Social Media and Cognitive Bias

Read the following passage and answer the items that follow. Your answers to these items should be based on the passage only.

Passage 1

Social media platforms, while apparently democratizing access to information, often engender cognitive fragmentation by reinforcing users’ pre-existing beliefs. Through algorithmic curation designed to maximize engagement, social media platforms construct echo chambers where individuals encounter ideologically aligned content, rarely exposed to dissenting perspectives. This selective exposure cultivates the illusion of knowledge, users feel informed while consuming affirmational rather than educational content. The velocity of misinformation propagation, combined with low epistemic friction, amplifies superficial understanding over critical reflection. As cognitive biases like confirmation bias and the Dunning-Kruger effect proliferate online, genuine deliberative discourse erodes. Consequently, social media fosters overconfidence, polarisation, and a degradation of democratic dialogue, impeding the cultivation of nuanced, reflective public understanding in an age saturated by curated information.

51.Based on the above passage, the following assumptions have been made:

1.Cognitive coherence within a society is critically dependent on individuals being regularly exposed to and processing a common, uncurated set of information.

2.Low epistemic friction counters the fact that critical reflection and genuine understanding are significantly enhanced by the cognitive effort required to process challenging, diverse, or contradictory information.

Which of the assumptions given above are valid?

(a)1 only

(b)2 only

(c)Both 1 and 2

(d)Neither 1 nor 2