Tell Me More
Breaking out of Echo Chambers
Photo by Erik Johansson from the Exhibition: The Echo Chamber
In some sense I feel like all of my writing on Shape of We has been about breaking out of echo chambers, but I think it’s useful to distill down the various concepts and ideas I’ve been ruminating on and writing about into exercises. You’ll find at the end of each section an exercise or set of exercises. You should know all of this comes from my own experience having been embedded in a number of echo chambers and, windingly, finding my way out of them. That is why I’m downright obsessed with this topic and anything related to it (cults, conspiracy theories, etc., etc.). I’ve seen, firsthand, how much growth and learning comes from breaking out of echo chambers. I’ve noticed, firsthand, how much healthier and freer I feel leaving these echo chambers.
Maybe I’ll just go ahead and warn you right now - I’ve also felt, firsthand, how leaving an echo chamber can feel like a sort of death and can be quite disorienting. But this is part of the training to be able to hold ambiguity, confusion, and the discomfort of disagreement that you’ll need to take into the rest of your life. There are no easy answers. Discernment is the work of a lifetime and along the way you will make many errors, says Catherine MacCoun.
Let’s start at the foundation. What is an echo chamber? There is a professional definition I could put here but I’d rather just put it into my own words (another tip I’ve found to break out is to learn to put things into your own words to make sure you’re not just repeating talking points or what you’ve heard, but to see if you actually understand it and are thinking through it and then checking to see if it’s accurate).
I think of an echo chamber as a hall of mirrors, a place you can seal yourself into where you only hear what you want to believe and what you already believe, whether it’s about yourself or the greater world around you. And, often, you don’t realize you’re in one.
Of course there are holes in this definition (also part of breaking out of the echo chamber is continuing to question your thinking, continually revising if you find holes or mistakes). The above definition makes it sound like you choose when often, as I’ll talk about in a bit, you don’t.
Why does it matter if we’re stuck in an echo chamber or not? I think the best argument for this is what cults show us, even the more benign ones - that it grows our irrationality, which has all sorts of detrimental effects not only on ourselves but others we have relationships with or come in contact with. The latest cult documentary I watched showed just how painful it was for the former cult members to wrestle with the consequences of raising their kids in the cult and under those belief systems. I also often think about the novel Remains of the Day, a poignant piece about a butler who comes to regret their loyalty to the lord they served. I think about it a lot - not realizing until it’s too late, until you’ve lived most of your life, that the beliefs or direction of your life have been misplaced or not at all what you thought it was. I think about all of the revolutions that have gone wrong, the utopias that turned into hells. There is much to be learned from history and these events.
Of course there are differences between a cult and just everyday echo chambers. But there are a lot of through-lines too.
I once read that cult survivors experience a splitting of self, a cult self, that becomes disconnected from other aspects of self. This is where I want to start. The self. Or, rather, the Self-Concept.
Self Concept
S.I. Hayakawa in an essay titled The Self-Concept, notes that human beings are symbolic creatures - that our behavior is mediated by symbols, and inclusive of that is our symbolic self, or self-concept, which is not the same as your self (this flowing, changing, multifaceted process that you can never quite fully define).
When he defines the self-concept he quotes the late psychoanalyst, Carl Rogers, who says “The self-concept or self-structure may be thought of as an organized configuration of perceptions of the self which are admissible to awareness.” That last part is crucial and also why I consider the self-concept as something that can be considered an echo chamber, and maybe the first echo chamber to examine.
Something I noticed after I had been deeply embedded in echo chambers was that I had symbolized myself as a good person. A thinking person. An open-minded person. I was on the good side. I simply could not even fathom that these things weren’t true at the time. It was not admissible to my awareness that I was acting and thinking in ways that I had been condemning others for, behaviors and ways of thinking that I still feel pings of shame over (but in a good way, healthy shame as a sentinel). To be more specific, I was forcing my opinion, assuming ill-intent on others, judging and projecting negative stereotypes and caricatures, and not listening or being open to seeing things another way. And I wasn’t critically thinking.
I simply couldn’t see it because I was not only in a larger echo chamber of like-minded folks, but also an echo chamber of my self-concept, which kept me from seeing important information about myself.
Again, Carl Rogers: “We all suppress, to some degree, information that we do not like to face - whether about ourselves or other matters. Therefore, while unacknowledged fears or jealousies and repressed memories may be real enough to determine behavior, they are not part of the self-concept, and therefore they are not known to be causes of our actions. The self concept includes only what we are able to say to ourselves about ourselves.”
