Who Is Setting the Speed of Your Thinking?
Psychological friction, certainty and our direction of travel through the Six Stages Framework.
SSF Weekly Reflection #14 | Through the SSF Lens
By Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah
Chartered Educational Psychologist & Founder of the Six Stages Framework
Have you noticed how quickly a viewpoint can begin to feel like a certainty?
A few minutes of scrolling. One video becomes another. A concern becomes an explanation. An explanation becomes confirmation. Before we have consciously noticed what is happening, the digital environment surrounding us may already have shifted.
When I first developed the Six Stages Framework (SSF), I was interested in human movement: how people move towards greater awareness, reflection and advocacy, but also how they can move towards dismissal, hostility, blame and increasingly entrenched positions. That movement has never been linear or inevitable. People can move forwards, backwards and sideways. Context matters. Relationships matter. Experiences matter.
More recently, I have been extending this thinking by asking not only where we are positioned, but what states we occupy and what environments may be drawing us in particular directions. In What State Are You Occupying? And What State Are You Being Drawn Into?, I explored how emotions, circumstances, groups and environments may affect the positions we occupy at different moments.
But there is another question that I think we now need to ask:
What happens when the environment begins to move faster than our capacity to reflect on where we are going?
This is where I want to introduce the idea of algorithmic acceleration.
Digital systems do not determine where somebody will end up on the SSF. Human beings retain agency, and behaviour is influenced by many interacting personal, relational, social and structural factors. But digital architecture can change the conditions, intensity and speed of exposure.
And that matters.
Algorithmic Acceleration: Entering the Slipway
Imagine someone opening a social-media platform with no intention of seeking hostile or extreme content. It might be a young person looking for gaming or fitness videos, someone coping with loneliness, an employee scrolling during a lunch break, or someone trying to understand a social issue they have recently encountered.
They may begin at Stage −1: Unaware & Inactive.
The content around them gradually becomes more provocative. They encounter a joke, meme or commentary dismissing another person’s experience. Perhaps they disagree initially. Perhaps they simply keep watching. Perhaps they tell themselves, “It is only a joke.” This can begin to resemble Stage −2: Dismissive & Avoidant.
The recommendation system has not changed that person’s beliefs. But it has learned something about what captured their attention. More similar material appears. Repetition makes unfamiliar language familiar. Humour can make hostility feel more socially permissible. Claims encountered repeatedly may begin to feel less exceptional.
There is evidence that this process can happen remarkably quickly. Research led by UCL, working with the University of Kent and the Association of School and College Leaders, created archetypal young-male TikTok accounts and examined the recommendations they received. After five days, the proportion of misogynistic content presented to those accounts had increased fourfold, from 13% to 56%. The researchers also found through interviews with school leaders that some misogynistic language and ideas were moving from online spaces into everyday school culture. [Read the UCL research on social-media algorithms and misogynistic content.]
And now something psychologically important can happen. Discomfort, uncertainty or frustration may meet an apparently simple explanation.
At Stage −3: Hostility & Rejection, difference is increasingly experienced as something to resist, reject or attack. At Stage −4: Blaming & Deflecting, increasingly complex experiences can become organised around somebody or something else being responsible: women, men, immigrants, Black people, white people, LGBTQ+ communities, disabled people, DEI, “the woke”, “the establishment”, or whichever target best fits the particular narrative being repeatedly reinforced.
Through the SSF lens, the important question is not simply, What content did they see? It is also:
What is happening to their direction of travel while they are seeing it?
Algorithmic Acceleration and the Psychological Distance Between Discomfort and Certainty
This brings me to what I think may be the most important psychological issue.
What happens to discomfort next?
Discomfort does not automatically lead somebody towards either side of the SSF. It can become curiosity, but it can also become threat. It can lead us to ask, Why am I feeling this? Or it can become, Who can I blame for making me feel this?
This connects with another question I have been exploring through the SSF: how quickly we seek certainty when uncertainty becomes uncomfortable. In Accountability and Certainty: When the Evidence Is Never Enough, I considered our different roads to certainty and what happens when uncertainty either supports curiosity or becomes a place in which we remain stuck.
Algorithmic acceleration adds another dimension.
In ordinary life, there may once have been more interruptions between discomfort and certainty: a conversation, a disagreement, a night’s sleep, another experience, somebody challenging the explanation, or simply the opportunity to say, I am not sure yet.
Digital environments can dramatically compress that space. Instead of discomfort being followed by pause, exploration, alternative perspectives and reflection, it may be followed almost immediately by explanation, confirmation, repetition, community and certainty.
