Instant Genius - How to spot and fight misinformation

Episode Date: May 23, 2024

The internet is full of false facts and misinformation, but how can you tell what is real or fake? We spoke to Alex Edmans, author of May Contain Lies, who gives us tips on how to separate the real from the false. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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the BBC Science Focus magazine. The internet is a flood of misinformation as friends, family, and strangers pitched to you the latest scientific findings or events that have happened around the world. How do you decipher what is real or not? We spoke to Alex Edmonds, the author of the new book may contain lies to find out. He explains how our biases lead us to fall from misinformation, how to overcome it and what to look out for with news articles, books and any new information. So in your book, you address both how we typically fall from misinformation and how to overcome it as well. This falls into, I guess, three sections, starting by addressing our own biases and how these can be activated. Could you explain a little bit more about these?

You state them as the confirmation bias and black and white thinking. Certainly. So let me start with confirmation bias. So this is the idea that we have a view of the world. and if we see evidence that confirms that view, then we will lap it up uncritically, even without checking whether it's rigorous. For example, if I were a climate change denier, and there is a study which comes out saying, climate change is a myth, I will shout it from the rooftops, I will share this even without looking at the actual methodology. And the flip side to this is if I see something

that contradicts my worldview, I will either not bother to read it to begin with, or I will read it with the mindset of trying to pick it apart. So again, if there was a study saying that climate change is manmade, if I choose to open it, I would go through it line by line and think about all the potential holes in it, but not apply the same scrutiny to something that I want to be true. So confirmation bias applies where we have a pre-existing viewpoint, but there might be many things where we don't have a pre-existing viewpoint. And that's where the second bias comes in, which is black and white thinking. So this is the idea that we can view something as either always good or always bad. So one example might be carbs. So when you eat, you think that protein is good. You learn at

school that it builds muscle. You think that fat is bad. It's called that because it makes you fat. But carbs aren't so clear cut. But black and white thinking means that even if you're not sure, you think it's either one way or the other. So we're aware of our biases. and how they could be triggered. And we know misinformation typically tends to play on our emotions. How do we then break down this information to better understand what is, I guess, true, what's not true or what has a bit of added spice to it? You know, in such information-heavy world especially,

you detail what you call the ladder of misinfference in this. Could you sort of touch on that a little bit more as well? Yeah, so absolutely. So what I'm trying to encourage is for you to apply the same discern. to a study that you do like as one that you don't. And so this is really important because you might think, well, how do I check the facts? I'm not a statistician. I'm not going to suddenly do a PhD in statistics.

But what I'm trying to highlight is that the knowledge is already within you. Because people are already exercising discernment if they see a study they don't like. Let's ask the same questions and apply the same skepticism to a result that we do like. And so one practical tip I give in the book is if there's a conclusion you are willing to lap up, let's imagine it had the opposite result and see how you would tear it apart. So let's say I would love an excuse to drink lots of red wine this evening, and I find a study which claims that red wine leads to longer life. So if I imagine the opposite, how would I react if the study said red wine leads to shorter life?

I would say, well, there could be a lot of alternative explanations for this. Perhaps the people who buy red wine are poor people. They can't afford champagne. They can only afford red wine. And it's that poverty that leads to shorter life. Now that I have alerted myself to the possibility of poverty being an alternate of exhalation, I should ask myself, does this continue to apply even though the result is in the direction that I want? red wine is correlated with the longer life. Well, maybe the people who are drinking red wine

are wealthier to begin with, whereas everybody else can only afford beer, and it's that wealth which is leading to the long life. So the idea of imagining the opposite is to trigger you to ask the same questions as you would do for a study whose conclusions you don't like the sound of. And how do we go about, you know, when we see something that's maybe just a headline that says, the same sort of thing as you're mentioning there. How do we go about checking this sort of information? Is it a case of following something back to its route and finding out the information where it began? Yeah, so that is important. So sometimes when a statement is quoted, we take this as gospel truth. Sometimes it could be there's a footnote at the end of the statement and we think, oh, if there's a reference, it must be true.

