Epistemic humility and social media

As mentioned in the introduction, social media is often regarded as an epistemically dysfunc­tional arena because (inter alia) it is an echo chamber: because we friend those who are similar to us, we tend to hear only from those who share our political views and do not hear evidence against them.

On the other hand, there is a widespread worry that when we encounter dissent online, we may not engage with it in a way that gives it due weight. Again, we have seen that the empirical evi­dence suggests that there is something in this claim. As we have seen, when we are disposed toward a claim, we engage in motivated reasoning and are subject to the myside bias.We dismiss opinions because of their source, rather than their content, and without adequately considering that content.

We best avoid these twin ills, it would seem, if we calibrate our trust to the environment.We are apt to defer to a greater extent than we should in relation to claims that stem from ‘our’ side and should instead be more critical.We are apt to unthinkingly reject claims that stem from the other side, and should instead be more humble.We should strike the Aristotelian mean between servility and arrogance.

But if servility and arrogance are both epistemically adaptive — if, as I have suggested, together they play a large role in explaining our most impressive epistemic achievements — prescribing that individuals attempt to reign in these dispositions is risky (assuming, rather implausibly, that it succeeds).This is most obvious with regard to the suggestion that we cease to be arrogant. If the claim that epistemic arrogance is an adaptation for group deliberation is correct, then it is far from apparent that we should be more receptive to the claims of others. Perhaps the arrogance we display on social media is epistemically appropriate. Perhaps it is actually truth conducive; we probably tend, on the whole, to garner mainly true beliefs from social media (and it is far from obvious that we would do better, on average, to avoid it).¹⁰To the extent to which it is not truth conducive, moreover, it is far from obvious that altering our dispositions is either possible, or that if it is possible it would not have more costs (measured in the social generation of knowledge) than benefits.

Perhaps the epistemic servility we display with regard to claims that seem to stem from ‘our’ side, or that support our existing beliefs, can usefully be addressed by a little more care in accept­ing claims. Given the extent of our epistemic reliance on others, however, and our inability to check more than a tiny fraction of the claim we are presented with for ourselves, however, such servility may be required for good epistemic functioning.Time constraints, too, make epistemic dependence essential. Finite beings like us can’t do better than defer, most of the time, on most issues.When the issue is morally inflected, deference to our side — to those who weigh values in the way we do — may be a reliable guide to what we would think were we able to take the time to reflect on the issue. Of course, all kinds of factual questions are morally inflected (and this is true whether or not we accept cognitivism about morality), in part perhaps because different attitudes to risk or to value (the value of individuals versus groups; the value of non-human animals; the value of the citizen versus the stranger, and so on) tend to correlate with moral attitudes, and in part because on politicized issues we have good reason to suspect that biases occlude accurate perception.

Even if we decide that we would do better to display less servility in some contexts, and less arrogance in others, it is difficult to see how we may realistically expect agents to calibrate their trust in ways that would filter in the right array of claims while filtering out the wrong. It is worth noting that the view I am urging here seems to imply that one obvious, and oft- promoted, way of addressing the problem has limitations that usually pass unperceived. It is often suggested that we should avoid the echo chamber by ensuring a diversity of voices (perhaps Facebook might implement algorithms that ensure that every conversation of more than a certain length or with more than a certain number of contributors, which features only like­minded voices, be visible to others who are not on their side, so that they can chime in). But contrary voices may tend to trigger the confirmation bias, flipping us from epistemic servility to epistemic arrogance (rather than humility). Indeed, there is evidence that adding a diversity of voices leads to biased assimilation of information (Corner,Whitmarsh and Xenias 2012) not necessarily to more accurate beliefs.¹¹

If epistemic humility is not the solution to the epistemic problems of social media, what is? Addressing that question is beyond the scope of this chapter. I will allow myself just a few remarks. First, it is not apparent to me that there is a special problem here. No doubt fake news reaches a broader audience today than previously, but that doesn’t entail that on average people have less accurate or fewer well-justified beliefs today than previously. Accurate reports also reach a broader audience today than at previous times. It is not apparent to me that debate is really less rational than before.

