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No doubt most people are familiar with the friend who, no matter how much evidence is presented, will find a way to argue against it. If the debate were a football field, it would have the curious feature of moving goalposts, the end zone getting further and further away with every yard that’s gained. Whether they want to admit it or not, all people do this to a certain extent because they interact with information using a variety of heuristics, through a wide range of cognitive filters, and predisposed to a number of biases.

Complicating this matter more is that most people have what is known as a bias blind spot, which is the inability to recognize and compensate for their own cognitive biases. This module will introduce the reader to epistemology, heuristics, a few different kinds of biases, and some of the sociocultural filters through which people look at information. Learning to recognize these features of how people consume information is a fundamental skill of information literacy.

Epistemology is the study of knowledge, how people know things, and what it means to be justified in believing the things they believe. In a course about information literacy, it only makes sense to touch on the nuances of how people send and receive information, and to be able to discuss those things as precisely as possible. For instance, most people have likely not considered that a fact is not the same as knowledge and that knowledge is not the same as information. Yet, it makes it much easier to think critically about information when one incorporates the following framework:

A Fact is a record of a verifiable thing that happened or is actually the case. 

Information is what is presented by arranging facts and/or non-facts in any given order (or disorder, for that matter)

Knowledge is the assemblage of facts and information. (i.e.: One idea is built upon the idea that came before it, such that the next idea can build upon it.)

The Definition of Knowledge:

There are 3 aspects of knowledge to be aware of:

• Belief  — a statement of faith in something.  (The train will be here soon.)
• Truth  — a belief isn’t always true.  But if the belief tests positive (the train shows up soon) then it is said to be true (at least, conditionally).
• Justification – just because something turns out to be true doesn’t mean it is a justified belief.  (Did you think the train was coming because you are an optimist or because you looked at the schedule?)

Because of this, it is said that Knowledge is a justified, true belief. 

In building knowledge, there are multiple levels on which meaning can be lost:  People can be ignorant of facts, they can misinterpret information, and because of those things, they can construct a towering assemblage of beliefs that are not true. While facts can be learned and information clarified, the third instance is the most troubling because often once people have untrue beliefs ossified in their heads, it is difficult to shake them out.

The process through which people decide what is true and justified occurs constantly in both personal and public spheres. Individuals map out the world in their minds, weighing evidence and experience to try to figure out the best way forward. But it also happens in society, whenever people communicate their personal ideas to one another in the public sphere. These ideas are compared, contrasted, and tested to see if and how they may be true. Ideally, in this way a society would come to justified, true beliefs, or knowledge. Writing research papers may become a more interesting act if students recognize that every paper they write is part of the test that justifies beliefs, is part of the societal conversation that determines the best way forward.

It must be a very interesting time to be an epistemologist because the internet allows a front-row seat to a giant, unregulated barroom brawl over personal and public manifestations of belief, information, and knowledge. Here individuals, groups, organizations, governments, corporations, academics and everyone in between advance their ideas to inform the societal understanding of truth. In this way people construct knowledge or at the very least agree as a community what the truth is, even if that agreement represents an imperfect or even incorrect version of the facts.

If epistemology is about building knowledge, it is also about how people arrange the structure of knowledge, with one understanding built on another. Around 17000 years ago someone realized that carrying a box up a hill was not very efficient and decided that he needed to invent the wheel. Some 12,000 years after that, someone else figured out that it would work better with an axle. Then 5000 years later, society is blessed with wheels, axles, gears, engines, satellites, and YouTube videos of singing cats. Because one piece of knowledge builds upon the one that came before it, and, as noted before, societies need to protect their knowledge and make it accessible so it can be put to good use.

Libraries are one way that this goal can be attained. Melvil Dewey, a librarian at Columbia University back in the late 1800s created the Dewey Decimal system sometime around 1876 because he thought it would be helpful to arrange books in a way that would lead to serendipitous discovery. That is, lucky discovery. Luck which librarians help people have. Were someone to go to the shelves to retrieve a book about the Chicago River she would find next to it other books about the Chicago River, books she didn’t even know existed, which she was not looking for, but which now she knows about, because Melvil Dewey imagined 140 years ago that it would be helpful to arrange books by subject matter so that if a patron found one she would discover others like it. Before that convention, books were arranged by size. The tall books went on the tall shelf, and the short books went on the short shelf. As efficient and economical as that arrangement was, it did not encourage learning because patrons had to know exactly what they were looking for in order to find it.