But there are many places in which people are misquoted. And I have been misquoted myself in something as formal and official as a government's inquiry. So from time to time, there's government inquiries where they invite people to submit some evidence to the inquiry. And there was one inquiry into executive pay where I saw the final report and the final report claim that chief executives add very little value to a company. And they had a footnote and the footnote referred to me. And I was surprised. I thought I would never say something like this. I was a bit flustered. I wondered whether I put a typo in my original submission. Maybe I had added the word not in by mistake, but no, I had written what I believe to be correct and I had just been misquoted. Sometimes the misquoting might be just cutting out what the

original source was. So there was the famous book Why We Sleep by Matthew Walker, which has been a huge bestseller. And this is trying to claim that sleeping more always leads to better outcomes. And so there's a graph in that book which shows that the more hours you sleep, the fewer injuries you get in a study on teenagers. So nine hours of sleep led to fewer than eight, which led to fewer than seven, which led to fewer than six. But if you go to the original graph, the original graph had also a bar for five hours of sleep. And five hours of sleep leads to fewer injuries than six and fewer injuries than even seven hours. So often we want to go back to the underlying source. Now you might see, well, this is impractical. We would be at our wits end if

every time we had to check back to the original source. But if it's something which is particularly accurate and also something which triggers our biases, which might mean that the writer knew that he or she could play fast and loose because people wouldn't check it, then it's particularly useful to be sure. So is it almost a case of, you know, if it's too good to be true, do the deeper research on something? It is. If it's too good to be true and you want it to be true, then you might want to be skeptical. And obviously we're talking about this very much in connection to the digital age, you know, headlines, articles online, all of this sort of stuff.

Is this misinformation a new experience caused by this era? Or is it just more that we're seeing such a rapid expansion of it and it's so heavily in front of us all the time? Yeah, so I think the issue is that we have so much information out there that it's easy to be misinformed. Now, that might seem a paradox. You might think isn't it the opposite? the more information that's out there, the more likely you are to be informed. But it's not because, again, of confirmation bias. So when I mentioned confirmation bias earlier, I talked about the biased

interpretation of data. Once we receive information, how we interpret it depends on whether we like what it says. But there's also bias search. What information do we search for to begin with? We will only search for evidence that confirms our point of view. So again, if I was a climate change denier, I could Google for why climate change is a hoax. I'm sure I could find a lot of studies, some claiming to be scientific, to state that, whereas I was to Google the opposite, why climate change is real, I'd get quite different studies. So the accessibility of information actually can make us less informed because it means that it's much easier to find evidence that supports our viewpoint. We often hear this phrase bandied around like evidence should

shows that. A study finds that. Research proves that. But this is all quite meaningless, because you can almost always find a study to show whatever you want it to show. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save? Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or The Hilton. an app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected. When you want savings, not surprises, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.

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name audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound, and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. There's a weird argument of do you want to find truth? Because for a lot of people, there might be a slight awareness that there isn't an incomplete level of truth or the argument they're pitching for isn't always correct and they'll track down the angles that work for them.

Why do we need to find truth? Because these are things which affect our daily lives. So you might think, isn't this just academic? I'm an academic, I'm a research professor, I spend time scrutinizing academic papers, but the average person doesn't do this in their job. So does this really matter? Is this not academic point scoring? But it does matter.

Because research is everywhere. You're acting on the basis of research. So what is the best food to eat or food to avoid? And if the research claiming that something is a superfood is actually not correct, then you're just spending a lot of money. on an overpriced superfood, which might be unpalatable, you're a slave to a diet which is not even working. If you want to train for a London marathon because you were inspired by the marathon last month, what is the best way to do that by finding the most efficient training regime,

then you can put in far fewer hours and also achieve the same results. One genre of books, which is really popular right now, is the self-help or self-improvement. So does waking up at 5am every day transform your life? Well, if it actually does, then knowing this is really important because otherwise you'd be needlessly waking up so early. And we're talking about this a lot from the angle of, I guess, how to identify misinformation or false facts. But as a society, as a group, is there a way for us to simply end it? Or is this just sort of wishful thinking an impossible task? Unfortunately, I think it's impossible to try to end it. So when you hear about misinformation,

people might think, why can't you regulate this? Can't you just have prosecutions for people who are releasing untruths just a bit like fraud? But this is difficult because one of the things I stress in the book is even if something is 100% accurate, it could still be misleading because there could be multiple interpretations. So if indeed people who drink red wine live longer, if that is a fact, then anybody who states that fact is not being untruthful. However, if people infer from that, that drinking red wine causes you to live longer, then that is incorrect. If in truth what's going on, it's wealthier people, drink red wine, and wealthier people live longer. Another example is the exception that doesn't prove the rule.

