Variety of approaches. Any team looks for stuff other teams don't. There's overlap, of course, but there are imperative nuances even in the same methods that researchers use.
Relax, humanity's path is still - and always will be - broad and mostly unbeaten.
The psycho-social patterns we see and "deduce from" are just "hints" for us that there are systems we can deliberately manipulate/repair/influence. You don't get paranoid or freaked out about Raspberry Pi's being everywhere, do you?
Culture paints the devil everywhere for a ton of reasons. Yes, google is evil, but not _that_ evil. Same goes for Murdoch, Bezos and the hundreds whose names I never even heard or read.
The scale at which companies influence/nudge people is crazy nowadays. It's kinda sad that work/life implicitly practically forbids getting a clear picture of what the fuck is going on and it's even worse to whitness how human minds turn into frenzied, cacophonic, wooing fanboys and -girls of game theory and hoarder-capitalism, even though these people don't even respect each other for the same freaking reasons.
But we all get a chance to say "no, fuck this shit, I'll take the time to do this _RIGHT_", which is: one of the many beyond-game-theory-super-rational kind of ways (which is what logic is actually about).
So yeah, pick alternatives, DIY, tell your friends and family about fallacies and emotional weakspots, when they occur and what to do in such moments, which is almost freaking always: "no, fuck this shit, I'll take the time to do this _RIGHT_".