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Gibson Nyikadzino Correspondent
Picture this scenario: “Your favourite sports team commits a serious foul which you admit is against the rules of the game. But your fellow fans think the foul committed by your team is totally acceptable.”
This becomes an uncomfortable state of limbo in which people may be tempted to blame the referee or complain that the other team is being targeted or to think there was no foul in the first place.
In such a scenario, people are motivated to maintain a positive relation with their group than to maintain a view of the world that is accurate.
The tension that exists in this situation is what is known as cognitive dissonance. Such behaviours are often dangerous when it comes to politics.
What makes this behaviour dangerous is in trying to understand whether someone’s political identity can affect their ability to process information and establish reasonable conclusions by weighing facts.
At an individual scale, political party allegiance allows supporters to create an identity.
However, cognitive dissonance can make people reject even reality, because they want to defend and maintain a certain party line.
Social media and networking application have become a pervasive force in national and international political jurisdictions, altering the communication dynamics between political leaders, influencers, “human rights defenders”, activists, journalists, and the public.
For unknown reasons, people have since become irrational about politics.
In this era of increased polarisation, it has become commonplace to attribute to a political opponents’ belief as irrational.
An irrational electorate
There are some explanations that have been given to explain the growing tenacity by political supporters and citizens to rely on partisan news or the social media bubble.
Without doubt, social media have opened a new ground to expand the irrationality of human beings when it comes to politics and voting.
Who remembers the 2018 picture of then MDC-Alliance presidential aspirant Mr Nelson Chamisa with “V11 papers and evidence” to overturn President Mnangagwa’s victory in court to his favour?
Who also remembers Mr Chamisa in December 2018 being quoted in a local newspaper saying “ED to go in five months”?
Such is the irrationality in politics and a misfortune believed by Mr Chamisa’s supporters.
These are the genetic defects of the advent of social media in politics. When the mind cannot accept the truth, it starts to believe that it must be the reality that is wrong.
This is what plays in the minds of the opposition CCC leaders and their supporters.
The growth of social media use in politics has increased political irrationality, where many politicians play the populist card on social media in the hope to win votes and make more personal gains.
It is healthy to assume that human beings are independent and are able to make rational political choices when voting, but while that assumption is true, human beings can also be politically irrational.
All this lies in social association.
The more individuals grow and attach towards a specific, partisan agenda, the more they are prone towards extremism and fundamentalism, which are also elements of political irrationality.
The curse of echo chambers
It is key to highlight that studies that have been conducted the world over have so far shown that influence through social media matters for political activity.
Spaces like Twitter, Truth, Facebook, TikTok and Instagram have become go-to arenas for politicians and their supporters to get instructions, plans, strategy and in some cases, policy reflections.
Often, social media has been praised for promoting dialogue and exchange, and that there is no better way to test views and ideas than through disputation and scrutiny.
Perhaps this explains MDC-T’s Mr Douglas Mwonzora’s philosophy of “politics of rational disputation”.
Social media has also proven to be a theatre exacerbating political polarisation through politics of irrational disputation by creating and encouraging continued establishment of echo chambers that prevent people from being rational.
These echo chambers are bastions of like-minded irrational people who arrive at decisions without an interplay with logic.
The essence of echo chambers is specifically to likely target people who believe specific falsehoods, for instance, those believing that life under Ian Douglas Smith was better than in post-independent Zimbabwe or that there are no sanctions in Zimbabwe.
It is on platforms like Facebook and Twitter where there is the existence of the narrowest and very loud echo chambers being ridden to have a strong effect on dividing people, especially by the opposition through their Western funders, to polarise the country ahead of the 2023 elections.
Resisting the distortion filter
A growing number of people are coming to the conclusions that social media have too much influence on important social and political conversations.
From the political landscape in Zimbabwe, it can be presumed that social media political use enables political and social participation.
However, there are dangers that should be avoided, chief among them misinformation.
There are strategies that have been presented by cognitive scientists to resist the distortions and misrepresentations that have been adopted by many social media politicians and activists.
Naturally, people are more biased than what they think.
To avoid political irrationality, when one encounters new information, they ought to make a deliberate effort to evaluate it analytically.
It is important to fact-check and questioning assumptions that are being targeted by certain echo chambers.
Zimbabwe’s democracy cannot develop fully with the politics inspired by this kind of error, where toxicity is the order of the day.
It is true that someone’s political identity can affect their ability to process information. It is so because of a socio-political phenomenon known as partisanship.
Partisanship is a particular and strong bias towards the preferences of one group over another.
One’s preference of party A to party X should be judged on ideas, values, policy and not partisanship.
It is also key to appreciate that political, religious and national identities are all different forms of partisanships, however, as Zimbabweans, the sense of self that we carry not only gets judged by who we are, but also by the group of people we associate ourselves with despite political affiliation.
Identifying with a social group is a healthy part of human life. But it becomes a problem when the group’s beliefs are at odds with reality.
Think critically!
All facts and truths ought to be grounded in reason.
Zimbabweans in the political sphere should resist the temptation of trying to solve problems and disagreements with partisanship, for that affects the nation’s ability to make evidence-based decisions about our shared reality.
Echo chambers must also be fought through analysing and dissecting what is presented as fact on the internet and social media, and separating fact from fiction.
While we have the freedom to choose and belong to political party for identity purposes, people should also think in terms of values and objectives, it often makes more good than harm.
Some social and political challenges that communities the world over face are showing evidence on the dire need for critical thinking skills and data analytics to come to an informed conclusion or decision on how challenges can be faced.
It is unfortunate that most people pass on wrong information or develop opinions based on emotions alone and then rage within the falsehood, drawing a line of “I am right and you are wrong”.
Logic and building a solid foundation of reasoning should be the premise of political and ideological contestations.
In the face of contradictions, and to maintain the essence of humanity, it is important to remember Aristotle when he said: “It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it.”
Online Reporter