Recruitment review

On the echo chamber effect

Pete Gwilliam

owner, Virtus Search

Amodern-day irony is that we now have greater access to information than ever before, but often find ourselves in echo chambers with people who share our opinions and worldviews. We all have a natural tendency to gravitate toward people who think like us, but that can lead to simply reinforcing similar opinions and forgetting that there are other people who think differently. Echo chambers can make it difficult to understand opposing viewpoints.

When we are constantly exposed to ideas or beliefs that confirm our own position, divergent opinions get marginalised because of their reduced visibility, and if everyone seems to be agreeing it can lead to a self- righteousness that isn’t healthy. Social media platforms use data to feed us more of the content we regularly digest, and it takes a conscious effort to follow accounts that you don’t always agree with to get a wider perspective and broaden the feed the algorithms would otherwise offer.

The best leaders are always open to new ideas and insights from their teams, whilst realising team members don’t always feel comfortable sharing everything they know/think. Regularly soliciting feedback and input from your team will help you identify any concerns or problems before they become larger issues, especially if you gratefully receive and respect challenging comments (which, in turn, will encourage more to speak up).

Listening to a different perspective and not judging the person for holding a point of view that may be based on values that are drastically different to your own is difficult. There is a big difference between listening to understand and trying to find angles to convince others their view is not as valid as your own.

Being able to respect someone else’s opinion, even when it’s drastically different from your own, is a crucial life skill (even more crucial when you’re in a management role); moreover, so is the necessity to realise reframing an opinion that was once entrenched doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It means that you’re willing to grow.

We will all recognise the times when we have been in discussions in which both sides focussed more on what they wanted to say than what the other person was sharing. Neither is truly acknowledging what the other person says, and certainly there is no increased understanding of the alternative perspective. It’s still about one person being right and the other person being wrong.

When we shift perspective to seeking to understand, we can almost always uncover the shades of grey. We discover the areas of commonality in what seem to be opposing views. We start to recognize that differing views are not necessarily mutually exclusive. Questions allow you to delve deeper into trying to understand why other people believe what they do – but only if those questions come from a place of open-minded curiosity rather than judgment.

When people do disagree because of entrenched positions, communication breaks down, which only pushes the conflict underground – and what goes unsaid and unheard will simply resurface again later.

Recognize that although you can potentially influence others’ decisions and behaviours, you have no control over the choices that other people make, and any fundamental change in view derives from a basis of trust, which relies on people feeling accepted for who they are and the views they hold.

It is accepted that echo chambers can change whom people trust, largely leading those in a particular chamber to distrust everybody outside of that chamber, and leading an insider’s trust for other insiders to grow unchecked. There is no doubt in my mind that this polarizes society.

We can all see distinct and different groups of people living in different worlds, populated with totally different facts, and effectively forming ”them v us“ camps on issues such as Brexit, asylum, climate change, masks, and vaccinations.

Whether or not culture wars are being orchestrated and inflamed to suit political agendas, we can consciously choose to be better and realise the danger of relying on our own echo chamber.

Hearing only like-minded views is not going to enrich decision-making, and worse still is discrediting outside perspectives because you have already made your mind up and your echo chamber has emboldened your belief. M I