Echo Chamber
What is an Echo Chamber?
An echo chamber is an environment, often online or within social groups, where individuals are primarily exposed to opinions, information, and beliefs that reinforce their own. In such spaces, opposing or dissenting views are minimized, ignored, or actively excluded, which can lead to the amplification of confirmation bias.
The Basic Idea
It started with a single reel—clever, a little sarcastic, and right in line with Sarah’s social and political views. She liked it, shared it, and pretty soon her Instagram feed was full of similar posts: snappy memes, headlines she agreed with, and threads where everyone seemed to be on the same page about the issues she cared about. It was oddly satisfying, and Sarah felt like she was in a conversation where everyone understood her.
A few days later, during a chat with her parents, they brought up a major news story. Sarah hadn’t seen or heard a single mention of it. Curious, she looked it up on her phone and sure enough, it was real and widely covered. Just not in her little corner of the internet. Somewhere along the way, her feed had become hyper-personalized and highly selective. Without noticing, she’d ended up in a digital space where only information and discussions she wanted to see—and agreed with—were appearing.
What Sarah experienced is known as an echo chamber. To understand our contemporary use of the term in relation to digital media, it’s useful to look at how it has been used in architecture for centuries.
If you’ve ever been into a big, domed building and shouted “hello,” chances are your words came straight back to you many times over. In physical space, an echo chamber is a structure or room specifically designed—or incidentally shaped—in such a way that sound waves reflect and reverberate extensively, creating distinct, prolonged echoes. A good example of this is Capitol Studios in Los Angeles, which houses eight subterranean echo chambers located about 30 feet beneath its parking lot.4 Each chamber is trapezoidal in shape and constructed with thick concrete walls coated in a hard, reflective lacquer. These characteristics give the space a unique acoustic profile. Designed to produce varying sound qualities, these chambers can generate reverberation times of up to five seconds, offering a rich, natural echo prized by recording engineers.
Similarly, an echo chamber is an environment (either physical or digital) in which the same opinions or ideas are bounced around, endlessly ‘echoing’ with little or no change. In other words, people within the echo chamber hear the same thing over and over, quite like how you would in Capitol Studios.
Nowadays, we mostly use the term echo chamber to refer to digital spaces and communities, but the concept can be applied to a range of contexts. Interacting with the same person day in and day out can constitute an echo chamber, as can a large congregation of worshippers at a church. Even the places we live can act, to some extent, like echo chambers. In predominantly liberal or conservative communities, similar views and assumptions tend to circulate in everyday settings—whether in cafés, local shops, schools, or neighborhood conversations—reinforcing a shared worldview through repeated exposure.
"A fantastic model of collaboration: thinking partners who aren’t echo chambers"
— Margaret Heffernan, entrepreneur, writer, and professor
About the Authors
Dan Pilat
Dan is a Co-Founder and Managing Director at The Decision Lab. He is a bestselling author of Intention - a book he wrote with Wiley on the mindful application of behavioral science in organizations. Dan has a background in organizational decision making, with a BComm in Decision & Information Systems from McGill University. He has worked on enterprise-level behavioral architecture at TD Securities and BMO Capital Markets, where he advised management on the implementation of systems processing billions of dollars per week. Driven by an appetite for the latest in technology, Dan created a course on business intelligence and lectured at McGill University, and has applied behavioral science to topics such as augmented and virtual reality.
Dr. Sekoul Krastev
Dr. Sekoul Krastev is a decision scientist and Co-Founder of The Decision Lab, one of the world's leading behavioral science consultancies. His team works with large organizations—Fortune 500 companies, governments, foundations and supernationals—to apply behavioral science and decision theory for social good. He holds a PhD in neuroscience from McGill University and is currently a visiting scholar at NYU. His work has been featured in academic journals as well as in The New York Times, Forbes, and Bloomberg. He is also the author of Intention (Wiley, 2024), a bestselling book on the science of human agency. Before founding The Decision Lab, he worked at the Boston Consulting Group and Google.
