The Psychology behind Information Overload

Hey dear community, first of all I hope that you are all doing well and that you had a day full of interesting experiences! In this article I would like to discuss psychology and hope you are able to expand your knowledge about this interesting topic.

Information overload means when a lot of information affects people from outside that they cannot handle and since people have to process a lot of information at the same time, it is very difficult to separate them from each other and consider the usefulness behind it. This phenomenon is often seen in the media landscape and here meaningful and meaningless information are often mixed together and for the viewer, it is very difficult to understand the actual meaning of a message in such a short period of time and there is a distortion of perception and that some information are only partially absorbed. In recent decades, there is a clear upward trend of information overload, which is largely due to the fact that more and more information has reached people due to the growing digitisation and the type of media has changed so much that people are almost always dealing with information and a good example is social media where this phenomenon often occurs and also in the field of marketing you can see it. From a psychological point of view, it often happens in this context that certain areas of the brain no longer work as they actually would and there is a change in cognitive abilities and often the whole thing happens unconsciously which makes it particularly difficult to deal with it and too much information can also lead to a kind of collapse. It also depends on the type of information that affects people and there are numerous influencing factors such as the type of information that can further enhance the whole thing and especially with informations that are difficult for the human brain to process and also the way in which information are decorated such as certain colors or tones also have a strong influence. How strongly the individual reacts to this is always very different and the effect in the long term is also interesting because it comes to the fact that people no longer do things as productively as they would otherwise do and it can even lead to the occurrence of stress and also the patterns that arise and are associated with moments and other perceptions are stored in the subconscious also have an additional influence on the behaviour.

Thank you very much for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about psychology! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.