A group of Chinese scientists from Peking University conducted a study of the neural mechanisms of perception of misinformation in social networks.
For the study, the team asked participants to play a game that required observation of other people’s behavior and the conclusions that could be drawn from those observations.
The test subjects were randomly assigned to different “sites” in a temporary artificial society that consisted of an interconnected network of people. They could only communicate with people who were their immediate “neighbors” in that network.
The scientists, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), studied the brain activity of participants performing the task and analyzed the data using state-of-the-art computational models.
The study showed that in a networked environment, the brain can respond to situations similar to those that occur in real life. For example, if a person has a certain opinion about several competing films, he can change it based on the choice of his “neighbors”. The more unexpected the choice of neighbors, the more likely the brain will update its belief.
Social networks have been widely hypothesized to play a key role in many large-scale social phenomena, including vaccine hesitancy, voting behavior, and fake news proliferation, yet the exact mechanisms by which interpersonal connections contribute to these phenomena remain unclear. The current study sheds light on this topic from a neurocognitive perspective by elucidating how individuals actually experience and interact with a networked environment. Our data provide neural evidence for a bounded rational, network-related filtering of social information, which may result in the spread o misinformation and biased consensus among connected peers. More broadly, this work demonstrates the possibility of developing computationally-tractable and neurobiologically-plausible tools and methods for investigating the complex interplay between social behavior and social embedding in the brain, which may have the potential to translate upward for tackling phenomena in wider society
Social Media Manipulation NATO
