This reminds me of an interesting study from MIT relating to collective learning that I heard about from Cesar Hidalgo recently.

The Online Disinhibition Effect (John Suler, 2004) - the lack of restraint shown by some people when communicating online rather than in person. (It can be good as well as bad. How can we reduce the bad behavior?)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_disinhibition_effect http://truecenterpublishing.com/psycyber/disinhibit.html

A good further reading on why groups choose to believe/ cherry pick information is to read "The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil" By Philip Zimbardo

This idea that fear cannot effectively regulate behavior after a certain time is founded on basic social psychological principles. There is a concept of internal versus external justification. With an external justification, such as fear, one does something only because they know they have to, which leads to only a temporary change. Internal justifications, such as belief in a system of governance or code of ethics, leads to a permanent change because one does it because they believe it is right.

The Bystander Effect - Crowds sometimes fail to help someone in trouble: everyone assumes someone else will do it.

Similarly, people in groups often fail to check facts as carefully as they would if they were alone. They assume someone else has already checked.

Careless people, and bots, tend to share news quickly, without bothering to fact check. Once something has been shared thousands of times, even fairly careful people are likely to assume it must be true.

Again, if social media was to think a bit bigger, there are ways to apply this insight to deprivilege the influence of the quickest, and privilege the influence of those making informed decisions.

The Shouting Class -- people who criticize things as a way of life.

At least, they’ve become unavoidable in class discussions even tangentially related to social psychology. In intro sociology, they lead to some interesting thoughts about lab vs. field experiments.

Alice Maz on communication failures due to different cultures of conversation and values.

Most people value feelings, shared perspectives, and social status. They see correction as an attempt to knock them down a peg. Nerds value facts, logic, and the sharing of information. A genuine nerd shares information with no intention of knocking anyone down, and prefers being corrected to remaining misinformed.