Accuracy Nudging in the Age of Chicken Little
This past weekend my wife and I were enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon, watching an ABC News 20/20 program. The story was about a young man incarcerated for shooting someone, and by all accounts he certainly seemed railroaded. Toward the end of the program, a few seconds of video showed a high-ranking state official going on the record at a highly visible press conference about the case, doubling-down on the jury’s guilty verdict, claiming that celebrities and other individuals advocating for the young man’s innocence were being fed inaccurate information. Soon after, the program wrapped-up, with the young man still in prison and his case gaining notoriety.
For some reason, the press conference shown toward the end of the program – for lack of a better term – bothered me. It just seemed out of place for a high-ranking official to take the extreme measure of holding a press conference and putting forth such a bold statement, in the face of the information I had absorbed throughout the rest of the extensive piece.
To scratch this itch, I grabbed my smartphone and did a quick search for news items about the case and the official’s press conference. In a couple minutes, I found a local news story providing coverage of the press conference and a backstory on the case. Toward the end of the article, the local news outlet provided a link to a document distributed by the high-ranking official at the press conference. It provided a detailed overview of the case, including a rather large amount of factual information that was new to me insofar as it was not mentioned in the ABC News 20/20 program.
Reading through it, my opinion started to change. Perhaps the young man wasn’t railroaded after all.
The very next day, I was at work researching the latest information on COVID-19. For context, if you’ve heard the term “both a blessing and a curse” welcome to my world of landing a new job in the middle of a global pandemic – with the job entailing writing about the pandemic itself. Anyways, as part of my gig, I do a lot of research on the constant evolution of this infectious disease, and how dedicated healthcare professionals are trying to stop its spread while searching for a vaccine. Suffice it to say there is an awful lot of information out there on the subject.
This particular day, I was delving into an article which was making pretty heavy claims about a certain aspect of COVID-19. The author was referencing statements and information purportedly made and shared by national figures and government entities, but without proper (or in some cases, any) attribution or context. In my opinion, it needed fact-checking.
As I did on Sunday, I researched the claims, cross-referencing names, words and phrases, etc. Unfortunately, I was coming up empty, and a red light came on in my head regarding the veracity of the claims. I then decided to check the author – a contributing writer, not a staffer at the news publication. Typing his name into a search engine followed by “Twitter” I was soon given a glimpse into his social media world, with a pretty complete history of viewpoints on the individuals and organizations referenced in his article.
It was interesting, to say the least.
At this point, I was 20 minutes into finding the article, reading it, cross-referencing the author claims, and researching the author. It was not 20 minutes well-spent, insofar as finding material I could reliably use. I moved on.
The Case for Accuracy Nudging
One of the side-effects of COVID-19, even if you don’t have it, is an uptick in the amount of misinformation being spread about the disease. It got so bad that in early July the United Nations launched an initiative to get people to think before spreading false information about COVID-19, either intentionally or by accident. This push was backed-up by a university study showing the importance of assessing accuracy of information before sharing it.
You can read about the study, “Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention” via this link to the publication Psychological Science.
The basic gist of the study and the U.N. push is to capitalize on the impact that a subtle accuracy nudge has on an individual’s brain, in essence training them to consider factual accuracy of information before sharing it online. I’ve had years of such nudging, both from my education and professional journalism training. Too often, however, people see a headline that agrees with their point of view on a subject and they blindly blast it out without first checking to see if the information is accurate.
I’m not trying to lay blame here; we all do it. There is a lot of information out there about a lot of things people are passionate about, triggering an emotional reaction. The constant “sky is falling” approach taken by social media influencers, celebrities and personalities, politicians, activists, and high-profile news organizations doesn’t help.
The good news is there are certain best practices all of us can adopt to help make sure the information we are consuming -- and then sharing -- is accurate:
1) Find original source material. If a social media influencer or national news outlet reports on something that happened in a certain part of the country, do a quick search to find the actual original local report, as the details can end up slightly different or altogether out of context once a third party (national news outlet) gets hold of it. I was able to do this successfully twice as outlined above: once with the local report on the high-ranking official’s press conference, and the other with the Psychological Science article.
2) Identify the real experts. If you recognize a talking head, chances are it’s because he or she has been offering opinions before, sometimes on multiple topics. Run a quick search online – including the word “Twitter” if you are so inclined -- to check on their credentials and possible bias. This will help separate faux-experts from more knowledgeable individuals without an agenda who may actually be worth listening to.
3) Beware the average Joe or Jane. In hard (breaking) news, a man’s house is hit by lightning and burns to the ground, a reporter interviews him – the man is a victim of a house fire. It gets murkier with features and investigative reports; a dirty little secret in journalism is that sometimes reporters put out casting calls for individuals in order to fit a narrative for their story. If you find yourself asking, “Where did they find these people?” then maybe take a deeper look at things.
Ultimately, information is only as good as what you do with it, even information about things like global pandemics. Do you fret over it, helpless to change anything? Or do you use what you can from it to stay educated and informed, and go about making your little corner of the world a better place?
The key is maintaining control over the information we consume, rather than letting information consume us.
