A few days ago, I was on my way home from the office and suddenly made a stop in a barbershop to cut my hair.
The barber looked young and very active and asked me to rate and review the shop and his service after my hair cut.
I was kind of satisfied with the service that he gave to me so I accepted his request.
I was in the mood to give him at least 4 out of 5 star review at the moment.
In the evening, I was at home and doing something else on my laptop and remembered the barber’s request.
But once I opened his website, I saw two of the most recent reviews by two other people who had given him 5 out of 5, detailing a lot of nice things about him and his shop.
After reading these two nice reviews by two other people, my previous decision faltered automatically and I also gave 5 out of 5, my original decision of giving 4 out of 5 disappeared completely from my mind.
This is one clear example of how we are influenced by social media in making our independent judgement.
I realized that my problem was I was heavily influenced by the interdependence effects of other people’s opinion to my pure independent judgement, probably, a sign of weaker emotional intelligence.
This is just one example I’m showing here, and I’m sure you might have many similar stories in your life.
Most of the time, social influence adds positive signals to our individual judgement because we mimic others’ views because we think other people know something we don’t, we assume other people are better and smarter than us.
This is human nature.
In reality, this is the beginning of our herding mentality.
My initial online rating decision entered into the herding stage after reading a few curated reviews on the social platform.
Remember, most of the time, our wisdom looks for independence but it’s very difficult to hold it for execution.
“Remember, most of the time, our wisdom looks for independence but it’s very difficult to hold it for execution.”
According to recent research, ninety two percent consumers read reviews before buying their most important product or service but only six percent write the reviews after buying their product or service.
And, think about it, we are making our decision by reading these reviews which are already the minority data, only six percent.
Sinan Aral, professor of MIT and author of ‘Hype Machine‘ says that social media lead to change our actions and behaviors and help to accelerate corporate business.
Dr. Aral raises an important question for all of us: how we can design, use, and monitor our social media influence that will determine whether it leads us toward wisdom or madness in life.
I am a scientist by profession, and I think of this behavior myself a lot to evaluate my daily activities.
If my mind is so much influenced by social media, algorithms, and edited versions of a few other’s opinions and their hidden power of capturing my attention then what about ordinary peoples’ minds?
These aren’t my words but from experienced and already successful people. They say that normally when we do or act on any action, we must behave and think like a scientist.
Trust me, I’m not bragging about my profession here, I’m quite aware of my limitations of my mind, body, and qualifications.
What I’m saying is totally based on my pure observation and experience leading up to this stage in my life.
Science is nothing more than an understanding of the world and why it is the way it is in our observation in daily life.
Evolving scientific knowledge around us is simply the current understanding of our existence at a particular time frame.
Knowledge could be on anything like social media, our own refrigerator or computer at home or any online course that we are taking at the moment.
The tool or subject matter doesn’t matter, what matters is the hidden power behind it.
The secret of being a good scientist in life lies not in our intelligence because that we already have inside us from birth.
A good scientist simply needs to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see outside and why.
This came to my mind heavily recently because of the influence of Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn in my core areas of life’s decision.
One thing is clear that logical thinking precedes rational decision if we are trying to do something important and sustainable in life.
In today’s world, what to think is not important because there are many people who can teach it but how to think is rare because there are very few people who can teach it.
Most of the time we learn it by reading past thinkers and practice it rigorously rather than anything else.
“A good scientist simply needs to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see outside and why.”
The key capability we must develop from the scientific mind is the clear understanding of inconsistencies between what we see and what actually is happening beneath the surface.
This gap elevates a mental clarity which is essential to real breakthroughs in our lives.
Many years ago, I’d read ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ and it has had a huge impact on my personal and professional life.
Dr. Daniel Kahneman, Nobel laureate, and author of ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ has introduced a really applicable research finding for our life, system one and system two thinking in human decision making power.
As an average person or a problem solver or a business person or a scientist, you must be able to distinguish system one thinking which is fast, intuitive, and emotional with system two thinking which is slow, deliberate, and logical.
