User:Tetronian/essayspace

You can prove anything you want by coldly logical reason – if you pick the proper postulates. That’s where everything falls down. Postulates are based on assumption and adhered to by faith. Nothing in the Universe can shake them.

Dogma and denial are as old as human society itself - nothing, it seems, can restrain humanity's irrepressible urge to reject facts and twist the truth. Belief systems and the rationalizations surrounding them are dependent upon environmental and social factors, and crowd psychology is often an essential component of any belief. As a result, denialism, radicalism, and rationalization have metamorphosed as history has progressed, since they are inextricably dependent upon contact with other believers, which is dependent upon the methods of communication available. This informal essay examines denialism, groupthink, and rationalization in relation to the advancement brought about by the Information Age, namely the Internet and the mass media, and I shall prove how both of these have fundamentally altered the way we form and defend our beliefs.

Rationalization
What is rationalization? My dictionary defines it as "attempt to explain or justify one's own or another's behavior or attitude with logical, plausible reasons, even if these are not true or appropriate." The most important phrase in this definition is "even if these are not true or appropriate." By this definition (which we will use for the remainder of this essay), it is possible to rationalize any belief regardless of its veracity.

Denial
What is denial? My dictionary defines it as "failure to acknowledge an unacceptable truth or emotion or to admit it into consciousness, used as a defense mechanism."

Group identity and "group think"

 * Crowd psychology
 * groupthink

Case study: US politics
To better understand how strong the correlation between group identity between group identity and rationalization is, let us use United States politics as a case study. In the US, one's location is (on average) directly related to one's political views. Sociologists have found numerous trends linking lifestyle to political viewpoint. Though correlation does not equal causation, the number of ways that lifestyle is correlated to political viewpoint make the connection almost impossible to ignore.


 * Correlation of political slant and opinion of global warming

The troubling side
This clustering instinct may have serious consequences. Sociologists have suggested that the creation of homogenous communities is happening nationwide and may create enormous political and social polarization. This phenomenon, dubbed the "Big Sort," has apparently been happening for several decades, and some believe that we are seeing the results of this divide in Congress. In the long term, the effects may be even more dire, as loyalty to one's homogenous community, church, or political party might even supplant nationalism. As the sociologists Bill Bishop and Robert G. Cushing (two of the discoverers of the theory) put it:

The Founders believed that when people with diverging opinions hashed out their differences face-to-face, the country would be better off. The clashing of opinions would produce a better result. It was a brilliant insight. The Founders sought to make diversity a creative force. Differences didn't have to end in hate. They could be wielded to craft the best answer to problems. The Founders sought to turn the vice of disagreement into the virtue of new understanding. Now that simply doesn't happen — in Congress, in our legislatures, or between our increasingly isolated neighborhoods. We've replaced a belief in a nation with an oversized trust in ourselves and our carefully chosen surroundings.

Bishop has also been shown that the Big Sort affects elections. In the US Congress, the number of political moderates is decreasing while the number of ideologically radical politicians is steadily climbing.

Expanding connectivity
In general, increased the spread of information promotes rational thought and challenges established ideas. The printing press was essential to the Protestant Reformation, which opposed the Catholic Church's monopoly on religious truth. The radio and television allowed people to receive information instantaneously, increasing the rate of cultural exchange. Today, the scientific community depends upon interaction and communication and dialogue between scientists all around the world, none of which would be possible without the tools of the Information Age. Yet, in spite of the almost miraculous increases in communication and understanding brought about by technology, increased connectivity can also foster groupthink and allow people to rationalize their beliefs.

Access
The Internet also allows nearly unlimited access to books and other resources that would otherwise be more difficult to attain. For example, sites like Amazon allow people to peruse an almost limitless selection of literature. At a glance, it would seem as though this infinite variety would break down polarization by providing people with a wide range of reading material. However, like the Internet itself, the increased selection provided by Amazon, YouTube, and similar sites actually increases people's ability to cluster into groups. Amazon itself recognizes that people have "sorted," as it provides suggested results underneath purchase information for each book. These suggested results are both an indicator and a cause of what Bill Bishop calls "America's partisan reading list." Bishop has published highly convincing figures showing that liberals and conservatives purchase different groups of books on Amazon. In general, these results suggest that people of different political orientation deliberately seek to read books written by "their own side," and different parties have very little reading material in common with each other. A survey of YouTube videos reveals that the same phenomenon is also happening with political videos, at least in the US.

