My mum used to have a t-shirt that read, “it’s probably more complicated than that”. As a guiding mantra when entering into a debate on anything in life we could all do worse than adopt this, yet at the same time there is an alluring pressure to make things simple. Above my desk, as I write this, I have a schematic of the cognitive bias codex as a reminder to myself of the complexity of the human brain. Of course it doesn’t stop me from falling into the traps, it just reminds me that I probably have.

We know that in times of stress and pressure we can rely more on our unconscious brain and that it can also be the place where some of the biases are held, to help make sense of information quickly and simply. And of course, most of us have lived through a period of sustained stress and pressure, so it is perhaps unexpected when we are so tired, so consumed with the pressures of life, so run down as a society that we want to make other things simpler.

Right. Wrong.

Good. Bad.

With. Against.

Fair. Unfair.

Politicians, media and campaigners understand this well. They’ve learnt the tricks of manipulation and use them freely. We call them out on it when they are suggesting something we disagree with, yet we lap it up when used on something that we agree with – the bandwagon effect. And at the same time our confirmation bias allows us to label “facts” as misinformation when they disagree with our argument, but accept “misinformation” as facts when they prove our case. And the funny thing is that most of us, if we take a little time to reflect, know this and can probably recognise when we have done this.

There was a lovely example of this recently with the launch of Threads in the battle between Facebook and Twitter. I watched as people moved across to the new platform and proclaimed how wonderful it was to find a platform where there was none of the hate or noise, a pure place like back in the early days. And then I watched as the same people, started to exhibit the same behaviours as they denounced on Twitter, sharing misinformation and biased political commentary. Of course, it isn’t the platform that makes the culture it is the people, what they were celebrating was the temporary loss of “the other lot”.

So what do we take from this? I don’t know. People are tired, we’ve been through (and are going through) a really difficult period in society. We all have a need to make things easier for ourselves and that might mean more judgment and less curiosity. We can’t stop that in society, but we can observe it in ourselves and our behaviour. And at the end of the day, it probably is more complicated than that – so maybe we don’t have to have an opinion right now or at all. Maybe that’s a start.