If you’ve watched as many cult documentaries as I have you can see this pattern play out so vividly. Often, cult members think they are saving the world, doing good in the world, even as their prophecies never come to fruition they continue to warp their stories and are blinded to the abuse perpetrated by them and to them.
As soon as I started loosening up and letting go of a more static symbolic self (I literally stopped thinking of myself as a “good person”), I could see more of my behaviors and thoughts with a gentle honesty, I could see better when I wasn’t acting in congruence with my values and principles and could course-correct quicker. I spent less energy trying to prove and defend my sense of self and more energy on learning and how I was behaving.
Our self-concept is created through our experiences, often early in life, and often not of our rational or conscious choosing (and sometimes not really in our immediate awareness - we kind of have to dig for it and observe ourselves more objectively). Often, it’s how we adapted or were shaped by our caregivers and environment.
Jack Kornfield says: “Central to the stories we tell are the fixed beliefs we have about ourselves. It is as if we have been cast into a movie as a depressed person or a beautiful one, as a compromiser or clown, an angry victim, or a fighter whom no one will ever take advantage of again. Because those thoughts and assumptions are so powerful, we live out their energies over and over. These patterns of thought, together with the contradiction of body and heart, create a limited sense of self.”
Exercise: Take some time to think about your self-concept. What stories do you tell yourself about yourself? How do you think about yourself out in the world or how do you want others to think about you? In what ways could that self-concept direct what is admissible and not admissible to your awareness (or another way of saying this is what would be emotionally uncomfortable to acknowledge about yourself)? When was the last time you updated your self-concept? How open or closed is it to new information coming in? How much change does it allow?
I’ll wrap up this section with this quote from Hayakawa’s essay: “Included in the self-concept should be a knowledge of how much more there is to know about oneself…In each of us there are unknown possibilities, undiscovered potentialities - and one big advantage of having an open self-concept rather than a rigid one is that we shall continue to expose ourselves to new experiences and therefore we shall continue to discover more and more about ourselves as we grow older.”
Beliefs and the Structure of Your Beliefs
Have you ever asked yourself why you believe what you believe? It’s a jarring question, especially if you haven’t. I remember when I started asking that question after I realized I had just been repeating things I had heard over and over again (it was not in my awareness because I had symbolized myself as a critical thinker).
But much like the self-concept formed early before we have rational choice in the matter, we’ve all inherited worldviews, beliefs and belief systems from our environments. Many of us may question those beliefs and worldviews to various extents as we grow up but I think part of breaking out of echo chambers is revisiting this question regularly, a practice of regularly checking in. It’s so simple and so powerful and will often let you know if you believe something because you’ve thought it through or you believe something because you want it to be true (or not true).
Wanting something to be true (or not true) is sneaky and often substituted for actual truth. Even if it’s something terrible, we want it to be true because it reifies our existing belief or the beliefs of our social group, which creates stability. In our echo chambers this can often result in unquestioningly accepting information that feeds stereotypes and caricatures of those we disagree with. It lowers our standards of information quality and integrity.
As Daniel Kahneman noted in his book “Thinking Fast and Slow”, “…when people believe a conclusion is true, they are also very likely to believe arguments that appear to support it, even when these arguments are unsound.”
Much flows from the self-concept. It’s a sort of foundational belief system that influences secondary beliefs you’ll have about the world around you. A person that considers themself a Democrat then has various beliefs about government that spring from that self-concept. This is why questioning it can be so disorienting because it opens the possibility of questioning a whole host of other beliefs.
I’ve talked about “The Open and Closed Mind” before by Milton Rokeach and his theory beliefs have both content and structure. His findings were that seemingly opposite ideologies (so different content) were similar in that they had the same structure, and that those with more closed minds or are more dogmatic have a structure to their beliefs that correlates to there being one true authority or one truth.
Anne Applebaum in her book “Twilight of Democracy: The Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism” cites Karen Stenner’s research on personality traits and argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition. She says “Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically ‘left-wing’ or ‘right'-wing’ about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”
Often, when we’re in an echo chamber our attention is focused on the content of beliefs and not so much the structure. The content is what binds everyone together so it can be difficult to observe the structure of our beliefs because the content feels so right. The hall of mirrors can feel really good and safe. But maybe more important is looking at the structure your beliefs.
Exercise
Spend some time writing down your beliefs about the world. What are you beliefs about others who think differently than you? What are your beliefs about government, justice, freedom? What are you beliefs about what’s good? Keep going and see how many areas of life you can document.
