INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY Web tools and social media are our
key sources of information when we make decisions as citizens and consumers.
But these information technologies can mislead us by magnifying social
processes that distort facts and make us act contrary to our own interests –
such as buying property at wildly inflated prices because we are led to believe
that everybody else is. New research from the University of Copenhagen, which
has just been published in the journal Metaphilosophy, combines formal philosophy,
social psychology, and decision theory to understand and tackle these
phenomena.