Rita's Political Psychology Blog

Like everything there is a positive and a negative side. Social Media is a fast growing platform that is accessible, dangerous, and open. Social media allows the expansion of relationships and boundless communication. This platform has created a window for anonymous 24/7 activity that has no geographic limitations. Although this is beneficial in many ways, it is manipulated by people who turn it into a dangerous place, also known as the dark web. Due to anonymity, people can do and say whatever they want without consequence and with influential young users it can be detrimental. People can put out false information and create a frenzy upon people. Majority of internet users are youth and they extremely influential, making them prone to believing most of the things they hear. And because they are addicted to social media, that is their only source of information. False information can spread like wildfire on the internet and it does not allow for real information to be presented often.

After reading "Why We Believe Fake News" by BBC, the idea of people receiving their information from specifically selected sources is reinforced. I believe that people believe and know what they want to believe and know. An ignorant person can have impulse opinions and if they hear someone trying to "inform" them about a topic, they are more likely to believe that person. If a person has little  to no awarness of something and there is sufficient information provided, then the person is more prone to believe that information is correct. In the era of social media there is an abundance of false and true information, but the false information is being emphasized on more accessible platforms to the impressionable unaware people and are not filtered out. People are less likely to read a long article with a bunch of information, numbers, and a vernacular they do not understand, than to read a short article with an eye catching headline. This is an epidemic. It is not...

Connecting the ISPP article and "The Crowd" reading, we realize the consequences, both positive and negative, of individualism and being a part of a group. There are three very different and distinct aspects in being a political animal that are identified in the ISPP article. The first characteristic is that the human mind is shaped by social processes meaning that we are influenced by the aspects that characterize the social system. The second characteristic is that the human self is designed to expand and include other to form a group. This allows people to identify the ins and outs of a group, figuring out if the groups' beliefs are aligned with the individual or not. The last one is that people act to advance their group-based view of the world, comparing and contrasting groups. Individuals act in way that they learn and progress their interests as themselves and as subgroups. An example of this is labeling oneself as Liberal or Conservative. Humans are political ...