Psychological influence – This is your brain on social media

Social media makes it seem as though you’re seeing the world around you, hearing a balanced set of opinions, experiencing discourse.

But, of course, you aren’t.

Social media allows us to create a strange space for ourselves. We gather our friends and other like-minded people on there. We gather feeds for the news outlets and, therefore, the opinions we support.

Social media is an echo chamber.

Therefore Confirmation Bias is the strongest psychological effect on social media. We only see or hear from sources that reinforce our existing opinions. In reality, you’re seeing the world through a set of self-imposed filters – ones that only tell you what you want to hear.

Now, this has always been true of media to some extent – and to the circle of friends we build around ourselves. But social media can make those choices – those filters – invisible, because we forget how and what we chose.

Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms one’s preexisting beliefs or hypotheses.”

It’s one of the psychological biases that sit in our blind spot. After all, we don’t see what we don’t know to look for.

What aren’t you seeing on your social media?