Information Society and Cognitive Constructivism in Forming the Image of Reality and Decision Making

Abstract

Contemporary development of information technology is this stage of civilization called information society in which human learns to transform information into the knowledge. An advantage of this stage is that it allows to effectively adapt to rapidly changing economical and political situations. However, its uncontrolled effect is the phenomena of creating the „virtual reality”. In such reality the information is constructs the illusions and artificial worlds in the human mind. The research on perceptual and memory processes uncovers the mechanisms of such construction which are often used to control the consumer and voter choice in economic and political market. The paper presents some examples of such control in both, the investment behavior on stock market, and the voter behavior under the influence of the negative political campaigns. The analyses of this controlled behavior in the light of cognitive mechanism of information processing allow to look differently on the classic notions of truth and freedom in decision making