Recent experimental research published in Nature adds an interesting dimension to this. In a randomised study involving 2,000 participants, engagement-based feeds amplified intergroup, moralised, emotional and toxic content compared with reverse-chronological feeds. A differently designed feed reduced exposure to these forms of content while maintaining comparable levels of platform enjoyment. [Read the 2026 Nature study on feed design and algorithmic amplification.]
This does not mean that algorithms create beliefs from nothing. But it does suggest that design influences the informational and emotional environment within which beliefs are encountered, strengthened and rehearsed.
The danger is not simply that an algorithm may show us harmful content. It is that it may reduce the psychological distance between discomfort and certainty.
Algorithmic Acceleration and the Cave of Simplification
This is where algorithmic acceleration intersects with what I describe within the SSF as the Cave of Simplification.
Complex human problems rarely have one cause. Loneliness is complex. Economic insecurity is complex. Changing gender expectations are complex. Migration is complex. Racism is complex. Belonging is complex. Identity is complex. Workplace inequality is complex.
But complexity is psychologically demanding.
The Cave of Simplification offers something much easier: one explanation, one enemy, one certainty. Digital environments can then repeatedly reinforce that certainty, narrowing the range of explanations that feel plausible and strengthening the impression that a complex issue has finally become simple.
This is not a new concern within my SSF work. In my recent retrospective, Gender Bias, Misogyny and Backlash: What Did the Six Stages Framework See?, I returned to earlier work on gender, social media, misinformation, anger, group influence and backlash. One of the questions emerging from that reflection was not simply where somebody is, but what is influencing their movement.
Algorithmic acceleration pushes that question further.
By the time someone reaches Stage −5: Deeply Entrenched Views, their explanation of the world may have become increasingly rigid. Information that confirms the worldview is readily absorbed, while information that threatens it may be dismissed, reinterpreted or treated as further evidence that the worldview must be correct.
At Stage −6: Extremist Leadership, the individual may move beyond holding entrenched views towards actively promoting, recruiting, organising or encouraging others into them.
But we should be careful not to imagine a conveyor belt. There is no inevitable pathway from watching provocative content to extremism. The SSF is dynamic. Movement can be interrupted. People can encounter alternative perspectives. Relationships can challenge certainty. Environments can change. Curiosity can return.
That distinction matters. In They Walk Amongst Us: Two Years On, What Have We Learnt — and What Have We Changed?, I returned to the question of what precedes hostility and extremism while emphasising that the SSF should not be used to infer an individual’s internal psychological state from one statement, photograph or incident.
The issue is not prediction.
It is direction of travel, environmental influence and opportunities for interruption.
Which brings us to something that technology usually tries very hard to remove.
Psychological Friction: Interrupting Algorithmic Acceleration
Modern digital design celebrates the frictionless experience: fewer clicks, faster answers, instant recommendations, seamless scrolling and immediate confirmation.
But what if some forms of friction are psychologically protective?
I describe this as psychological friction: the pause that allows us to notice what is happening before reaction hardens into certainty. It may be the pause before sharing, the question that complicates the obvious explanation, the person whose experience does not fit our assumptions, the encounter with evidence we had not considered, the conversation that makes us uncomfortable without humiliating us, or simply the capacity to tolerate “I don’t know yet.”
Through the SSF lens, this matters because movement towards the positive axis often requires precisely this kind of space.
At Stage +1: Emerging Awareness, something is beginning to be noticed. At Stage +2: Discomfort & Awakening, the discomfort is not immediately expelled or converted into blame; it can be tolerated. At Stage +3: Developing Understanding, curiosity begins to replace certainty. As we move further along the positive axis towards Engaged & Reflective, Systems Thinker & Advocate, and Transformational Leader, our capacity to hold complexity, examine systems, listen across difference and recognise our own contribution becomes increasingly important.
Psychological friction creates room for that development.
This also connects to one of the earliest questions in my Weekly Reflections: how do we move from certainty to curiosity? The Cave of Simplification is not only about the explanations others adopt. It invites us to notice our own attraction to simple explanations when complexity becomes uncomfortable.
Institutional Responses to Algorithmic Acceleration: The Cave of Symptoms
There is also an institutional issue here.
Suppose a school suddenly experiences increased misogynistic language, racist material circulates among pupils, or employees begin repeating highly polarised narratives within workplace discussions. The visible behaviour matters and cannot simply be ignored. But institutions can become trapped in what I call the Cave of Symptoms.
