REVIEW article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Media Governance and the Public Sphere
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1547489
Ignorance of the crowd: Dysfunctional thinking in social networks
Provisionally accepted
- Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
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Cognitive dysfunction, and the resulting social behaviors, contribute to major social problems, ranging from polarization to the spread of conspiracy theories. Most previous studies have explored these problems at a specific scale: individual, group, or societal. This study develops a synthesis that links models of cognitive failures at these three scales. First, cognitive limits and innate drives can lead to dysfunctional cognition in individuals. Second, cognitive biases and social effects further influence group behavior. Third, social networks cause cascading effects that increase the intensity and scale of dysfunctional group behavior. Advances in communications and information technology, especially the Internet and AI, have exacerbated established problems by accelerating the spread of false beliefs and false interpretations on an unprecedented scale, and have become an enabler for emergent effects hitherto only seen on a smaller scale. Finally, this study explores mechanisms used to manipulate people's beliefs by exploiting these biases and behaviors, notably gaslighting, propaganda, fake news, and promotion of conspiracy theories.
Keywords: Cognition, Cognitive error, social cognitive error, Social network, artificial intelligence, emergence, complex systems, gaslighting
Received: 18 Dec 2024; Accepted: 22 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Seeme, Green and Kopp. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Carlo Kopp, Faculty of Information Technology, Monash University, Clayton, Australia
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