We hear a lot these days about
the world becoming polarized. It is either good or bad; right or wrong; all or
none. So many national and global events today draw sharp reactions from either
side of the spectrum. But whichever side of the spectrum you align or identify
with, more and more people have sharp opinions and extreme reactions. We hear
this often from so many quarters – the world has become divided; politics is
becoming polarized, and opinions have become extreme. but what does it mean
exactly?
Take the recent example of China.
We have people on two sides obviously; but most Indians believe that China is
an evil, authoritarian regime that is hell-bent on destroying their competitors
(read India) and hell bent on world domination. If you purchase and use
Chinese-made products, you are branded a traitor. If you refuse to use them,
you are branded a hyper-nationalist. Another polarizing topic is Narendra Modi.
You can either love him or hate him. People fall into these two distinct
categories. Either he can do no wrong or he can do nothing right. Either he is
saving the country and the world from apocalyptic melt-down or he is taking the
country down the path of a genocide and/or economic ruin. The most recent
polarizing topic is of course the Israel-Hamas conflict. You see opinions
expressed strongly on both sides of the dispute – you are either an antisemite
or an Islamophobe. There is no middle way!
That is a most
curious phenomenon. The question that comes foremost to my mind is – has public
opinion always been this sharply divided? Has the discourse always been about
two extremes? Perhaps we feel this way because this is the only “age” we have
lived in. Statistics suggest otherwise. A 2022 study by Anindita Borah and SR
Singh [1] on political polarization in India through social media
network analysis and mining concluded that there was a significant amount of
polarization (non-overlapping social media interactions) for retweets in
general and controversial topics in particular. A 2023 study by the Association
for Democratic Reforms found that 72% of Indians believe that the country is
more politically polarized now than it was 10 years ago. A 2016 study by the
American National Election Studies [2] found that Americans have
become increasingly hostile towards the opposing political party. The study
found that the share of Democrats who view Republicans as "very
unfavorable" increased from 35% in 1992 to 89% in 2016. The share of
Republicans who view Democrats as "very unfavorable" increased from
38% in 1992 to 85% in 2016. Prima facie, these are significant changes. To
conclude, statistics from studies around the globe indicate two things - first;
opinions are more polarized today than before and second; this trend is
increasing.
Being a numbers guy, the second
question that comes to my mind is whether this polarization has any correlation
with income, education, age etc.? Extent of political polarization being the
dependent variable, it would be worthwhile to check the independent variables
that have the highest correlation in terms of impact. Are richer people less
likely to have polarized opinions? Do highly educated people tend to avoid
political extremes? Does political extremism taper off or increase with age?
All truly relevant questions which should have some independent studies done
for further investigation. But while this can be done by more capable people
than me (read TISS or any other educational institution interested in this
topic), armchair thinkers like me can sit back and contemplate more anecdotal
incidents. A recent conversation with an acquaintance brought home this point
in stark and brutal fashion to me. This conversation was with a young person
(just under 30) about the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict. It lasted around 30
minutes and it almost seemed to me that we were talking different languages.
The disconnect was so obvious as to be comical. While my whole fascination with
this topic was of a geopolitical nature and I kept trying to draw the
discussion towards facets like the Sykes-Picot agreement, the Balfour
declaration, the impact of the ‘Law of Return’; this acquaintance of mine kept
brushing these topics aside and kept talking of the “ongoing humanitarian
crisis” and how one side was the oppressor and the other was the victim. The
conviction was absolute despite knowing that the best minds in the world agree
that this is a complicated issue. At one point, I had to politely stop the
conversation. This (and more such incidents) brought home to me the stark realization
that political polarization might be increasing, and that income and education
do not seem to have a correlation to it. This of course led me down the rabbit
hole of whither did this come from?
One factor that we hear about is
social media. It is cited often (and ironically enough, quite vehemently) that
a glut of information and echo chambers created by social media algorithms have
led to this rise in polarization. But to be honest, I
feel that this simplistic solution is like missing the forest for the
trees. Could very well be that echo chambers are created by polarized opinions
rather than the other way around. I feel we need to
go deeper. While social media might or might not be the root cause, there are
two particularly important considerations that I would like to lay down –
Firstly, reduced attention spans and secondly, the need/gravitation towards
instant gratification.