So Simon Sinek has the third most viewed TED talk of all time on how start. starting with Y leads to success. And he says, well, Apple is extremely successful and Apple started with Y. It has a purpose. It has a mission. But that is one single handpicked example. There could be hundreds of other examples of companies that start with Y and failed, but you never hear about them because Simon Sennick will never mention them because they don't support his thesis. So what he does say is completely truthful. You can never prosecute people. for not saying something and not giving the full picture. So this is why in the book I highlight that the onus is on us

to try to address misinformation by being aware of our own biases and doing our own research. What happens when something has become, I guess, so cemented as a belief that it's almost become a fact in itself? How do you reverse something like that? The example I think in my head is the idea of MSG and it's like health concern, something that's become so much, so cemented, it is basically a fact to a lot of people.

Yeah, so this is really interesting and this was covered in a great podcast by Katie Milkman, a professor at Wharton. I used to be a professor there myself. Her podcast is called Troisology, where she talked about the idea of that if something is repeated many, many times, then people think it's true just because of repetition. And so what the podcast highlighted was the importance of going through to the original source. And so what the podcast was, what the podcast us interviewee did is they went to the original source and this original source with, I think, just an opinion piece. It was not even a scientific study suggesting that MSG was bad when there was very little evidence behind this, but because of this Chinese whispers phenomenon,

people have thought that this was actually true. And you see this not just an MSG, but something even more serious. So the opioid epidemic within the US, one of the most cited papers, which apparently claims that opioids do not lead to the... to addiction was something published in the New England Journal of Medicine. You might think, well, that's a great scientific journal, but this was never a study. It was just a letter to the editor. And so it was cited without people realizing it was just a letter. They thought it was an article in the New England Journal of Medicine, which claimed that there was no addiction. Lots of people cited this, and this was an impactful article in encouraging the uptake of opioids with devastating

consequences, so 650,000 people have died in the US alone over 20 years. This is millions when you look worldwide. We're talking about this idea of addressing your biases and trying to understand when you might feel like you've chosen to feel a certain way or that you might be tricked by a certain bit of information. For a lot of people, this sort of comes down to a conversation with someone else where they don't feel like that person is right or that they feel like someone is misunderstood. what do you do when you're speaking to someone and you feel like they've fallen for misinformation and they can't see that? I think it's to try to highlight the alternative viewpoint and this is often not best done by telling them the alternative. Why? Because if you want to recognize that that person is biased, then they might not be listening.

So I saw this phrase once, which is before you want to argue with somebody, ask whether they are in the right headspace to consider the idea of an alternative viewpoint. Because if not, sometimes there are certain people that you can't argue against, and no matter how much you want to, it's not actually worth trying. So sometimes you can actually back people into a corner and make them even more defensive. But if the person might be amenable, you might just ask them questions. So often actually asking questions and getting people with strong positions to explain them in detail might cause them to realize that their positions are not strong as they thought. And so there was actually a scientific study. which asked people to rate their knowledge on things such as how does a toilet flush work, how do piano keys make sound, and people rated their knowledge as like nine out of ten or ten out

of ten. And then they asked them to write an essay describing this. And actually, many people were not able to describe this. And after failing to write the essay, they were asked to re-rate their knowledge again, and they rated themselves more lowly. So if somebody is to say, oh, I think climate change is completely man-made, all the evidence suggests that it's not happening, just ask them to walk through what the evidence is, not in a ha-haha way to try and catch them out, but be generally inquisitive. What is the reason for why they think that particular way? And sometimes you might realize that you are not always correct. So in the Brexit referendum, I was a very strong remainer. I thought that every Brexeter is xenophobic and uninformed, but I went to a Brexit talk

and the speaker, I thought, had really good arguments. Now, I didn't agree with everything that he said, but at least I could see that they were based on logic rather than just hyperbole. And so even if listening to an alternative viewpoint, you think 90% of what they say is wrong, maybe 10% of what they say is right. And maybe that 10% leads you to come away more informed than you started with. And why is it that some people are more likely to fall from misinformation? Is there some sort of predisposition to this kind of thinking? I think it's just the strength of your existing belief. So if you have a strong viewpoint, then confirmation bias is at play. So Leo Tolstoy wrote that the most difficult tasks cannot be explained to the most intelligent man if he has firmly