Knowledge can be mapped and cross-referenced and plotted, but it is not stagnant, unchanging, or set in stone. When people talk about an issue, it is important to recognize that there are facts and ignorance, information and misinterpretation, knowledge and assemblages of incorrect beliefs, and every permutation in between. All of that provides a socially constructed context in which a debate happens and in which knowledge is said to be created. 

According to Tversky and Kahneman’s often-cited “Judgment Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases” (1974), heuristics may be simply defined as automatic shortcuts a person’s brain takes in its daily attempt at survival (1124). These shortcuts are necessary because of the constant volume of input coming from all around. A person’s brain has to filter out the things that seem extraneous to focus on what seems important. For instance, someone might tune out the swooping arcs of the birds and the color of the leaves to focus instead on the two strangers walking toward her on the sidewalk. People use the same kinds of processes to make decisions quickly, rather than taking the time to research, find exact measurements, and plot decisions using perfectly correct calculations. Consider for instance, weighing the estimated amount of gasoline left in the tank vs. the approximate distance one needs to go vs. the exact time ones needs to be there vs. the exact traffic and road conditions vs. how long it will take to stop and get gas. Taking the time to put exact numbers on all of those variables would likely make someone just as late as running out of gas on the way there. That kind of planning does not require exact calculations as long as it is reasonably accurate.

Understandably, the field of heuristics has startling implications for information literacy. While most of the time shortcuts work well, when people become dependent on their shortcuts in situations calling for more precise information, they are subject to a wide range of failures. Not every task needs to be backed up with formal research, but when it comes to making important decisions, people should seek out unbiased, timely, and credible sources. As Tversky and Kahneman pointed out, the heuristics which people employ to make intuitive decisions can cause them to make mistakes in judgment regarding the likelihood of events and the reliability of evidence. For instance, they found that over-reliance on heuristics may lead people to draw false correlations between unrelated events or to inaccurately categorize people because of perceived characteristics. Similarly, Stavy and Tirosh (2000) found that reliance on heuristics can lead students to make critical errors in math and science coursework.

The heuristics people use come from a variety of inputs, including personal experience, family, culture, and political preferences. Some even seem to be rooted in the deep structures of the brain and have lingered through millennia of evolution (Westen 2007). They are not in and of themselves bad things. In fact, they are quite useful at getting people through the day safely and efficiently. But it is important to recognize that quick, automatic decisions cannot help but oversimplify complex problems, sometimes in a way that does more harm than good.

An important facet of using information is to recognize when a quick mental calculation will suffice and when deeper research is needed. For instance, when trying to get across town on a nearly empty tank of gas, estimates will probably lead to a reasonably reliable decision. On the other hand, trying to put an astronaut on the moon using the same shortcuts would be catastrophic.

Overreliance on heuristics can sometimes leads to bad decisions. Other times, someone’s unconscious thinking is so out of line with rational decision-making that it interferes with his objective understanding of reality. Cognitive biases are ingrained thought processes that skew perception.  There are many different kinds of cognitive bias recognized in the literature, of which these may be the most important for the sake of research:

Confirmation Bias refers to people’s willingness to believe sources that agree with them with little critical effort.

Disconfirmation Bias refers to the opposite effect, that people will expend a great deal of critical effort to reject information that disagrees with their prior beliefs.

Fundamental Attribution Error refers to the error of assuming that people’s behavior is the result of their personalities or dispositions instead of external circumstances that may have led to the behavior.

Bias Blind Spot refers to people’s inability to see their own biases.

Anchoring Bias refers to people’s over-reliance on one piece of information or evidence.

Projection Bias refers to the error of assuming that others share one’s beliefs or feelings.

These biases are but a handful of all the recognized cognitive biases, but being aware of them will assist in the task of evaluating resources for credibility, timeliness, and authority. Compensating for one’s cognitive biases is not at all an easy task, because they happen pre-consciously.  But the crucial first step is simply to be aware that they exist.  The second step is to create a rubric by which to judge all sources.  The rubric once created should be read and understood to such a degree that its application becomes practically automatic.  Evenly applying standards to research in an a priori manner typically yields the best results.  

Because people tend to be blind to their own biases, it could be informative to use a hidden bias checker. The Southern Poverty Law Center keeps a page on understanding prejudices and biases here. One resource they link to is the Harvard Implicit Bias checker.  People should try taking tests like these from time to time to see what they discover about themselves.