They respond to what they can see and measure: a sanction, an exclusion, a revised behaviour policy, an HR investigation, a compulsory training session or an assembly.
These interventions may sometimes be necessary. But if we only address the visible behaviour, we risk asking the wrong question.
Instead of simply asking, How do we stop this behaviour?, we also need to ask:
What happened before this happened?
What environments are people inhabiting? What narratives are repeatedly reaching them? What vulnerabilities are those narratives attaching themselves to? What is being normalised? What is being reinforced? And where are the opportunities for reflection before attitudes become more deeply entrenched?
This concern with what precedes visible behaviour is becoming increasingly important within my SSF work. As I reflected in They Walk Amongst Us: Two Years On, extreme manifestations rarely tell us the whole story. We also need to examine the repeated signals, narratives, environments and missed opportunities that came before them.
Ofcom’s work on online safety reinforces the importance of examining the architecture rather than focusing only on individual pieces of content. It identifies personalised recommender systems as a significant pathway through which children may encounter harmful material and now requires services within scope of the UK’s online-safety regime to take steps to make children’s feeds safer. [Read Ofcom’s guidance on safer feeds and children’s online safety.]
The behaviour we encounter in the classroom, workplace or community may therefore be the visible endpoint of a much longer environmental process.
Algorithmic Acceleration Means Digital Literacy Must Include Psychological Literacy
This means digital literacy can no longer simply mean teaching people how to use technology safely. We also need what I would describe as psychological digital literacy: the capacity to notice how digital environments are shaping our attention, emotional responses, interpretations and certainty.
Young people — and adults — need to understand that a feed is not a neutral window onto the world. We need to become curious about why we are seeing what we are seeing. Why did this appear next? Why does this content provoke such a strong emotional response? Why am I being shown more of it? What is missing from my feed? Whose experience am I not encountering? Am I becoming better informed, or simply more certain?
This is not only an educational challenge. It is also a leadership challenge, a psychological-safety challenge, a safeguarding challenge and, increasingly, a human-development challenge.
And it should not be framed as though children and young people are uniquely susceptible while adults stand outside the problem. Repetition, confirmation, belonging, fear, anger and certainty are human psychological processes. The platforms may differ, but none of us should assume that professional status, age or education makes us immune.
Can Algorithmic Acceleration Work in the Other Direction?
There is an important counterpoint.
If digital environments can amplify repetition, certainty and division, could they also be intentionally designed to create space for reflection? Could technology introduce rather than eliminate useful friction? Could it provide context before we share inflammatory material, broaden the range of perspectives we encounter, interrupt endless repetition, or make us more aware of the emotional patterns shaping our engagement?
Could digital spaces help people move towards curiosity rather than certainty?
The Nature research mentioned earlier is useful here because it suggests that the architecture is not fixed. Changing how material is ranked changed what participants encountered without necessarily making the platform less enjoyable.
So the question is therefore not simply whether technology is good or bad.
The more important question is:
What kind of psychological environment are we designing?
Because environments influence direction of travel.
This Week’s Algorithmic Acceleration Lens Check
So this week, I want to invite you to observe your own digital environment — not simply what you are reading, but what it is doing to you.
When something makes you angry, frightened, defensive or intensely certain, notice what happens next. Does your environment widen the question or narrow it? Does it introduce complexity or give you an immediate target? Does it encourage reflection, or reward reaction?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who is setting the speed of your thinking?
The SSF has always been concerned with movement. More recently, I have been asking about the states we occupy, the environments that shape us and what happens before visible behaviour emerges.
Algorithmic acceleration adds another dimension.
Perhaps we now also need to ask:
What is changing the speed and direction of my movement — and is my environment giving me enough psychological friction to notice that I am moving?
Sometimes the most psychologically important thing we can create is not another answer.
It is enough space to think before the answer becomes certainty.
Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah
Chartered Educational Psychologist | Founder of the Six Stages Framework
Part of the SSF Weekly Reflections series, exploring human behaviour, leadership, inclusion, psychological safety and systems change through the Six Stages Framework.
#SixStagesFramework #ThroughTheSSFLens #AlgorithmicAcceleration #DigitalPsychology #PsychologicalFriction #PsychologicalSafety #DigitalLiteracy #HumanBehaviour
External links UCL: Social media algorithms amplify misogynistic content to teens · Nature: Redesigning algorithms to intervene on social norm misperceptions · Ofcom: New rules for a safer generation of children online