If there is a problem, however, it is probably best addressed in the way we best address all epistemic matters: socially. Perhaps the epistemic environment is not well structured to scaffold knowledge generation and dissemination. Perhaps we need to regulate it better.As we have seen, though cues for deference and for triggering the myside bias are typically well calibrated for epistemic success, false positives and false negatives certainly exist.We may, for instance, be taken in by an illusion of consensuality.To the extent there is a problem, I suspect it is best addressed by ensuring that networks are structured and information is filtered so that the cues for defer­ence are better calibrated.We are deeply social animals, in our epistemic dispositions as much as anywhere else, and individualistic approaches, such as those that would have each of us cultivate virtue, ill fit with how we function.¹²

Notes

1 While accounts that understand the virtues as the mean between excess and deficiency are common, a number of theorists of epistemic virtue reject such views. However, I don’t think I beg any ques­tions against them by describing epistemic humility as a mean between servility and arrogance. These theorists hold that we cannot define the virtue like that.They do not deny that whatever the nature of the virtue, manifestations of it exhibit dispositions that are too self-effacing to be arrogant but not so self-effacing as to be servile.

2 The situationist challenge was originally levelled at the moral virtues, by philosophers like John Doris and Gilbert Harman (1999). Its extension to virtue epistemology is due in particular to Mark Alfano (2012).

3 The following section draws on material in Levy and Alfano (forthcoming).

4 For steps in the direction of anti-individualism, see Kallestrup and Pritchard (2012; 2016), Palermos (2016).

5 Heyes (2018) dissents from the claim that children are preadapted for culture: she suggests that the dispositions that underlie the acquisition of cumulative culture are themselves the product of cultural evolution.

6 Of course, virtue epistemologists accept that, as contexts change, the virtuous agent will alter her response. Just as the courageous agent must recognize when it would be foolhardy to take a risk rather than be courageous, so the epistemically humble agent must recognize when she should defer to others, when she should discount their claims and how much weight to give to them in those situations where she should neither (completely) defer nor (completely) discount. But the kinds of contextual shifts we’ve discussed are nothing like those traditional virtue epistemologists envisage. Blind deference seems no virtue, from their perspective, but it is something that looks alarmingly like such deference that underlies cumulative culture in an important way. Similarly, there seems to be a good case for calling the kind of behavior that minimizes hidden profiles epistemic arrogance (indeed, Samuelson and Church 2015 are explicit that epistemic humility is incompatible with the confirmation bias).

7 Insofar as virtue theory requires stability of response, this seems to me like bad news for the approach. Of course, there are obvious responses available. One would be to deny that what look like arrogance or servility are any such thing: the person who insists on his opinion, in the presence of dissenting epis- temic superiors, say, does not manifest epistemic arrogance because his doing so is conducive to collec­tive deliberation. There are two problems with this response. First, at the individual level, his behavior may count as epistemically arrogant on any plausible account.

8 Though it should be recognized that some of the ways in which content matters can make us worse off epistemically. Our content biases include a disposition to accept and repeat emotionally arousing claims (Peters, Kashima and Clark 2009); that disposition likely plays a role in the way in which consume and spread fake news.

9 There is a danger of exaggerating the extent to which social media is liable to echo chambers. Guess and colleagues have found less evidence of selective exposure to a one-sided diet of voices than we might have expected (Guess, 2018; Guess, Nyhan, Lyons, and Reifler, 2018).We might even hope that social media could serve to harness the wisdom of crowds, leading to better justified beliefs. Sullivan et al. (forthcoming) suggests that that hope is yet to be realized, at least with regard to vaccination mes­sages on Twitter.

10 It should be acknowledged that this might be true of some populations (perhaps ‘digital natives') and not others. Guess, Nagler and Tucker (2019) found that the over 55s shared nearly 7 times as much fake news as the youngest. This may not be an indication of greater arrogance in this group, however, so much as greater credulity.

11 Here I take issue with Nguyen (2018), who suggests that adding a diversity of voices pops our epis- temic bubble in a way that leads to better justified or more accurate beliefs, except when other voices are systematically denigrated. Nguyen reserves the term ‘echo chamber' for epistemic spaces in which rival views are denigrated, calling those that simply happen to be closed to other voices epistemic bubbles. The evidence suggests, however, that the kind of vociferous and systematic denigration char­acteristic of his echo chambers is not required for triggering the myside bias and subsequent belief polarization. As we have seen, our filters on testimony are not the problem, and popping epistemic bubbles is not the solution.

12 I am grateful to Mark Alfano for his helpful comments on this paper.This work was supported by a generous grant from the Australian Research Council.

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