this bias, particularly Chapter 10.
Suppose we did not abstract away ‘skeptics’ and we add them to the model by letting \(w\) get entrenched as well. The results that will be relevant to the discussion will still be the same, except that rather then having a possible polarization between two opposing attitudes, there can be three. And that seems like a reasonable possibility; why should skeptics not be able to form their own echo chamber?
Not all ties will be resolved however, e.g., when the levels of entrenchment are equal.
Another way to remain ‘open minded’ is to avoid becoming too entrenched. This strategy is discussed later.
More specifically, they move in a random continuous direction, rather than, e.g., a random cardinal direction. Different kinds of movement strategies can be important for modeling certain phenomena (Smaldino and Schank 2012), but are not believed not to make a significant difference here.
Both D-measure and O-measure have a version where they do not discount the maybe so attitude, but it is uninformative for the purposes at hand.
Simulations were also done across three different environment sizes, which do not appear to qualitatively affect the results.
See Burnstein and Vinokur (1977), Hinsz et al. (1997) for some experimental work that corroborates the claim that people change their minds in response to arguments raised in discussion (without knowing what other people’s positions are). See Myers (1978) for an example of work that shows people change their attitudes by merely comparing theirs to others. A host of other factors have also been documented, including writing down one’s own opinion (Liu 1998), or even just thinking about an issue for a few minutes (Tesser et al. 1995).
If the designated agents are taken to be ‘experts’, then this is not possible in the model presented here. Any agent that is not fully entrenched will move their entrenchment level in the direction of a designated when interacting with them.
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Thanks to Carlo Proietti and Frank Zenker for organizing the 4th Copenhagen-Lund Workshop on Social Epistemology and to the participants that gave invaluable feedback on this work, especially Patrick Blackburn and Erik Olsson. Much of this work was inspired and informed by the agent-based modeling group at University of California, Davis. I am particularly indebted to Jeff Schank, whose patient technical help made possible the prototype implementation. I also thank Alvin Goldman, Bernard Molyneux, Roberta Millstein, Paul Smaldino, and Paul Teller for comments on drafts.
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Baumgaertner, B. Yes, no, maybe so: a veritistic approach to echo chambers using a trichotomous belief model. Synthese 191, 2549–2569 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0439-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-014-0439-9