How do you overcome somebody’s confirmation bias?
That’s something I found out today in a provocative article titled the “Curation/Search Radicalization Spiral.”
The article tells the story of a 13-year-old Jewish kid from Washington D.C. who became a true-believing moderator of an alt-right subreddit.
The story itself is less interesting than it sounds. What is interesting is how Mike Caulfield, the author of the article, explains how this kind of “grooming” happens.
How could a Jewish kid from a liberal family be persuaded to join a far-right community, made up of people who are often hostile to Jews?
And more broadly, how is it possible to overcome somebody’s confirmation bias… and implant ideas that were once inconceivable?
I won’t repeat Caulfield’s entire argument here. But the gist is the idea of gradual curation. Here’s how it works:
1. A person (the mark, for short) goes to a subreddit or a Facebook group or somebody’s blog.
2. There he gets exposed to a curated claim. This is a claim that is carefully selected, provocative, but not threatening to his world view.
For example, the 13-year-old above was accused of sexual harassment by a classmate. So maybe he came across a claim on Reddit that said, “Study in Cambridge Law Journal reports up to 90% of rape allegations are false.”
3. At this point, the mark is intrigued but also a bit cautious. So he goes on to verify the claim for himself by doing a quick Google search. There it is, “Rumney, Philip N.S. (2006). ‘False Allegations of Rape’. Cambridge Law Journal. 65 (1): 128–158.”
4. Mind is blown. Now the mark is ready to repeat the process one level down… with another curated but more provocative claim, which gets him closer to the alternate reality.
None of this is news to marketers. Curating facts is what good direct response copy is all about, and Gene Schwartz wrote about “gradualization” back in 1966.
There are even copy tricks to simulate verifying something yourself. But maybe it’s a bit tasteless to give you a step-by-step here, since we started by talking about the radicalization of a 13-year-old.
So instead, let me tell you what I personally get out of this. It might be relevant to you also:
The upshot for me is to avoid curated content as much as possible. That means turning off social media… news sites… and I hate to say it, newsletters like mine.
Because everybody has an agenda. And if you give somebody a freeway into your mind that’s open 24 hours a day, every day, it gets harder to resist that agenda.
You start being groomed… and the next thing you know, you might be marching in somebody else’s army, fighting somebody else’s war, fully convinced it was your idea all along.