'When people gather in groups, bizarre behaviors often emerge': How the rise of online social networks has catapulted dysfunctional thinking

Opinion

By Fatima Seeme, David Green, Carlo Kopp published September 17, 2025

The pervasive spread of misinformation can be tracked to cognitive limitations, social influence and the global spread of online networks. Combatting it has become an "arms race" between truth and lies.When the COVID-19 pandemic broke out, a bizarre conspiracy theory swept through global social media: that the disease was caused by radio-frequency emissions from 5G cell phone towers. The wild theories spread across social media platforms. The belief in this conspiracy was so fervent that the media reported more than 100 incidents of arson and vandalism against 5G (and 4G) infrastructure, as well as numerous instances of abusive or threatening behavior against telecommunications workers.

Why do bizarre events like this happen? In our recent review article, published May 19 in the journal Frontiers in Communication, we showed that conspiracy theories and other widespread incorrect beliefs emerge from complex interactions involving people's cognitive limitations, social influence in groups, and the global-scale spread of ideas across social networks.

This fatal combination of processes at different scales — individual, group and global — has led to the online problems we are seeing today. Their complexity makes the resulting social trends incredibly difficult to combat.

Primed for poor thinking and bizarre group behaviors

The root cause of poor thinking lies in our evolution. Our ability to cope with complex information is limited, so our brains take shortcuts, such as confirmation bias — the tendency to notice things that match our preexisting beliefs and ignore those that don't. For example, we quickly forget waiting in a fast queue but remember how annoying a slow queue is, and ask, "Why am I always in the slow queue?"
Snip...more...
https://www.livescience.com/human-behavior/when-people-gather-in-groups-bizarre-behaviors-often-emerge-how-the-rise-of-online-social-networks-has-catapulted-dysfunctional-thinking-opinion