SoylentNews

AnonTechie writes:

Here's a quick quiz for you:

In the biblical story, what was Jonah swallowed by?
How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?

Did you answer "whale" to the first question and "two" to the second? Most people do ... even though they're well aware that it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story.

Psychologists like me call this phenomenon the Moses Illusion. It's just one example of how people are very bad at picking up on factual errors in the world around them. Even when people know the correct information, they often fail to notice errors and will even go on to use that incorrect information in other situations.

Research from cognitive psychology shows that people are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic. In what's been called an era of "fake news," this reality has important implications for how people consume journalism, social media and other public information.

The Moses Illusion has been studied repeatedly since the 1980s. It occurs with a variety of questions and the key finding is that – even though people know the correct information – they don't notice the error and proceed to answer the question.

[...] Detecting and correcting false information is difficult work and requires fighting against the ways our brains like to process information. Critical thinking alone won't save us. Our psychological quirks put us at risk of falling for misinformation, disinformation and propaganda. Professional fact-checkers provide an essential service in hunting out incorrect information in the public view. As such, they are one of our best hopes for zeroing in on errors and correcting them, before the rest of us read or hear the false information and incorporate it into what we know of the world.

https://theconversation.com/why-you-stink-at-fact-checking-93997

[Related]:
[PDF] Moses illusion: Implication for human cognition

Moses strikes again: Focalization effect on a semantic illusion

Knowledge neglect

Although the title seems click-baity, this is an interesting article. As most of you are techies, you must have faced a few problems with regard to fact-checking. What do you think about this phenomenon ?

Original Submission