Let us first talk about attention
spans. Herbert A Simon, An American economist, political scientist, and
computer scientist uncannily prophesized this in a 1971 paper titled “Designing
Organizations for an Information-Rich World.” [3]
In an
information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something
else: a scarcity of whatever it is that information consumes. What information
consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence
a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention.
Gloria Mark, a psychologist and
currently the Chancellor's professor in the Department of Informatics at
University of California, Irvine, lays out the data in her new book -
“Attention Span: A Groundbreaking Way to Restore Balance, Happiness and Productivity.”
[4] In the early 2000s, she and her team tracked people while they
used an electronic device and noted each time their focus shifted to something
new—every 2.5 minutes, on average. In recent repeats of that experiment, she
says, the average has gone down to about 47 seconds. Another study by Microsoft
Corp [5] published as a consumer insights report highlights that
attention spans (defined here as the amount of time consumers spend on one
screen before moving on to another app/screen) has dwindled from 12 seconds in
2000 to 8 seconds in 2015. To put this finding in perspective, Microsoft
themselves have compared it to the average attention span of a goldfish, which
is about 9 seconds. This means that by 2015, on average, humans (at least
Canadians as per this study) had a lesser attention span than goldfish. The
study goes on of course to discuss the implications of this for marketers but
we need not get into that. The point is attention spans have reduced markedly
in the last two decades. Even citing high-level data, that hypothesis seems to
be true. There has been a 66% increase in viewership for the “Shorts” format
from 2022 to 2023. The average length of a typical music video [6] has
decreased from 259 seconds (about 4 and a half minutes) in the 90s to 197
seconds (about 3 and a half minutes) today. The average length of a typical
newspaper article [7] has decreased from 1222 words in 2000 to 589
words in 2022. A 2023 report by the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) [8]
found that the average length of a digital video advertisement had gone down
from 30 seconds in 2000 to about 15 seconds in 2022.
In an interview with Time
magazine, Adam Brown, co-director of the Center for Attention, Learning, and
Memory at St. Bonaventure University in New York cited technology (read phone
usage) as a key factor in reduced attention spans. [9] To quote him
verbatim -
Human brains
want novelty, excitement, and social connection, and devices play into those
desires. Checking a notification flashing across your screen can provide a
small hit of dopamine, creating a sense of reward that keeps you coming back
for more. When you give in to temptation by pausing a task to check your phone,
your brain also has to shift gears to stop what it was previously doing and
move to a new task, Brown says. This process negatively affects the overall
speed and quality of your work in the short term, research suggests, and in the
long term, “the more you engage in task switching, the more your brain wants to
wander and look for that new thing,” Brown says. In other words, your brain
gets used to constant diversions and engages in them out of habit—hence why you
might find yourself mindlessly checking your phone even as you watch your
favorite television show.
This “malevolent” design is
everywhere. To understand how instant gratification has become inextricably
linked to our shortened attention span we need to understand the reward
mechanism in our brain. The first analogy to draw on is the spike in blood sugar
levels after eating carbohydrates. Refined carbohydrates cause a much steeper
spike in blood sugar levels than whole/complex carbohydrates. This is because
the fiber in whole/complex carbohydrates need more work to be digested. This
happens more slowly and therefore supplies a slower release of glucose into the
bloodstream. Unfortunately, refined carbs can be highly addictive. Carbs
release glucose into the bloodstream and a burst of dopamine in the brain, and
this can act like a drug for some people. There is a reason these foods are
called comfort foods. The essential molecular structure of the carbohydrate is
similar in refined as well as the complex variants. However, the addition of
fiber causes us to do more work to digest it and hence delays the gratification.