decided that he knows already. But the simplest thing can be explained to the least. informed man if he is willing to learn. So it's often not your intelligence, but the strength of your biases. And it may well be the case that more intelligent people are more biased. So sometimes listeners might think, I'm so smart, I would never fall for misinformation. But there are studies which find that actually sometimes intelligence makes the problem worse. Why? Because people deploy their intelligence selectively. They use their smarts to argue against any evidence that contradicts their worldview. But they suddenly switch off their critical thinking faculties when they see a conclusion they like the sound of. In your book, you lay out a pretty

comprehensive guide to better preparing someone to deal with misinformation. Can you talk us through, I guess, a bit of an easy checklist for what you call smarter thinking? Certainly. So the first is to ask, do I want this to be true? Because if I do, then my confirmation bias might be at play. and so I might need to be a bit more discerning. So I think this is a good place to start because we can't go around checking everything. We need to be realistic. So what are the cases where I particularly want to devote my energy? Then what I want to look at is, well, what am I trying to check? If it's a statement, then let me check, is this a correct quote? Was there something which is cut out from a bar chart? So to go to the original source. When I've gone

to the original source, I want to look at, is this a single example? Or, or is there large-scale data behind it? So if somebody is telling me, Apple started with why, and Apple is successful, and I go to the original source, and I look at Apple's market value, and I see it's massive, that is true. But even if it's true, it's misleading, because it's only one single example. Let me look at large-scale data. If what I'm given is large-scale data, I wanted to look at and check, is this actually evidence? So what's the difference between data and evidence. Let's think about evidence in a trial. So evidence in a criminal trial is evidence that supports one particular suspect, but is inconsistent with other suspects. So if the evidence

suggests that Tom, Dick or Harry could have killed Sarah, it's not evidence because it's consistent with alternative suspects. And similarly, data is not evidence if it's consistent with alternative explanations. So go back to the example, people who drink red wine live longer. that is data. It could be gathered across thousands of people, and you find in large-scale data people who drink red wine live longer, but this is not evidence because it could be that red wine causes the longer life, or it could be that wealth causes you to drink wine, and wealth also leads to longer life. So this is why I encourage you to imagine the opposite, to think of the alternative suspects, the rival exhalations for the same data.

So the idea of misinformation, alternative facts, you know, all of these different parts of this topic, they have become so widespread in recent years. But how do you see it looking at in, I guess, the next five, ten years, especially with the rise of deepfakes, AI, you know, all of this sort of technology that is probably just going to make it a lot harder to identify what is the truth online? I think unfortunately misinformation is going to get an even more serious an issue. And often people say, oh, AI will always make things worse. I think these are problems even if you did not have AI.

So I'm going to come back to AI shortly. But even without AI, there's a lot of forces towards misinformation, which is just the scalability. So if you are somebody who just is giving a viewpoint, even if it's not based on data, it can go viral because of social media. And if it's something that people want to be true, then people will share this widely. So it could be something with very little scientific backing such as 5G causes coronavirus,

but if people want this to be true, if they like to believe in conspiracy theories, these things will spread quite widely. And also, how do you become famous, right? You become famous by saying something that people want to be true. There are many people who've managed to sell a lot of books or become Instagram influencers by peddling potential myths. But then with AI on top of this, this could work in two ways. So on the one hand, AI could be a solution to misinformation because AI could try to check the

underlying facts. But also AI could be a source of misinformation. Why? Because AI could be used to produce, as you say, deep fakes. Maybe AI could write something in the style of a famous scientist or author. And also, AI, I don't know this field particularly well, but how AI can think critically is not clear. So even if AI can find that data is completely conclusive and comprehensive and robust, can AI think about the multiple alternative explanations for that same data? It might not yet have got to the stage when it can do that. And if so, it might be focusing on data, which is 100% truthful, but it's not evidence because there's alternative explanations for that data.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Inson Genius. That was Alex Edmonds on misinformation. The Insingenious Podcast is brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents, as well as on your preferred app store. Alternatively, you can come and find us online at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analog warmth.

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