We often think the solution to misinformation is fact checking. But just checking facts is not enough. Even if a fact is 100 percent accurate, it could still be misleading – it could be a large-scale correlation when there’s no causation.
The solution to misinformation is not obtaining a PhD in statistics, London Business School professor Alex Edmans and author of “May Contain Lies” argues. We often already possess the discerning skills to distinguish truth within ourselves.
Misinformation is so prevalent today because we suffer from confirmation bias, or the idea that we have a certain view of the world and we will latch onto any piece of evidence that supports our viewpoint. When we inject skepticism into our thought process, we can overcome these biases.
ALEX EDMANS: My biggest concern with misinformation is that people will claim that something is rigorous because it's by an authority figure or it's written in a book. But anybody can write a book. We often think that the solution to misinformation is to check the facts, But just checking the facts is not enough. So even if a fact is a hundred percent accurate, it could still be misleading. It could be a single anecdote, the exception that doesn't prove the rule, or it could be a large-scale correlation when there's no causation. The solution to misinformation is not that we need to get a PhD in statistics or engage in statistical pyrotechnics. We often have the discerning skills already within ourselves. We just need to overcome our biases and deploy them.
My name is Alex Edmans. I'm a professor of finance at London Business School and author of "May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases and What We Can Do About It."
Misinformation is so prevalent today because we suffer from confirmation bias. This is the idea that we have a view of the world, and we will latch on to any piece of evidence that will support our viewpoint. For example, we often like to think that breast milk must be good, something natural must be better than something man-made, a formula concocted by some giant corporation. There is evidence that babies who were breastfed have higher IQ later in life. Now it's true that one interpretation is breastfeeding causes the higher IQ. But an alternative suspect, an alternative explanation, is which babies end up getting breastfed. Those are the ones with a good home environment. Because breastfeeding is tough, it's hard to do without family support. So the babies who are breastfed, it may well be that the mother has a supportive partner at home, maybe help outside the house. So maybe parental background both causes a baby to be breastfed and also leads to the higher IQ.
Now everybody knows that correlation is not causation in the cold light of day, but because of our biases, we might forget this if we like the causal story being paraded. There's many topics about which there's no preexisting view, but this is where a second bias comes in, which is black-and-white thinking. And that is the tendency to see the world in all-or-nothing terms. So something is either always good or always bad. One example is carbohydrates. So people might have preexisting views about protein and fat. Right? Fat sounds bad. Right? Isn't it called fat because it makes you fat? And protein is good. We learn in school that it builds muscle. But carbs, that sounds pretty neutral. But if we suffer from black-and-white thinking, we think that carbs have to be either always good or always bad. So the Atkins diet played on black-and-white thinking with a diet which claimed that we should eat as few carbs as possible. When in reality, some things can be moderate, and what this means is that they're either good up to a point or only bad after a point. So if you take carbohydrates, scientific advice recommends that carbohydrates are actually good as long as they are within thirty to fifty percent of your daily calories. But that would be difficult to implement. You would need to track all of your calories from carbs and fats and proteins and then look, are my carbs within this small range? So a simple rule, a black-and-white rule such as avoid carbs, that's something that can easily catch on even if it's not backed up by science. To write a bestseller, Atkins didn't need to be right. He just needed to be extreme.
To check the truthfulness of a bold claim, if it's a claim that you would like to be true, imagine it was the opposite claim, and look at how you would try to knock it down. For example, if a study claimed that breastfeeding leads to lower IQ, that is something which just jars with us. It just sounds wrong. And how would we try to knock it down? We would appeal to common causes. We might say, well, who are the mothers who breastfeed? They might be poor because they're not able to afford formula. And it could be the poverty, which is leading to the lower IQ, not the breast milk itself. So now that we've alerted ourselves to the possibility of common causes, ask ourselves whether those common causes could also explain the actual correlation. Is it that family affluence, family background, is leading to that result rather than breast milk being what's causing the high IQ?
Why is healthy skepticism healthy? Often, the advice given by some widely paraded studies is highly restrictive. But when we recognize that these studies are actually more flimsy, then we can live more freely. My wife could choose to bottle-feed our son, or I could choose to help out without feeling guilty. Similarly, the idea that you need to avoid carbs to lose weight, this will mean that we're always carb-counting. We can't even eat some pieces of fruit. But when we realize that the evidence behind this diet is actually almost non-existent, then this allows us much more flexibility in our diet. These tools aim to help you reduce the amount of misinformation that you will fall for. It might not completely eliminate it because you're human and you can't get it right all the time. But if you reduce the amount of times that you're susceptible to misinformation, that can improve your life in many ways.
