![]() ![]() Discuss what you’ve learned with friends and acquaintances, both to help it sink in and to hear alternative viewpoints. Talk yourself through why it matters to you. Ask yourself questions about what you read. ![]() Instead, identify a few reputable sources from a variety of perspectives and stick to those.įormulating a plan for information consumption stimulates executive function. If you just enter the fray of endless news without formulating your approach first, you are bound to get inundated by information that isn’t helping you. The study about hyper news consumers found that they were outperformed in political knowledge by those who stuck to a few reliable sources, instead of trying to follow every last blog post and Twitter thread. ![]() So how can information overload be combatted?įirst of all, people need to approach the news more intentionally. While the research on this is muddled, psychologists and economists “are concluding that an overload of options may actually paralyze people or push them into decisions that are against their own best interest,” according to a piece in The New York Times. Researchers note this is subtly different from “information overload.” So-called “choice overload” is a phenomena where people have difficulty making a decision if presented with numerous options. This simplistic response - “there are too many news channels, I’ll just stick with the one I’ve always watched” - can keep news consumers isolated from competing points of view. Too many media choices can also cause people to narrow their media consumption to only a few outlets, because they simply can’t decide which ones to watch. It seems that, as Ezra Klein put it in Vox, “At least some of what we learn as we become more politically informed is how to mask our partisanship by spouting things that sound that like facts, but often aren't.”Īt its worst, information overload may exacerbate polarization and allow conspiracy theories to flourish, as we’ve seen happen during the pandemic and in the aftermath of the 2020 presidential election. For example, one study of biases against members of the opposing political party found that “those who report following the news most closely also hold the most prototype-biased beliefs about party composition.” In other words, “well-informed” Democrats were more likely to hold skewed views about Republicans, such as that many of them make over $250,000 a year, whereas “well-informed” Republicans were prone to badly overestimate the numbers of Democrats who were atheists. Similarly, overconsumption of information may distort people’s perceptions, especially in an information environment that emphasizes inflammatory stories that drive engagement. The study’s authors attribute this to information overload. A comprehensive study of news consumers in Europe found that “hyper news consumers,” who consume information from whatever sources they can get their hands on, were less politically knowledgeable than those who consumed information in moderation. Paradoxically, information overload can lead to a less-informed population. ![]() The consequences in social terms can be significant as well. ![]()
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