Escape the echo chamber
First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult
[aeon.co]
and
This is how exit counseling works - by providing information that a cult has intentionally concealed from you.
Recruitment into a cult is where things get interesting.
A common way for aggressive cults to recruit is to market themselves to like minded groups.
If a group is not cultic, you can enjoy the group and continue to enjoy your relationships with friends and family who are not interested in participating. You will not be led to regard them as inferior or threatening to your welfare.
A cultic group may, in the early stages of your recruitment, seem just another like minded group (epistemic bubble). Over time, you are socialized to depend more and more on the group for everything you need, to the point where you incur significant "exit costs" if you consider leaving or are threatened with loss of favor.
Cults differ from like minded groups in that cults are not just good at attracting people; cults, unlike other interesting events, set things up so that leaving or disagreeing has high exit costs -- something you are NOT told about when you first get involved.
Think of the old ads for Roach Motels - Ya can check in but ya can't check out.
First you don’t hear other views. Then you can’t trust them. Your personal information network entraps you just like a cult
[aeon.co]
Quote
An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview.
But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests. When we take networks built for social reasons and start using them as our information feeds, we tend to miss out on contrary views and run into exaggerated degrees of agreement.
An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited.
Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders.
In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices.
and
Quote
In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined. The way to break an echo chamber is not to wave “the facts” in the faces of its members. It is to attack the echo chamber at its root and repair that broken trust.
This is how exit counseling works - by providing information that a cult has intentionally concealed from you.
Recruitment into a cult is where things get interesting.
A common way for aggressive cults to recruit is to market themselves to like minded groups.
If a group is not cultic, you can enjoy the group and continue to enjoy your relationships with friends and family who are not interested in participating. You will not be led to regard them as inferior or threatening to your welfare.
A cultic group may, in the early stages of your recruitment, seem just another like minded group (epistemic bubble). Over time, you are socialized to depend more and more on the group for everything you need, to the point where you incur significant "exit costs" if you consider leaving or are threatened with loss of favor.
Cults differ from like minded groups in that cults are not just good at attracting people; cults, unlike other interesting events, set things up so that leaving or disagreeing has high exit costs -- something you are NOT told about when you first get involved.
Think of the old ads for Roach Motels - Ya can check in but ya can't check out.