The Social Media Mirror
When was the last time you casually glanced at someone else’s social media feed?
A few weeks ago, I found myself doing exactly that. I was sitting on one of those slightly raised bus seats, perfectly positioned behind a man scrolling endlessly through Instagram. For twenty minutes straight, his thumb never stopped moving. I couldn’t help noticing something unsettling: the world on his screen looked nothing like mine.
My own feed had led me to believe that everyone around me was deeply concerned about environmental collapse, the rise of Reform UK, and the devastating loss of innocent lives across the globe. His feed told a completely different story. Neither of us was seeing “the truth” — just a version of reality carefully tailored to our preferences. Our algorithms were doing exactly what they were designed to do: reinforcing what we already believed.
And that’s where the trouble begins.
The Roots of Black-and-White Thinking
We like to think that technology helps us understand the world better. In many ways, it does the opposite. Increasingly, it narrows our vision. Social media isn’t the sole culprit, but it has magnified a much deeper issue: our growing addiction to black-and-white thinking.
Good or bad. Us or them. Right or wrong.
This instinct isn’t new. It’s wired into us. Human brains evolved in environments where rapid judgments were essential for survival. Spotting who belonged to your tribe — and who might harm you — could mean the difference between life and death. Those quick categorizations kept our ancestors alive long enough to pass on their genes.
But what once served us well now works against us.
Why Nuance Feels Hard
In small communities facing constant physical threats, this mental shortcut made sense. In 2026, surrounded by complex global systems and abstract dangers, it leaves us intellectually cramped. We reduce people to political labels, moral stereotypes, or single opinions — often based on a tweet, a headline, or a fleeting impression. Real human beings are far messier, richer, and more contradictory than that.
The appeal of simplification is obvious. Thinking deeply is exhausting. Genuine reasoning — holding competing ideas in your head, revising your beliefs, admitting uncertainty — demands effort. It’s far easier to bend new information to fit what we already “know.” Doing so protects our mental energy and gives us the comforting illusion that we understand the world.
How Social Media Exploits Us
Social media platforms exploit this tendency brilliantly.
Their algorithms are finely tuned to reward certainty, outrage, and affirmation. Bit by bit, they feed us content that confirms our views, until our personalised echo chambers start to feel like objective reality. Disagreement begins to look like ignorance. Complexity feels like weakness.
What disappears first is nuance.
We lose the patience to recognise that most issues are deeply complicated, that reasonable people can disagree in good faith, and that truth is often fragmented rather than absolute. Along with nuance goes intellectual humility — the willingness to be wrong, to listen, to change our minds. In its place, we get political discourse that resembles propaganda, and a casual ease with which entire groups of people are dismissed as stupid, dangerous, or morally corrupt.
The Role of Education
Institutions like the University of Oxford, for all their flaws, at least attempt to push back against this impulse. Through tutorials and seminars, students are trained to interrogate sources, consider alternative perspectives, question whether ideas hold across time and context, and step back to see the broader picture. It’s an education in resisting simplicity.
But even this is only a partial remedy.
We can’t simply think our way out of millions of years of evolution — especially when powerful companies profit from keeping us reactive and divided. Still, awareness matters. Recognising our own tendency toward snap judgments is a starting point.
A Call for Reflection
The next time you catch yourself reducing someone to a label — based on their politics, background, or online presence — pause for a moment. Ask yourself: What else might be true about this person? What doesn’t fit the story I’ve just told myself?
Because the alternative is bleak: a world where people are flattened into caricatures, where resentment thrives, and where division becomes the default setting.
And that world leaves no room for grey — only sides.