Next, ask yourself where these beliefs come from. Do they come from your upbringing, your experiences? Have you actually arrived at them through your own investigation and critical thinking or have they been adopted without question?
Next, see if you can notice a structural pattern to your beliefs. Does the structure allow for nuance, complexity, disagreement or is there only one authority/worldview? Is there a pattern of simplifying complex topics to black and white terms? Does it question itself or allow for new information to come in?
Next, read this article on understanding others worldviews .
The Mind
Our mind is a prediction machine, constantly making predictions about what’s happening based on past experiences, constantly making meaning from information based on our past experiences.
David McRaney says in “How Mind’s Change”, “When we encounter novel information that seems ambiguous, we unknowingly disambiguate it based on what we’ve experienced in the past. But starting at the level of perception, different life experiences can lead to very different disambiguations, and thus very different subjective realities. When that happens in the presence of substantial uncertainty, we may vehemently disagree over reality itself - but since no one on either side is aware of the brain processes leading up to that disagreement, it makes the people who see things differently seem, in a word, wrong.”
Many of us have never traveled to the parts of the world in which we are reading or hearing about, have never experienced the things that we read and hear about and so it’s safe to say that our minds often have inaccurate models, which make it difficult to judge the quality of information. As someone who lives in California I can tell you that much of what you hear about California in certain circles or the picture you get of it on the news leaves so much out. But if you don’t live here you might just adopt those opinions and positions because you don’t have much to check it against, especially if it fits neatly into your existing worldview/model.
Humility is a critical characteristic to hone when you’re breaking out of echo chambers. To be able acknowledge that many of the things you hear about and read about are things in which you’ve had no direct experience with, and then also acknowledge that this makes it difficult to discern what’s quality information is critical. There’s a great You’re Not So Smart Episode that interviews a prominent 9/11 conspiracy theorist who changes his mind after speaking to architects and engineers and relatives of the dead around what happened. He leaves his echo chamber, amidst serious backlash from his community, and finds out how much he didn’t know, and didn’t even realize he didn’t know.
Daniel Kahneman talked about the lure and dangers of simplified narratives in his book Thinking Fast and Slow . He says “Paradoxically, it is easier to construct a coherent story when you know little, when there are fewer pieces to fit into the puzzle. Our comforting conviction that the world makes sense rests on a secure foundation: our almost unlimited ability to ignore our ignorance.”
I often repeat this to myself - you’re one experience away from changing your mind. Literally. To build a better prediction machine in our minds we need to continue to add experiences and learnings, and try to acknowledge when our prediction machine in our mind may not be accurate.
I could go on and on about the many different shortcuts and biases of our mind, but I think the most important thing to remember when breaking out of your echo chambers is just holding the awareness of how limited your one mind is or many minds that think the same thing are in understanding what’s happening. We all have biases and limited perspectives and blind spots, especially in areas we don’t know that much about. Humility is truly the foundation for breaking out of our echo chambers.
Exercise: Pull out a piece of paper and draw two columns. In the first column list all of the things you’ve had direct experience with. Really think about your life and where you’ve been. Think about how these experiences impact how you see related topics. Are there ways in which these experiences help you understand things better? Are there ways in which these experiences hinder how you understand things, or ways in which it’s created biases or blind spots? In the next column list all of the things you have strong opinions about but no direct experience with - things you’ve only read about or heard about. Examine your information sources for those opinions. Do you know why you choose those information sources?
Emotions and The Body
When I was at my most self-righteous, which, not surprisingly, was correlated with when I was deepest into my echo chambers, I could not see the difference between the need to feel right versus the goal of trying to be right.
Part of breaking out of my echo chambers was becoming aware of the ways in which conflict created a particular, patterned nervous system reaction in my body.
Often the emotions we want to avoid, or automatically avoid without our conscious awareness, keeps us from learning and growth. Keep us stuck and small. Even though I would feel surges of anger towards others who I thought were so wrong, it was not healthy anger. It was anger I didn’t know how to hold in my body or work with. I later came to see it was a pattern from the past, of feeling wronged, not listened to and it also protected me from the shame of not actually having integrity with my own beliefs. I hadn’t actually weighed different perspectives or critically thought through many of my beliefs, or examined my blindspots, and so I was defending an emotional need to feel right instead of simply a researched perspective.
When we’re deep in an echo chamber we are often identifying with a certain group of people and, depending on how overtly or covertly controlling the group is, there can be a very strong incentive to look good and feel right in their eyes as well. Remember, the self-concept can be strongly tied to a group and this can blind us to dysfunctional dynamics in the group and the many ways we might participate.
