To Think, or Not to Think: That Is the Social Media Question

As the days pass, I find myself spending less and less time on social media. Every time I open my feed on one of the major platforms, I find it clogged with a single format: one person, one camera, one set of opinions, talking directly into the lens. Video after video of someone dumping their conclusions into the void for the rest of us to absorb as fact.

All these videos tell viewers what to think, but almost never how to think: how to step back, weigh evidence, and arrive at a conclusion on their own terms rather than parroting someone else’s.

Doing the heavy lifting of thinking about why you think what you think is crucial. Cognitive scientists have spent decades studying whether thinking itself can be taught, and the answer is yes, but only through deliberate, structured practice. The psychologist Richard Mayer distilled the research into four principles. First, thinking isn’t one big muscle you strengthen all at once; it’s built from smaller, teachable component skills. Second, good instruction models the process of arriving at an answer, not just the answer itself. Third, those skills stick best when taught inside real subject matter, not as an abstract, one-size-fits-all course. Fourth, higher-order reasoning can be introduced even before the more basic skills underneath it are fully automatic.

Much of today’s social media skips these steps. Instead of teaching the people who use these apps the skills they need, it hands them ready-made opinions from people who often have little real impact on their daily lives. It rarely explains the process behind a view; it simply presents the view as a finished thought, with the reasoning left out. Our feeds often present opinion, speculation, and verified information as if they carry the same weight. The result is an echo chamber that just repeats the same things back at you.

Consider how this plays out with something as mundane as a rude encounter in a parking lot. Have a bad exchange with a stranger, and you can find no shortage of videos declaring that humanity is collapsing and kindness is hard to find. What you’ll struggle to find is a video walking you through the more useful exercise: pausing to consider what the other person might be carrying that day, examining your own reaction, and thinking about how you might actually improve the next interaction. The first kind of content is abundant because it’s easy to produce and easy to consume. The second requires something social media rarely teaches: thinking through the process of patience.

Social media can teach process well when there’s an incentive to. Look at cooking content. A good recipe video doesn’t just show a finished dish; it walks you through the sequence, ingredient by ingredient, and often includes the caveat that makes it actually useful: “no sugar on hand? Honey works fine here.” That’s a real model of thinking, a demonstration that outcomes are reached through steps, and that sometimes those steps require a pivot. The tools for teaching process exist. Platforms simply don’t apply them to the harder, messier questions of how we treat each other and what we choose to believe.

We also have to reckon with the fact that you cannot think well without a wide enough set of information to think with. If the only material feeding your judgment is a stream of two-minute clips, whatever conclusion you reach will be skewed before you even start reasoning, because your inputs were narrow by design. One of the most useful questions anyone can ask while scrolling is simply: why am I being shown this, right now? If I look up from my phone and see three hundred purple flowers, but every video on my screen is a yellow flower, something is curating what I see that has nothing to do with reality itself. We owe it to ourselves to keep asking whether what we’re being fed actually resembles the world, or just resembles what keeps us watching.

It’s easy to let someone else do the thinking for you. Who looks forward to picking an insurance policy, figuring out the best way to ask out a love interest, or researching every detail of the ballot measures they need to vote on? When you can get a quick answer from a two-minute video that sounds about right, it’s easy to accept it and apply it without stopping to ask whether it’s actually valid.

The result is a kind of slow-motion echo chamber, where millions of people end up repeating the same talking points lifted from the same handful of talking heads, mistaking repetition for consensus and consensus for truth. Which is why the most important question left for any of us scrolling through a feed isn’t about the video in front of us at all. It’s about ourselves: am I actually thinking right now, or am I just absorbing the thoughts of a stranger speaking to me through my phone?