Internal Constraints

Abstract

AbstractA second driver of many of the mechanisms perpetuating advantage and disadvantage is more internal: the scarcity of time and attention that people can devote to processing information and utilizing other such resources as are available to them. In an information-rich society such as is given to us by the internet, problems of time and attention scarcity become acute. The ways we find for coping with those problems on the internet, and the biases built into them, are emblematic of our strategies for coping with scarcities of time and attention more generally. Search engines and decision algorithms are undeniably useful for processing the flood of internet information. But they are notoriously biased in their operations, sometimes in ways that are obvious and easily remedied but often in ways that are either opaque or hard to remedy even if detected. Even if people switch from one coping strategy to another, the new one might (indeed, we have every reason to suppose that it will) also be biased in some way or another. Since we need to devote time and attention to switching, and those are scarce, the coping mechanisms we employ will tend to be ‘sticky’, perpetually instantiating the same biases time and again.