System one thinking does not breed mental clarity immediately, it breeds comfort and acceptance due to our emotional attachment.
Thinking that we experience over and over again is more likely to come to mind in a positive way when we are ready to execute without going much deeper.
This is what happened when I was rating barbershop in the end after reading other people’s reviews and is normal to everybody.
Fast thinking is very emotional but slow thinking is very logical.
Dr. Kahneman describes how we would need significant contrary information for system two thinking to override system one thinking.
“Fast thinking is very emotional but slow thinking is very logical.”
Dr. Kahneman won the 2002 Nobel Prize in economics even though he was primarily a psychologist.
Kahneman’s work is a masterpiece on how our brain makes decisions and explains our understanding of decision making by providing data indicating that humans are not purely rational creatures.
I recommend watching Dr. Kahneman’s TedTalk ‘The riddle of experience vs memory’ as a supplement to his pioneering book ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’.
In my personal opinion, everybody must read ‘Thinking Fast and Slow’ in their lifetime, probably a few times.
The earlier you read the better because we’re making a lot of life decisions everyday irrespective of our age and circumstances in life.
I would like to give one more example of how our logical mind, the system two thinking, works in making decisions in business.
When Edwin Drake, the first American businessman who drilled the first oil well in 1859, he only dug 69 feet to get oil that immediately started giving 25 barrels a day, a big achievement at the time.
Today, oil companies spend billions of dollars to drill wells digging thousands of feet deep to find oil.
They do a lot more work obviously, spend way more money, but they are continuously making a lot of money as profits.
And this applies not only in the oil drilling business but to any business of innovation.
But how does it really happen?
The key remains in the ‘system two thinking’ in execution.
Because of logical and independent thinking in decision making, we cross the barriers of emotion and crowd madness and bring sustainable long term value.
If you look around any successful business and innovation, typically, all of them are products of ‘system two thinking.’
“Because of logical and independent thinking in decision making, we cross the barriers of emotion and crowd madness and bring sustainable long term value.”
If you are unaware about how your brain is making decisions, just observe your daily habits.
Let’s say you are surfing Facebook which is free and you think that you are not paying for such a wonderful service, then you are only using your system one thinking.
Remember, you are using the service free means ‘yourself’ you are becoming the product but you realize this only when you override system one thinking by system two thinking.
You are enjoying free Facebook to hit the ‘like’ button all the time in other people’s pictures.
The key business model in this case is, products usually sell advertisers access to your attention as potential consumers.
Just think about the use of Facebook or any social media and its subsequent algorithmic attack on the page that you follow.
Yogi Berra, a celebrated athlete, and author of ‘The Yogi Book’ says, “In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. But in practice, there is.”
If we practice to observe how our brain plays around, thinks, and makes decisions then we experience the difference all the time.
I would like to put two different author’s findings in perspective regarding human judgement.
James Surowiecki has given us a wonderful book regarding human judgement, ‘The Wisdom of Crowds‘ that says the power of collective judgement helps to solve our challenging problems like prediction, innovation, and strategic decision making.
But the challenge, at the time of social media, is how to rationalize collective judgement in our daily lives which is heavily influenced by algorithms.
Surowiecki, the author of ‘The Wisdom of Crowds’ adds that large groups of people are often smarter and make better decisions than small and elite experts.
Surowiecki’s main point is that if we aggregate independent, imperfect judgments from a large diverse crowd, the individual errors will cancel each other out, leaving behind a highly accurate collective judgment.
The second view is from renowned economist Robert Shiller who said, “people don’t usually make decisions in sequence. People independently choose their actions based on their own signals, without observing the actions of others”.
Dr. Shiller, 2013 Economics Nobel laureate, wrote a highly influential book ‘Irrational Exuberance’ in which he used psychological principles to explain how markets become detached from economic fundamentals.
Dr. Shiller is a pioneer in behavioral economics and says, “popular stories, fears, and cultural narratives go viral and directly drive major economic events.”