Another example is the ubiquitous slot machine. When one pictures gambling, one
often thinks of poker tables, and people in dinner jackets calculating the odds
of various combinations in their mind. This notion of traditional gambling was
made very popular by actors such as Daniel Craig in Casino Royale. However,
slot machines are far more popular. They contribute over 70% of any casino’s
revenue. The slot machine hacks into a very primal reward mechanism of the
brain remarkably like Pavlov's dogs. We "salivate” at the sight of those
reels lining up and that familiar sound which is a precursor to a reward. We
continue to press that button, mindlessly tuned in to the short, quick bursts
of dopamine or the painful thrill of disappointment laced with hope for the
next turn of the reel. Delayed gratification is mostly not addictive. Instant
gratification is. It is that simple. This design is embedded by large
corporations into everything they try to sell us – from chips with the perfect
blend of salt and fat to cola drinks with the perfect blend of sugar and
caffeine to tobacco companies with the perfect blend of nicotine and tar to
shopping apps with the perfect blend of deals and customized recommendations to
social media and smartphones! The last two are a veritable smorgasbord of
addictive choices with instant gratification. Smartphones reel us in with the
very design of their UI and the way user experience is built. Notifications
keep us hooked. That small red number indicating the number of unread messages,
the buzz or ping or beep of the notification sound . . it's a science that is
being perfected at alarming rates.
Having plumbed many examples of
how instant gratification can get addictive, let us dive a little deeper. What
is it that makes instant gratification addictive? Think of the baseline
dopamine levels in our brain as an “elastic” string tied across two poles. It
is a crude but effective metaphor often used by Andrew Huberman (A Stanford
researcher and neuroscientist with a special focus on ophthalmology) on his
podcast. From sugar to shopping to sex, any addictive substance has two
(amongst others) important characteristics – firstly, the time lag between an
activity and the associated burst of dopamine (rate of onset); and secondly,
the introduction of a spike in the level of dopamine in the brain. This spike
must be significantly higher than baseline. The higher the rate of onset, the
more addictive a substance. The higher the spike, the more it's addictive
potential. This elastic that I mentioned earlier is impacted by these two
factors – the flood of dopamine and its rate of onset. But in a short time after
the flood, the dopamine levels in our brain drop back down. The higher and
steeper the surge, the more they drop. The more they drop, the more the craving
for the same experience again. The more the craving, the more reinforcement for
addictive behaviors. It is a vicious cycle. Spike, drop, crave, repeat. Over
time with repeated abuse of this reward mechanism, the baseline dopamine level
drops too. The elastic loses strength, and it sags down. This leads to a host
of other problems such as depression, which is a topic unto itself.
Smartphone manufacturers and
social media companies have tapped into these characteristics of the human
brain just like all other large corporations have done. Some of the key
addictive features [10] of smartphones in general and social media
in particular are infinite scrolling, instant push notifications, pending
notification count, personalized recommendations, constant profile
customization and instant messaging. Small things like a slight delay when
refreshing the feed are by design! They increase the anticipation of a
refreshed feed.
Which brings us to the impact.
Over the last 10 years, daily average screen time [11] has increased
by a whopping 23%! A large chunk of that is because of smartphones which has
registered an increase of 43% in the same period! As of 2022, we spend around 7
hours in front of a screen every day and around 4 of these in front of a
smartphone. But because of the addictive nature of its usage, we are not
focusing on anything for too long. These 7 hours in front of a screen are spent
scrolling/browsing/flitting from one screen/app to another. As per research
done by Gloria Mark (cited above), the average time we spend on a screen is 47
seconds (8 seconds if you believe Microsoft). Even at the higher end of the
spectrum, 47 seconds is just not enough to form a nuanced opinion. At this
point we will have to delve a bit deeper again [12] into
neurobiology and how humans make decisions/form opinions. While it is an
oversimplified theory, the Triune model of the brain’s evolution suggest that
the limbic system is more involved in decisions and actions involving emotion
and the neocortex is involved in higher-order decisions, analytical thinking,
and rational decision flows. While decision-making is an extremely complicated
process from a neurological standpoint and the triune model is considered an
over-simplified framework, it does provide a frame of reference or a point of
ingress for us to understand the very crude basics. It is safe to say however,
that the limbic system is highly involved in lower order emotional processing
of input from sensory systems. On the other hand, the neocortex is understood
to be involved in higher-order brain functions such as sensory perception,
cognition, spatial reasoning, language, and analytical decision-making. The
effect of social media on how we think has been well analyzed. A 2023 paper by
Sergey Yu Tereschenko titled "Neurobiological risk factors for problematic
social media use as a specific form of Internet addiction: A narrative review.”