With time, I learned to be able to hold the charge in my body that came from disagreement, that came from encountering information that challenged my viewpoint, or that came from being wrong. The more I practiced being able to hold the charge, and then reflect on what exactly felt so threatening, the more I could relax because I realized I was not being threatened.
If I was wrong, great. I wanted to learn and to actually find out what was true - this slowly became more important and more tolerable in my body than wanting to feel right.
I was starting to really think through my positions, revise them. I was less emotionally attached to them, more tentative with them, and yet I trusted myself more because I was spending more time actually reading and thinking and listening and weighing different viewpoints to get some semblance of my own. I believe this is one of the biggest upsides to breaking out of your echo chambers - it restores a sense of integrity, and a sense of trust in being able to discern and adjust and change, when needed.
Safety in our bodies plays a huge role in being able to listen to different viewpoints, and to hold ambiguity and uncertainty. We cannot expect others to always give us this. We must train ourselves.
If you can gradually teach your body to trust more in these liminal spaces, you’ll find that space between your beliefs and someone’s different beliefs are not as threatening. Or, you may still feel some threat but you are able to hold multiple things at once - you may feel angry or sad or fear or shame, but the more you can sit with those strong emotions and discomfort, the more you can create space to separate your emotions from the information and the person, and discern if there is any useful or accurate information. Or, you can disagree without making the other person into your enemy.
Exercise: Pick a topic you feel strongly about. Go find a source that argues a different perspective. Pay attention to your body as you do this. Do you want to shut down or yell? Sit with what’s coming up. Part of this exercise it to recognize those moments that you’re most triggered and to learn to be with it without immediately shutting down or lashing out. When you can be with the discomfort for longer it creates space to see if there’s any information that is accurate or helpful. If you continue to practice this is gets easier and easier to be with what comes up and you may find the reactions become less strong.
Also, take stock of how often you expose yourself to viewpoints that challenge yours. Are there emotions you’re trying to avoid by doing that? What would happen if you recognized and felt those emotions in the moment and then returned to the information?
Language
Just like the self-concept, language plays a massive role in sealing us into echo chambers, and it’s highly intertwined with the previous section.
The late semanticist, Alfred Korzybski, coined the term “Identification Reactions” for a patterned, negative response to certain labels/words. He was concerned with those that seemed “blowing a gasket” upon hearing a certain word or label. Democrat, Republican, Communist, Capitalist, Billionaire, Elite - all of these are examples that can bring about a strong nervous system reaction along a spectrum but identification reactions capture those instances when one can no longer think rationally when they hear those words.
Where do identification reactions come from? I think many places, including our own families, but one is from the media one consumes. There are certain outlets and people who infuse certain labels and abstractions with highly emotional content that is aimed at instilling these outsized reactions. Part of breaking out of echo chambers is being able to recognize and resist this pattern because of how much it hinders rational thought.
Related to identification reactions and to the section earlier on the structure of beliefs, S.I. Hayakawa, in Language in Thought and Action, talks about the difference between a two-value orientation vs. a multi-value orientation when we express. Two-value orientation is speaking in terms of this or that, good or bad, right or wrong. There is no middle ground. You’re either with us or against us! Someone or something is either all good or all bad - no shades of grey, no nuance. You can often find the use of labels prevalent in two-value orientation expressions. Hayakawa states “The more spirited the expression, the more sharply will things be dichotomized into the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’. Social media is full of two-value orientation, spirited language - the algorithms promote and amplify it. But it’s those very things that move us towards echo chambers and often backfires. Hayakawa points out “the two-valued orientation increases combativeness but sharply diminishes the ability to evaluate the world accurately. When guided by it for any purpose other than fighting, we almost always achieve results opposite of those intended.”
Multi-value orientation takes into account complexity, acknowledges different degrees of certainty and is interested in pooling knowledge. It is the counter to a two-value orientation of I’m right and you’re wrong with I don’t know - let’s see.
Tell me more, Hayakawa invites us to say when we’re in a discussion with someone because it moves us away from a battle of right and wrong, to a discussion around degrees of certainty. Multiple things can happen from this statement 1) The person you’re in discussion with may recognize that their statement was simply just repeating something they heard and that opens the possibility of them being less certain 2) that person could provide information that challenges your degree of certainty 3) the person feels heard 4) you’ve possibly pooled some knowledge. It’s important to remember we can do this with ourselves anytime we feel certain about something.
We don’t have to wait for others to offer the multi-value orientation, we can become it. The echo chamber starts with yourself. How willing are you to be wrong? Think in degrees of certainty.
