As an experiment, do either of the following exercises: Either watch the news coverage on the same event on Indian news chan- nels, Republic TV as well as NDTV; or watch Donald Trump as well as Bernie Sanders talk on the same topic. This activity is to essentially highlight the degree of influence and impact words and phrases have in transforming the essence of similar content.

Emotive Conjugation is a combination of rhetorical, psychological and linguistics factors that alter and form our opinions. Contrary to popular understanding, facts have a very minimal role to play. Therefore, we can actually completely change our opinion of people without actually changing the facts. Emotive Conjugation is built on the foundational principle that our mind constantly looks beyond what is true and false while forming opinions. It instead looks at the social consequences of having a particular opinion. This enables our tendency to mirror the emotions and opinions of the source of our information.

With traditional and accountable sources of information being replaced by decentralized and anonymous sources, we have entered an era of opinion overload. To successfully navigate in this time, it is more important than ever to build and retain empathy and to listen to a spectrum of opinions on one issue without getting agitated.