But, the interesting point to note is that both Surowiecki and Shiller didn’t have any experience of Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn or X kind of social media when they wrote about human decision and judgement.
At present, we don’t follow these social media, they follow us all the time in our daily lives and capture our thinking power and attention.
“Robert Shiller: popular stories, fears, and cultural narratives go viral and directly drive major economic events.”
Let’s take both positive and negative aspects of social media because any social media is a double edge sword.
The front load is, obviously, its advantage in society.
Social media connects us, we are more connected and we can do great things together like education, jobs, healthcare, innovation, and communications.
No doubt about it.
Social media helps bring people closer to whom we care and this closeness makes a great difference in our lives.
We achieve great things together because it leverages collaboration beyond any boundaries and geography.
The back load of social media is its disadvantage which is in our blind spot, we need system two thinking to understand it.
Social media have taken advantage of our trust, using sophisticated techniques to prey on the weakest aspects of our psychology.
Remember, it gathers and exploits our private data to develop business models for them that don’t protect us from harm.
The like button in social media is the engine of the attention economy.
It is made to capture our attention, to get our approval of the content we see or read, and to excite us to produce more content by giving us a quick burst of dopamine.
The greatest fact is social media sells our attention to brands, governments, politicians, and many organizations who want to change our perceptions, opinions, and behaviours in exchange for ads.
“The greatest fact is social media sells our attention to brands, governments, politicians, and many organizations who want to change our perceptions, opinions, and behaviours in exchange for ads.”
In my opinion, at present, social media is also creating a crab bucket effect in our lives.
The “crab bucket effect” indicates a social dynamic where people undermine or sabotage someone who is trying to succeed or improve their life circumstances.
It’s basically the eroding mindset: “If I can’t do it, neither can you.
Think about the behavior of live crabs in a bucket.
Any one crab can easily climb out and escape from the bucket but if you put many crabs in a bucket where any one crab attempting to climb the walls is pulled back down by the other crabs.
Ultimately, this gives the collective failure in the group, this equally applies to humans in our society.
If we lack independent judgement, then social media will behave exactly the same if anyone is trying to escape its negative influence in life.
Remember, when you decide to make a positive change in your life with logical thinking, your close friends or even family members might make unusual comments and actively try to pull you back into old life through social media.
It’s happening all the time, they say the most dangerous line, “you’ve changed.”
They said this sentence to me when I chose marathon training and escaped a friend’s birthday party.
My grandfather, who was a priest, used to say that the best work in the world was the work you’d do for free, and there was no social media at my grandfather’s time.
To be honest, now, there’s nowhere I can get free work.
Now, I’d rather be happier on Facebook than in the laboratory of a struggling pharma company studying molecules, running analysis, and understanding human diseases.
This is where we’re living at the moment.
Please, this isn’t my complaint at all, just my awareness.
So everytime time when I come out from my office or laboratory, I pull out my phone and check who liked my photo.
A sense of relaxation that somebody is at least liking me.
So, I’m leaving my final question to you: how are you managing the change in your life in this hypersocialized world?
Conclusion
Remember, most of the time, our wisdom looks for independence but it’s very difficult to hold it for execution in a present hypersocialized world.
We all can act like a good scientist because a scientist simply needs to look at reality and think logically and precisely about what we see outside and why we see it.
The thinking process which teaches how to think is more important in life than what to think.
Don’t trust fast thinking immediately because it is very emotional, so, always wait for slow thinking which is very logical.
Because of logical and independent thinking in decision making, we cross the barriers of emotion and crowd madness and bring sustainable long term value in life.
Robert Shiller, Nobel laureate said “popular stories, fears, and cultural details go viral and directly drive major economic events.”
The greatest fact of social media is that it sells our attention to companies, governments, politicians, and many organizations who want to change our perceptions, opinions, and behaviours in exchange for ads.
Yam Timsina, PhD, writes primarily on health basics, scientific progress, social upliftment, and value creation.
Disclaimer: “Please note that some links in this post are affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you.”