Online communities: a virtual "Big Sort"
Though the Internet allows people to interact and collaborate over long distances, it also enhances their ability to rationalize by forming communities based upon a particular lifestyle or dogma. Also, certain communities originally intended to promote understanding and learning, such as the wp:Wikipedia community, have fallen prey to the virtual equivalent of the Big Sort (discussed in more detail below).

Rationalization in action
To understand how online communities fall prey to groupthink and gradually become more extreme over time, let us look some examples of how groupthink can cause a community to slide to extremes.

Forums
 * Add some

Wikis
 * As discussed above, the Wikipedia community has come under criticism for having "all the outward characteristics of a cult" and for "erasing diversity, controversy, and inconsistency, and homogenizing contributors' voices."
 * The wiki encyclopedia Citizendium, which was founded by Wikipedia co-founder Larry Sanger, has also fallen prey to "the psychology of the tribe" over time.
 * The right-wing wiki-project Conservapedia has become a magnet for right-wing conspiracy theories and creationists, and it has severe symptoms of groupthink.

The last example on the list, Conservapedia, deserves further mention. This relatively well-known extremist blog has frequently pushed itself into the media spotlight with some increasingly bizarre projects. Conservapedia has existed since 2007, founded upon the ideal that Wikipedia has a liberal bias. But is Conservapedia really as bastion of groupthink and rationalization? To answer this question, we can look at the site in relation to Irving Janus's eight symptoms of groupthink:


 * 1. Illusions of invulnerability creating excessive optimism and encouraging risk taking.
 * Conservapedia (and specifically a handful of its editors) believe it is actually a significant project. Using phrases such as "this site is growing rapidly!" and "the truth shall set you free" in spite of the fact that Conservapedia garners only a small amount of Internet traffic. (Certain Conservapedians are more obsessed with the significance of the site than others.) Andrew Schlafly, the founder of the site, believes that site can be used as a teaching resource for homeschooled children in the US.
 * 2. Rationalizing warnings that might challenge the group's assumptions.
 * The Lenski affair, (which caused a large media frenzy that it exploded all over the blogosphere and was later enshrined in Richard Dawkins' latest book The Greatest Show on Earth) can be seen as an example of rationalizing evidence that challenges the group's shared beliefs. The results of Lenski's experiment are clearly a threat to Conservapedia's Young Earth Creationist viewpoint, prompting Andrew Schlafly et al. to challenge them.
 * 3. Unquestioned belief in the morality of the group, causing members to ignore the consequences of their actions.
 * The sites deliberately vague rules (the Conservapedia Commandments) are generally abused by the site's administrators, and their management style bears many similarities to a personality cult.
 * 4. Stereotyping those who are opposed to the group as weak, evil, biased, spiteful, disfigured, impotent, or stupid.
 * Conservapedia is well-known for stereotyping its opponents as liberals, and it contains many essays lambasting liberalism.
 * 5. Direct pressure to conform placed on any member who questions the group, couched in terms of "disloyalty."
 * Conservapedia contains no essays or articles that present liberalism in a positive light (or even attempt to portray it neutrally). Editors who attempt to do so are almost always blocked, and their work is deleted.
 * 6. Self censorship of ideas that deviate from the apparent group consensus.
 * There is a well-documented record of Conservapedia administrators frequently censoring "offensive" material.
 * 7. Illusions of unanimity among group members, silence is viewed as agreement.
 * Conservapedia editors are notoriously unable to detect editors who insert parodic content, similar to the way conservatives interpret Stephen Colbert's antics as proof that he is a conservative.
 * 8. Mind guards — self-appointed members who shield the group from dissenting information.
 * As mentioned above, Conservapedia sysops (administrators) routinely ban anyone with a dissenting view; the sysop corps can be thought of as "mind guards."

(Ed: I am not cherry-picking Conservapedia because it fits Janus's model so perfectly - I believe many of the other online communities I mentioned above above would also fit Janus's model. Instead, I used Conservapedia because of this website contains a veritable treasure trove of information about the site.)

The big picture
Despite all this, the Information Age has done a great deal to promote tolerance and understanding between cultures. Though it has fostered groupthink and denialism, it has done far more to promote tolerance and understanding then it has done to spread radicalism. In fact, the Nobel Committee nominated the Internet for the Nobel Peace Prize.