[13] found that internet addiction can lead to several changes in
the structure of the brain. To quote -
"To
date, a large number of studies have been devoted to the pathogenesis of
Internet addiction using various neuroimaging techniques, including magnetic
resonance imaging, positron and single photon emission computed emission
tomography. These techniques have revealed a number of structural brain changes
associated with Internet addiction: Decreased grey matter density in several
areas, including prefrontal and orbitofrontal cortical layers and an additional
motor area; abnormal functional activity of brain regions associated with
reward dependence; activation of sensorimotor synchrony with a concomitant
decrease in audiovisual synchrony; activation of brain regions associated with
compulsive craving and impulsivity; increased glucose metabolism in brain regions
associated with impulsivity, reward dependence and the urge to repeat
sensations; increased dopamine secretion with a concomitant decrease in
dopamine receptor availability in the striatum.
To sum up, social media addiction
leads to two especially important effects – it increases our stress, and it
increases our impulsivity. This leads to impaired decision-making (amongst
other things). As we saw earlier, the neocortex is involved in higher-order
processing of information. However, if the brain is hijacked and does not get
enough time to involve the neocortex due to a greatly
reduced attention span and a highly active need for instant gratification,
the result is not surprising – polarized opinions, extreme reactions, and
simplistic solutions. We use the limited time our attention is focused on a
particular screen to react emotionally and instinctively to the content. In our
hard-coded need to make sense of what we are seeing, we jump to conclusions,
search for the simplest solution without analysis and form opinions based on
emotion rather than logic/rationality. In essence, we
are losing our ability for deep, focused, and nuanced thought. That is truly a
scary thought. An even scarier consideration is that the brain is a veritable
"learning machine” up to around 25 years of age. Neural pathways are being
formed and it is extremely easy to pick up skills and reinforce them. After
this age, it is generally considered that neuroplasticity goes down and it
takes a lot more effort to "rewire” the brain (pick up new skills or
change mindset). Young adults who have grown up with an internet addiction and
have never picked up the skill for focused, deep, neocortex-worthy thinking
will have an especially tough time dealing with complex topics. If this trend
continues, we can expect future generations to be even more polarized in
thought and even more easy to influence through nefarious techniques of social
media manipulation. A whole generation of brain-washed consumers of information
ready to amplify whatever is being fed to them and spread it even faster to
other brain-washed consumers of information.
So what is the solution? As
someone who has quit a debilitating alcohol and nicotine addiction and has
stayed clean for the last decade or so, I can vouch that the path is not easy. To
top that off, this is not an individual that we are talking about. We are
trying to solve for the addiction of an entire population. We are also fighting
the systemic disinclination of the entire establishment (from Big Tech to
governments) to do something about this problem; mainly because it serves their
needs. A population of these aforementioned brain-washed consumers of
information are easy to influence. They’re easy to manipulate and easy to bring
to a boil. In this moment of despair, I am reminded of Rabindranath Tagore’s
timeless poem which can easily serve as a call-to-action for us and a fitting
conclusion to this journey through the rabbit hole.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high
Where knowledge is free
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments
By narrow domestic walls
Where words come out from the depth of truth
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
Into the dreary desert sand of dead habit
Where the mind is led forward by thee
Into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
References
- https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s13278-022-00939-z
- https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2016/06/22/partisanship-and-political-animosity-in-2016/
- https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780191843730.001.0001/q-oro-ed5-00019845
- https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/60795084
- https://dl.motamem.org/microsoft-attention-spans-research-report.pdf
- https://www.statista.com/chart/26546/mean-song-duration-of-currently-streamable-songs-by-year-of-release/
- https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2023/10/10/new-york-times-story-length/
- https://www.iab.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/IAB_PwC_Internet_Advertising_Revenue_Report_2022.pdf
- https://time.com/6302294/why-you-cant-focus-anymore-and-what-to-do-about-it/
- https://medium.com/swlh/the-secret-design-tools-which-social-media-apps-are-using-to-create-addiction-e6a502ccb79f#:~:text=The%20psychology%20behind%20all%20this,see%20if%20you've%20won
- https://explodingtopics.com/blog/screen-time-stats
- https://seattleanxiety.com/psychiatrist/2022/7/22/anxiety-social-media-use-amp-maintaining-mental-health#end1
- https://www.researchgate.net/publication/370906115_Neurobiological_risk_factors_for_problematic_social_media_use_as_a_specific_form_of_Internet_addiction_A_narrative_review