“You don’t and can’t take the time and energy to examine and compare every brand of yogurt,” says Wray Herbert, author of On Second Thought: Outsmarting Your Mind’s Hard-Wired Habits. It’s hard to imagine getting through so much as a trip to the grocery store without these helpful time-savers. Psychologists have shown this through the study of cognitive shortcuts known as heuristics. Humans like to think of themselves as rational creatures, but much of the time we are guided by emotional and irrational thinking.
But there’s an even more fundamental impulse at play: our innate desire for an easy answer. Political convictions lead us to lazy thinking. We are social animals, and the desire for likes can supersede a latent feeling that a story seems dicey. In an era when the average American spends 24 hours each week online–when we’re always juggling inboxes and feeds and alerts–it’s easy to feel like we don’t have time to read anything but headlines. Often it’s a matter of letting the wrong impulses take over. We don’t fall for false news just because we’re dumb. And experts like Wineburg believe that the better we understand the way we think in the digital world, the better chance we have to be part of the solution. The problem is also us, the susceptible readers. The problem is not just malicious bots or chaos-loving trolls or Macedonian teenagers pushing phony stories for profit. What is clear, however, is that there is another responsible party. And even if law enforcement and intelligence agencies could ferret out every bad actor with a keyboard, it seems unwise to put the government in charge of scrubbing the Internet of misleading statements. Many welcomed the decision by major tech companies in early August to remove content from florid conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who has alleged that passenger-jet contrails are damaging people’s brains and spread claims that families of Sandy Hook massacre victims are actors in an elaborate hoax.
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In a country founded on free speech, debates over who adjudicates truth and lies online are contentious. But engineers can’t teach machines to decide what is true or false in a world where humans often don’t agree.
Facebook lost more than $120 billion in stock value in a single day in July as the company dealt with a range of issues limiting its growth, including criticism about how conspiracy theories spread on the platform. There is no quick fix, though tech companies are under increasing pressure to come up with solutions. “It’s the equivalent of a public-health crisis,” says Alan Miller, founder of the nonpartisan News Literacy Project. In India, false rumors about child kidnappings that spread on WhatsApp have prompted mobs to beat innocent people to death. Our ability to vet information matters every time a mother asks Google whether her child should be vaccinated and every time a kid encounters a Holocaust denial on Twitter. “We are all driving cars, but none of us have licenses,” Wineburg says of consuming information online.īut the stakes are even bigger than elections. In his experiments, MIT cognitive scientist David Rand has found that, on average, people are inclined to believe false news at least 20% of the time. A 2016 Pew poll found that nearly a quarter of Americans said they had shared a made-up news story. Other studies have shown that people retweet links without clicking on them and rely too much on search engines. Wineburg’s team has found that Americans of all ages, from digitally savvy tweens to high-IQ academics, fail to ask important questions about content they encounter on a browser, adding to research on our online gullibility.
His team, known as the Stanford History Education Group, has given scores of subjects such tasks in hopes of answering two of the most vexing questions of the Internet age: Why are even the smartest among us so bad at making judgments about what to trust on the web? And how can we get better? The bookish professor had been asked to assess the article as part of an experiment run by Stanford University psychologist Sam Wineburg. It has been accused of promoting antigay policies, and the Southern Poverty Law Center designates it as a hate group.
What the professor never realized as he focused on the page’s superficial features is that the group in question is a socially conservative splinter faction that broke in 2002 from the mainstream American Academy of Pediatrics over the issue of adoption by same-sex couples. “I’m clearly looking at an official site,” he said. After five minutes, he had found little reason to doubt the article. The site’s sober design, devoid of flashy, autoplaying videos, lent it credibility, he thought. Scanning the site, the professor took note of the “.org” web address and a list of academic-looking citations.