You Don’t Think For Yourself

When was the last time you listened to a Coldplay album?

Nov 13, 2023

As much as we might like to pretend we’re single-minded, that’s less true than we would feel happy to admit.

We look to those around us to make our decision making easier, and save us the mental anguish.

This prejudice saves us having to put in the effort needed to assess everything in isolation. It is quite a useful evolutionary advantage, but we need to know when we’re on autopilot.

We’ve had two big social experiments that have illustrated this better than anything else in the last decade in the UK: Covid and Brexit.

At the start of Covid, people first looked to their leaders for guidance and advice, then to their peers.

Very quickly, the consensus of that peer group dictated to you whether you were taking the vaccine or wearing a mask.

Even more unexpected was how much of a relationship there was between people’s views on Brexit and Covid. The data suggests Brexit voting patterns influenced the likelihood of taking a vaccine, but also that areas that voted most in favour of remaining in the European Union have a lower death rate and higher vaccination rate.

Can our stubborn commitment to prejudice really lead to outcomes like this, or can we wrestle back control of our minds?

First Response

When I mentioned Coldplay at the top, you would have had a reaction.

Coldplay are a band that everyone knows, and whether you listened to an album of theirs or not in the last decade is probably a position you’ve held since their first album came out in 2000.

It isn’t necessarily an informed position, but it’s easier to have that than to have to listen to every one of their albums and change your mind.

Changing your mind is hard. Both admitting you were wrong, and the effort of having to review the back catalogue with the multiple listens it takes to form your own decision.

Life is much easier if you can just decide you don’t like music by Coldplay, U2, or Taylor Swift rather than invest the effort and energy to find out for certain.

It’s also likely that you won’t need to question your gut, you don’t obviously lose anything by not giving Coldplay the benefit of the doubt - or any other names or concepts that might create mental shortcuts.

Mentioning names like Karl Marx, Edward Bernays, or Adam Smith, evoke a similarly strong reaction. All of these names have become shortcuts that represent a deep culture which in one go people can automatically dismiss, reject or ignore.

If someone says to you they agree with Marx you’d take a view even if you’ve never read Das Kapital.

It also wouldn’t matter if you agreed with 80% of Das Kapital but disagreed with the overall concept - there’s not much room for that in the current climate.

This world doesn’t like those who are different.

It’s easier to follow a crowd than to dare to take the alternative path.

To that end, it’s safer to decide that you don’t like Coldplay even if you might be starving yourself of an experience you’d enjoy.

Single Knowledge

One of the really fascinating things for our generation is what the internet has done for urban legends.

There used to be a single knowledge on things like how long it takes for a chewing gum to digest in your stomach - seven years of course - things that every child knew but that was never taught in a lesson or written in a textbook.

I grew up in the town where Mary from Mary Had a Little Lamb grew up. Her school was on the bottom of the hill on Brook Street, now Penllyn Chapel. That was the school that the lamb followed her to every day.

Only that story was never true.

All of those urban legends when we were kids we now know were not true.

The internet has created a wholly new landscape for these urban legends and agreeing what truth is.

Even simple things like everyone having a different route to get to places convinced that their route was quickest was ruined by satnav.

Single knowledge was the stuff that everyone just agreed on, it’s the way the world is.

When you go to uni you start comparing these different myths about the reality of the world around you. Some of it is nostalgia, some of it is more fundamental than that.

It’s world building, it affirms what we know and hold as truth.

There are some things like language and local dialect which share this quality.

Language is a single knowledge issue, until you are in a bar with a northerner and a southerner and you ask them what you call sausages in-between bread.

It doesn’t matter what you think is the truth if someone else is convinced you’re wrong.

We’ve had generations of trusting what you’re told and the stories shared by those around you, until this millennium came around and all of a sudden we had access to all of the world’s knowledge, opinions, and perspectives.

Now, there is no single knowledge.

We justify our position by listening to people we trust will reinforce our views.

We’re influenced directly and indirectly by individuals and groups that we might never physically share a room with.

We Don’t Even Hide This Anymore

In the last decade we’ve started giving a name to the people who professionally attempt to change the way we think and act, the clue is in that name

Influencers are more now than just a novelty on social media, the movement has become a powerhouse industry.

Influencers took more ad revenue than magazines for the first time in 2022, and as a collective are on course to overtake newspaper advertising in the next few years.

Influencers aren’t accountable to the same powers as newspapers when it comes to editorial quality and impartiality.

This idea of influencers goes two ways - firstly there’s the idea that “anyone” can generate revenue now that it has been democratised, but secondly that a narrower field of folks even stand a chance of becoming an influencer.

The Russell Brand controversy earlier in 2023 showed how this can become dangerous. People tended to have a fixed view that almost felt curated by influencers. You either had mistrust of mainstream media, or a mistrust of the personality. It’s unlikely you’d have no opinion.

The same has happened with Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Boris Johnson in the last couple of years. Whether you think Trump caused the Capitol attack, or that Hunter Biden’s laptop is the clearest evidence of wrong-doing, or that Boris Johnson was negligent during 2020-2021 is highly likely to be affected by the way you vote.

Instead of rationally assessing the information it takes much less mental energy to jump to a conclusion that fits our own narrative.

Influencers play a role in representing a much bigger shift in our society that has quietly become dominant.

There’s a big risk associated with this: there’s no longer value in putting in the work to become a master gin distiller, much better to just get a celebrity to endorse your new brand as a “co-founder”.

We don’t need the best, we buy the most familiar.

It’s also so narrow that anyone outside that audience can’t process the fierce enthusiasm.

Last October I was at an Arsenal game and they had a new drink in the fridge in bright blue and red bottles. It meant nothing to me, but the teens around me couldn’t believe their luck - they’d be the talk of the school by taking in bottles of Prime the next day.

This obsession with nostalgia and familiarity could be a whole other post. As could be the question of whether this is even a problem if people have smiles on their faces.

There’s one other key way to filter if someone is worth our time.

Privacy Politics

Politics used to be private matter. Now it becomes important to know every perspective from every person - why is that?

Does it help us to know them better? To decide if they’re “our kind of person”?

Earlier this year the England men’s football manager, Gareth Southgate, used a press conference to ask when it became the job of a football manager untrained in these complex issues to be a spokesman for topics as diverse as LGBTQI+ rights, Middle Eastern politics, and misogyny.

Do we really need to apply these expectations to football coaches? What does it teach us about how well they can do their day job? To prejudge their future decisions?

When we were kids, it felt like left and right were much more abstract concepts.

Nowadays each touchpaper topic demands a hot take that inevitable leads to ignition and explosion.

Politicians aren’t fallible, three-dimensional humans, they’re shallow: “evil right” or “deluded left”.

Did the social media algorithms not only categorise us for their benefit, but help us to categorise ourselves and others? Once we’ve categorised them one way or another we can decide whether to save the effort of whether to trust them in the future.