It’s also important to look at how language is being used in the context of information quality because part of breaking out of an echo chamber is finding quality information that is multi-value orientation in nature, relies on solid reports, and stays away from judgements and sloppy inferences. The distinction between the three are as follows: A report can be verified - think, someone states that something happened and you can look it up and confirm or deny it. An inference is a statement about the unknown based on the known. Inferences can be well made or sloppily made. They usually have assumptions that are not specifically stated and can be inaccurate - think, someone makes an inaccurate claim about an organization based on a single instance. A judgement usually tells you more about the speaker than what they’re speaking about - someone calls someone a name because they didn’t do something or they did do something. It’s telling of the person making the judgement because it shows their biases, assumptions and maturity level. It provides little to no actionable or verifiable information.
A good question to regularly ask yourself is how important is the quality of information I’m consuming? How do I know the quality of information I’m consuming?
Exercise: Observe the media you consume, who you listen to, and see if you can identify any instances where they’re using a pattern of highly emotional language to describe other people, groups, events, systems. Observe your nervous system and the emotions present in your body when you watch and listen. Are there certain words that incite a strong reaction from you?
See if you can pinpoint the ratio of reports, inferences and judgements of the media you consume. How much of it is actionable information? Is it expanding your understanding of the world? Is there a patterned way of feeling after watching or listening to that source of information? Is it two-value or multi-value orientation in nature?
Communication and Intentions
Part of breaking out of our echo chambers is looking at our intentions and how we listen and communicate. Just like we can observe our information ecosystem, we can observe ourselves in how we communicate. Do we listen to find fault or do we listen with genuine curiosity? What type of content do we share and what messages do we attach to the content? Is it of the two-value orientation type or multi-value orientation type? How do we talk to strangers on the internet or even friends and family that disagree with us? How quickly do we unfollow those who share opinions we don’t like?
Your intentions really matter when it comes to communication. It’s what fuels the tone of your messaging, and it’s something others can pick up on. So if your intention is to dunk on people or make them feel wrong or stupid (a sign you’re in two-value orientation) then it should come as no surprise that they won’t want to engage or they might fight back - and it keeps you exactly where you started or maybe even more entrenched in your beliefs and echo chamber.
Part of breaking out of an echo chamber is holding the intention of understanding, of learning and being really honest with ourselves if we diverge from these intentions.
In How Mind’s Change by David McRaney he talks about the importance of allowing others to access their own agency when changing their minds. That’s the difference between engaging someone with the intention to force your opinion versus the intention to listen to that person’s experience and accept that they may not change their mind. Notice how different that feels in your body - engaging someone with a different viewpoint without the intention of changing their mind. What does that give you? Think about it for a second.
Questions play a massive role in breaking out of echo chambers. Questions are, of course, linked to curiosity. If you’re curious you ask more questions and you ask different types of questions. There are certain questions that aren’t necessarily questions but actually function as a sort of way to control the conversation. Let’s say you’re discussing a speech someone influential gave and someone asks you did you think they would be that boring? This isn’t really a question in which the person wants to find out what you think but rather a question to see if you agree with that person. A judgement asked as a question. If that person asked you I’m really curious what you thought about that speech? and then proceeded to ask follow up questions (tell me more) to better understand your views that is a completely different exchange, one in which the person asking the question might learn something new.
This is the massive upside to getting out of your echo chambers - acknowledgement and acceptance that you can’t change others, but that when you change and shift your intentions and behaviors, you’ll find that others may change as well.
Catherine MacCoun says In Becoming an Alchemist that “Between you and anything that you wish to influence there is a relationship. If either party in a relationship changes, the relationship itself is changed. In turn, any change in the relationship changes both parties. So if you wish to change something, the first thing you must do is discover the true nature of your relationship to it. Then you will be able to see how to change it by changing yourself.”
I shared a few practical exercises here but make no mistake I think of breaking out of our echo chambers as a spiritual practice - truly a practice which requires intention and consistent action and reflection. Often, with spirituality, we confuse symbols with truth. We can just as easily get into traps and echo chambers under the guise of spirituality and so I intentionally avoided using any spirituality terminology. I think that’s important too for breaking out of echo chambers, to be able to move among different models/worldviews and the languages they use. Can you find the patterns among them and distill the wisdom?
So, on that note, a distillation: use it all - the mind, the body, and the heart to discern truth, expand possibilities, build bridges, and restore trust and integrity. Keep going. Don’t stop.
Tell me more. Tell me more.