can you spot fake news? professional fact checkers can separate truth from fiction more accurately
and faster than even the smartest among us. how do they do it? and how can we get the same results?
researchers at stanford wanted to find out so they set up a unique competition between professional
fact checkers and regular people. well, not that regular. one group was made up of scholars with
a phd in history. so professionals at evaluating sources for reliability. and a third group were
stanford students. the three groups went head to head. the first challenge was to look at articles
online that looked similar but in reality were written by very different organizations
for example in one of the tasks the volunteers were faced with two articles on bullying. one
was by the american academy of pediatrics, the official organization of pediatricians in the US
with 66 000 members. the other article was by the american college of pediatricians
which is a conservative advocacy group with a strong anti-gay ethos. they've been labeled
a hate group by independent sources, they oppose same-sex marriage and adoption by gay couples and
they support conversion therapy aka curing the gay. so both organization names sound pretty official,
both websites look legit at first glance but in reality the two organizations are vastly different
can our competitors tell the difference? can they spot the fake news? the results were
shocking. a hundred percent of professional fact checkers chose the medical association as the
more reliable source and they did it within minutes. historians were much less consistent
fifty percent chose the academy. ten percent chose the advocacy group and forty percent weren't sure
and the students did abysmal. only 20% chose the academy. 64 percent chose the advocacy group as
their number one source. other tasks involved finding the funding source behind a website
or the parent organization behind a marketing campaign. across all tasks the professional fact
checkers consistently came out on top even though the other two groups are clearly made up of very
intelligent, educated people. how did the pros do it? the researchers tracked their every action using
screen capture software. they even had them speak out their thoughts out loud as they fact checked
they found that the fact checkers consistently used some techniques that gave them an edge
for example the students spent most of their time looking at the articles themselves
they paid a lot of attention to internal features of the websites like the logos or the domain name
or whether the article was referenced or written by someone with a medical degree. they also valued
whether they personally agreed with the arguments put forward in the article. the pro fact checkers
had a completely different approach. they glanced at the article for a few seconds and immediately
left. rather than evaluate the article per se or even the website, their priority was to learn more
about the organization itself. they went to the "about us" page of the website, they took a quick
look and then they left the site all together and looked for independent information on the
organization. this is called "taking bearing". they stepped back and looked at the broad picture
who is this organization and how do they fit into the overall context? instead, the students
dove deep into the content. they used what's called "vertical reading". they went through the
article top to bottom paying close attention to the language and the arguments put forward. but
the fact checkers relied on lateral reading. they opened new tabs on the browser to fact check the
reliability of the source before taking a deep dive. the pros only paid attention to the article
after they had done all that background work. as a result they were able to pick up on nuances of the
language of the text that escaped the students. the other technique that distinguished the pros
was click restraint. the students navigated haphazardly, clicking whatever got their attention
when they ran a google search they tended to click the top results even if they weren't the most
informative, so the time allotted for the task ran out before they could get their answers. the fact
checkers were much more deliberate and focused, they chose carefully which pages they visited and
they didn't waste time or get distracted. when they google searched, they carefully scanned the results
and spent much longer on the search page than the students. they chose which hits they clicked
based on the source and the content of the snippets, the short descriptions on google. as a
result, they were much more effective and quick to form a general picture and separate reliable fact
from shady sources. now, obviously we can apply these techniques to many areas of our lives
when we're looking for scientific information online whether it's nutrition or something else
we can take bearing by stepping back and getting a broad view of a topic before we dive deep
into a specific source. we sometimes form an opinion based on the first thing we find
which tends to be whoever is best at social media or SEO or the most charismatic or whoever tells us
what we want to hear, and then we latch on to those initial beliefs and resist any evidence
to the contrary. but that strategy can lead to stagnation and prevent us from learning more
now, it's important to point out that in science we don't accept an idea reflexively just because the
source is qualified and we don't dismiss an idea reflexively just because the source is unqualified
we rely on evidence. but which evidence is shown to us and how it's presented can make a world of
difference. that's how most of the confusion online around nutrition arises in the first
place, people are often exposed to a sliver of evidence and then get into these bubbles where
everybody just repeats the same thing. stepping back and looking at the big picture is often
all it takes to dispel confusion, triangulating information between different sources
and exposing ourselves to what we call totality of evidence. doing this sounds like a lot more
work but the reality is it can save time and in the case of medicine it can save lives as well