Wicked problems, social media, and how to overcome the epistemological crisis

The COVID Pandemic, the most disruptive event since the Second World War, is a good example of a wicked problem. It has multiple, interrelated aspects, and every time we take an action to address one aspect, that very action makes other aspects worse than they would have been otherwise. The aspects are perversely related to one another: e.g. actions addressing epidemiological aspects of the Pandemic created difficulties in the economy, and, presumptively, vice versa.

Any wicked problem is an occasion for different people to have different reasonable but often incompatible ideas about how to approach it. Chief Health Officers might properly emphasize health-related aspects of the problem, whereas Chief Executive Officers of major firms might emphasize aspects of the problem relevant to the economy.

Both these takes (and others) are reasonable and yet they are potentially incompatible; the economy can’t be both open (to protect it) and closed (to slow the spread of disease). Each approach would be only partially successful in addressing the overall problem; each approach leaves a nasty remainder. Wicked problems don’t have sweet spot solutions.

What seems to have happened in Australia is that these two, and other, perspectives were politically mediated, so that Chief Health Officers didn’t get as much as they would have liked, but neither did CEOs. If there was no sweet spot, at least it seemed to be possible to avoid the bitterest spots; there was a partial “solution” on which otherwise differently-minded participants converged … and it was compromise between those with different perspectives that made this possible.

Social Media

Another set of ideas involves the rise of internet facilitated social media platforms that enable individuals to say to many others whatever they choose.

The social media landscape is an archipelago, with islands of intensely intercommunicating participants separated by large gaps across which communication is fitful and low-fidelity, indeed often grossly distorted.

These islands are created by a convergence of basic human psychology and social media tools.

The psychology is that we like to be in groups whose members share our thinking and feeling (cf. social comparison theory, à la Leon Festinger.) The social media tools – of likes, shares, and follows – make it easy for us to join such groups.

Importantly, these islands of the like-minded often quickly become echo chambers, where (think QAnon) participants drive each other to more extreme versions of the thoughts they share and to greater degrees of orthodoxy in their thinking.

Again, the psychology is simple. Membership is conditional upon the alignment of a person’s thinking with the thinking characteristic of the group. If a new member has reservations about the group’s characteristic thinking – for example because they recognise that there are multiple perspectives and that the focal problem for the group is, in fact, a wicked problem – they might opt out, but, if not, they will need to silence their reservations in order to be comfortable, psychologically, in their membership (this is dissonance reduction à la Festinger) … indeed, in order to avoid being driven out. Once reservations are silenced all around, it becomes a race to the bottom, with various members competing with one another to express their commitment to the group.

What happens when wicked problems encounter social media echo chambers?

The Epistemological Crisis

Because a wicked problem has only partial solutions, we’re all, inevitably, going to have to decide which aspect is important to us and which we’re going to treat as unhappy remainders of our chosen approach.

What’s different with the rise of social media is that we can now find insulated and uncurated space, where everyone agrees with us about which approach to a wicked problem is better and where the game within that space is to ignore the unpleasant side-effects of the socially preferred approach and to enforce orthodoxy about this preference within the group.

And this explains what we plainly witness, namely, the polarisation of “discussion” on social media platforms where a self-stirring group which has one preferred approach to a wicked problem demonizes other also self-stirring groups which have other approaches to this problem, despite the possibility that none of these approaches is an unreasonable one and that all of them represent only partial “solutions”. Each group could be seeing an aspect that’s relevant to the problem, but they’re not able to acknowledge that the other groups might also be seeing aspects that are relevant, because what the other groups are seeing are aspects that they have had to discount, for dissonance reduction, as bad consequences of their own favored approach.

The inhabitants of each such echo chamber just ignore the inhabitants of others or, worse still, exchange insults across the gaps that separate them. Indeed, there are polarisation entrepreneurs working the social media to demonise those outside any given echo chamber as morally depraved, or perhaps craven (“sheeple” is a word that’s been used), or so befuddled by “fake news” that it would be pointless and immoral to engage with them.

These are the mechanisms that have given us the epistemological crisis of contemporary culture, manifested, for example, in science scepticism, distrust of experts, intolerance, fundamentalism, authoritarianism, populism, polarisation, erosion of civility, and an unwillingness to engage in constructive discussion or to compromise with “others”.

What’s the alternative to such mutual assured demonisation?

The Principle of Civility

Whenever we encounter people whose views are different from our own, we should attribute to them as much wisdom, knowledge, and good judgment as we’d like them to attribute to us. The Golden Rule, in other words. We don’t assume, from the bare fact of their disagreeing with us, that our interlocutors are stupid or ignorant or evil. More importantly, we try to consider not just what they believe but how they came to believe as they do. This crucially involves listening to them.

And perhaps, by listening, we discover that, though we wouldn’t have, indeed didn’t, think things through the same way they did, they nevertheless did think things through … and maybe even in a way that makes sense to us. In some cases, we will indeed “get it” why they believe what they do. In some cases, we will perhaps see aspects of the issue that we, through social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms, or maybe just from perspectival effects, didn’t initially see.

And when we execute civility in this sense, we don’t demonize our “opponents”; we humanize them. And, crucially, we make it easier for them to humanize us; perhaps our civility will be reciprocated. And when that does happen, we can, together, create a space where we’re interested in each other … where we’re not just trying to score points or to win favor with our own in-group. Where we’re trying to expand the circle of our fellows to include rather than exclude those who aren’t just like us, in order, if we’re lucky, to build a compromise between us … a solution that gives each of us some, but unavoidably not all, of what we’re looking for.

Civility requires discipline. There are social comparison and dissonance reduction mechanisms that we need to be aware of and to rein in if we are to exercise civility. It also requires institutional settings in which different points of view can be brought together. But it’s by exercising this discipline in such settings that we can engineer compromises as an alternative to the war of all against all that increasingly constitutes our cultural situation.