Get Inked
That humans are social beings is a well-established fact. We prefer carrying out most of our ventures in groups and rightly so, as things are always more interesting when we have company. However, this herd mentality can be detrimental to the basic requirement of a functional democracy: a fair and accurate election process. This mentality can be observed in any setting that involves groups of people, like schools, colleges and social media.
At workplaces, there is a general consensus that working together and reaching a collective solution increases productivity, but this isn’t the case during a democratic election. In this era of malicious misinformation, it is very easy for corrupt politicians to manipulate voters into casting their votes for an undesirable candidate. People in a group tend to agree with each other in order to minimize conflict, even if the group’s outlook as a whole is factually incorrect, unethical, or generally not accepted by society. There’s a pretty good chance that most members of a family vote for the same party’s candidate, every single time, almost like tradition.
Social psychologists define something called the Bandwagon effect. According to this effect, a person is highly likely to change his/her opinion when confronted by the fact that the majority of his/her peer group has a different opinion. Ardent political discussions among friends or family can go a long way in deciding whom a person votes for, regardless of the veracity of the information exchanged.
The 42nd Amendment of the Indian Constitution enshrined in it the concept of Fundamental Duties. With the constitution being an ever-evolving piece of social legislation, moral guideline and legal doctrine, it was felt imperative that residents of the nation acknowledge the basic duties that they must follow in order to live in a society of harmony and progress.
Having 11 ideals to follow, they form the notion of what a basic citizen must be; a role model to follow, if you will. In today’s day and age, it has become necessary to examine clause 5, one which intends to promote harmony and spirit of brotherhood; and clause 8, which calls for the development of scientific temper and spirit of enquiry and reform.
Today’s information era makes it easy for obedience to clause 8, owing to the simply massive amounts of knowledge disseminated through the internet. And yet, here comes the paradox: if the truth can be received faster than ever, then so can falsehood.
This ultimately leads to the degradation of the former clause 5, as seen in cases of mobs mobilizing to lynch people on the suspicion of kidnapping. While this can be made to seem like a one-off incident, the fact of the matter is that this affects every atom of our political consciousness. Skewed data, fake tweets, doctored photographs spread like wildfire without critical examination in order to incense sensitive issues close to people’s identity. In the end, it is nothing other than a ploy to exploit the mass to become the master.
Coming full circle to our duties, thus, it is now required to have a sense of journalistic vigour in each one of us, for actual journalists seem to lack in them nowadays. To keep our nation going, we must become a nation of skeptics.
Another factor that could cloud one’s opinion is the availability heuristic.
Availability Heuristics refers to the phenomena where the brain takes a mental and logical shortcut to have an opinion on a person/situation/event. The brain is often extremely lazy and tries to simplify complicated problems, which can lead to loss of context, clarity, and in essence, the truth.
This phenomenon plays a huge role in the development of factionalism of our society. People often make hasty decisions due to lack of proper information, largely contributed by the presence of information from unreliable sites. Under the banner of “different interpretation of data”, these news organisations cherry pick favourable data, manipulate them, use subtle moves (for example, various News channels label people as “Anti-national” when they disagree with them in their live debates) and sometimes outright lie about situations just to make their faction look better than their “distinguished competition”.
This problem is made worse when you consider online sources for information. Taking an example of the 2016 US Presidential Election, various surveys concluded that more than 80 per cent of the people used online news sources, and these sources were infamous for using clickbait, misleading titles, and sometimes outright lying about various facts. These problems can be seen in our nation too, but to a lesser extent.
On the whole, it is high time that we, as responsible citizens, recognize the need to make informed decisions on whom to vote for. Before you cast your vote, take some time to peruse the manifestos of the contesting candidates. Do your research. Take advice with a liberal pinch of salt. Vote for whoever you think has the most to offer; not the one everyone else is rooting for.
This article was written in collaboration with D Rohit, Shreyas Mahesh and Akash Mani.
