Breaking free of the echo chamber

By Matt Reese

Comfort is among our greatest desires, and our greatest enemies.

We each have a set of values and beliefs and we tend to be most comfortable when those values align with the people around us and are reinforced by the information we gather. This environment is often referred to as an echo chamber, which can feel very comfortable, familiar and safe. But there are some dangers.  

Melanie Wilt is a Clark County Commissioner with a career spent in the field of public relations, largely involving agriculture. She found herself in the global spotlight as a spokesperson for now world-famous Springfield, Ohio after comments about the Haitian immigrant population were made in debates leading up to the 2024 Presidential Election.

“What I witnessed was people feeding off of information that supported their own bias. If their bias was: ‘we don’t want people who don’t look like us in our community,’ then I’m going to go out there and look for information that will feed that bias. The same could be said for those who want to see a less homogeneous community and more diversity. They may have been more likely to say, ‘We want to support people coming in. We want to be a welcoming community.’ It built these echo chambers with people finding a way to support something negative about an entire community within our community,” Wilt said. “We tend to relate very easily to somebody who looks like us, talks like us and presents themselves like us. We probably should have a little more caution with that and, conversely, probably less caution with someone who does not. We want to look at things in a homogeneous way instead of letting someone challenge us. People feel comfortable in the black and white. Where they don’t feel comfortable is in the gray area, which is the nuance in between. That nuance is where the truth is going to come out, but the black and white is where people live comfortably, and we seek out things that make us comfortable.”

In recent decades, social media and media outlets have increasingly catered to, and capitalized upon, this.

“I was the PR person at the Department of Agriculture. I worked with a lot of journalists around the state. I would occasionally have a reporter come to me wanting to do an interview and I felt they already had their story written. Nothing to me was more frustrating than trying to have a conversation with a reporter who already had their story written because all they were doing was seeking information to support the hypothesis they had made,” Wilt said. “That’s what we do as individuals. We have a hypothesis and we want to support that hypothesis, but we’re better off as a society if we allow ourselves to challenge that hypothesis every now and then. Sometimes we’re wrong and when we can prove ourselves wrong, that’s how we get better. It’s in our failure that we’re going to find the right way forward.

“Ask yourself questions that challenge your own thought process. Look at things from somebody else’s point of view. We have to be careful not to feed our own narrative. It’s OK to have a value system through which we filter information, but we can’t let that dictate the narrative.”

Ty Higgins with Ohio Farm Bureau has spent his career in (and working with) the media and seen the value of agriculturalists understanding perspectives off the farm.

“We recently had Ag Day at the Capital, and we had a panel of Republicans and Democrats sitting up there talking with our members to get that holistic perspective. To be able to work across the aisle is going to give us much stronger policy, not just for agriculture, but for all Ohioans. We live in such a connected world and we do want to flock together, but I think more good things happen if we work to, maybe not agree with everybody, but understand where everybody’s coming from,” Higgins said. “The farming community doesn’t think that the people that consume our products really know what we do, and that’s probably true for most cases. We say, ‘Oh I’d like to see them try and grow a garden and sustain their own table three meals a day.’ But at the same time, if we just grew food for ourselves as farmers, we’d be out of business pretty quickly. We need each other in order to survive. It is hard when you’re less than 2% of the population to understand that you need the other 98% to survive, knowing that many of that 98% probably don’t think like you or even understand how you think or go about your business. But the most successful businesses understand what the customer wants and they formulate their product around those thought processes.”

To run better businesses and be better people, Higgins advises taking steps to break out of the echo chambers we build.

“I married a city girl and I live in suburbia. My in-laws think very differently than I do, so those conversations around the Thanksgiving and Christmas table will get very interesting. It helps me not only realize their perspective but also helps me refine mine. I think that’s important. If you can find someone with a different perspective to have a calm, meaningful conversation about why they think the way they do and why you think the way you do, you may never get to the middle, but you’ll at least get out of your comfort zone a little bit, grow as a as a human being and maybe think a little bit differently about the other side,” Higgins said. “I have a unique hobby, especially when news breaks, to flip from one channel to another and just see how the rhetoric changes depending on the station. I recommend people do that. You may get a little bit worked up, but you need to understand that there are people who believe what’s happening on that news station, just like you believe your news station — and that’s OK.”