In anthropological terms, culture is the collection of the ways of living and being and the system of beliefs and values that are shared and expressed by a group of people and which they transmit from one generation to the next. It includes all aspects of intellectual, political, economic, spiritual, and artistic endeavor within a group, as well as much more. Shennan (2007) espouses the notion of culture as information that is learned via teaching or imitation, stating that cultural tradition is “a process of inheritance through social learning” (38). He helpfully explains that while culture is not the same as behavior, it does influence the range of possible behaviors through the “creation of cultural tradition” which is inherited through social learning (42).  Gertude Himmelfarb suggests that much of this social learning and cultural tradition comes from interaction with family. The family, she argues, is the place where, “the most elemental, primitive emotions come into play and we learn to express and control them, where we come to trust and relate to others, where we acquire the habits of feeling, thinking, and behaving….where we are, in short, civilized, socialized, and moralized” (44).

Admittedly, it is somewhat of a fool’s errand to try to speak of how culture impacts information, as information itself is part of culture. Culture is what is written in textbooks, what is broadcast on the news, that flashes across the screen in movie theaters, and is both the subject and the substance of what people discourse about on internet message boards. Without culture of some kind, there would not be much to say and no way to say it. However, the cultural preferences with which people identify very much affect how they relate to information. Moreover, as much as culture represents the makeup of an individual’s dispositions, it cannot be overstated that there is a reciprocal relationship between the individual and the group in which she finds herself. In this sense, culture can be said to  be self-reinforcing. The more an overall group’s culture is shaped by a particular idea, the more that idea becomes normalized, and the more entrenched it becomes in the society. The more entrenched in society an idea becomes, the more difficult it becomes for an individual to express something outside those boundaries. This is known as the process of enculturation.

Once information becomes enshrined in culture, proposing narratives that challenge the orthodoxy becomes challenging. Joanne Melish writes in “Recovering (from) Slavery” Four Struggles to Tell the Truth,” about a Massachusetts museum wishing to alter its exhibits to tell a more nuanced and accurate story about slavery in the northeastern United States. They felt it was important to acknowledge that Massachusetts, itself, had been complicit with slavery until the 1780s. Melish explains the difficulties they encountered:

Persuading administrative, curatorial, and educative staffs to
recast their interpretations to incorporate the lives of
slaves and free people of color is one issue; getting trustees,
members, subscribers, and especially donors to buy into
new interpretations that not only challenge the celebratory narratives
of ‘their’ founders and patriots but also move the objects
and documents many of them have donated off center stage
is another (103).

In other words, it is one thing to acknowledge the truth, but quite another to expect wholesale acceptance of that truth by people who are made uncomfortable by it. As this example illustrates, the representations and institutions of culture are informed by people, just as people are dependent on them to be informed. Culture spreads while reinforcing itself, and people become less inclined to critically examine or challenge popular narratives or beliefs. Thus, people may resist messages that go against the grain of what they already believe to be an important part of their culture. The past and present are rife with examples of this exact phenomenon,and the lessons for the student of information literacy are that culture resists critical inquiry from within itself and that people are all part of one culture or another and need to recognize that they are infused with biases, dispositions, beliefs, and ideas that seem as natural to themselves as their very skin. Information literacy at the very least asks people to be aware of their own biases.

Another source for people’s cultures and worldviews is found in their political beliefs. Studies such as Oxley et al.’s Political Attitudes Vary with Physiological Traits (2008) and Dodd et al.’s The Political Left Roll with the Good and the Political Right Confronts the Bad: Connecting Physiology and Cognition to Preferences (2012) both found that there were correlations between physiology and politics. Oxley et al found that higher physiological reactions to sudden noises and threatening visual images were linked to approval of military spending, capital punishment, and patriotism, while those with lower physical sensitivities were more likely to support gun control, pacifism, and other core “leftist” stances. For its part, Dodd et al. found that people who dwelled on aversive stimuli tended to be right leaning, while those who sought out greater exposure to pleasing stimuli tended to be left leaning. In that sense, these political beliefs are somewhat akin to heuristics, because they are internal guides which encourage decision-making along particular and entrenched lines. Thus, it can be said that political beliefs may predispose people to accept one line of evidence over another, to embrace one policy decision and shun another, to filter decisions through the frame of their partisanship.  At the very least these aspects of culture make for a divided citizenry unable to ever get to the bottom of why they disagree with one another.  At their worst they contribute to intractable gridlock and inaction on issues of vital public importance. 

Still another root can be found in economics. Zac Bissonnette, author of The Great Beanie Baby Bubble  notes that the height of speculative buying of Beanie Babies coincided with the internet bubble, and he postulated that buying Beanie Babies gave the middle and lower class the feeling that they were participating in the market in the same way that the wealthy and elite were with technology stocks and internet websites. He finds this not unusual, drawing from Dr. Robert Shiller’s work in Irrational Exuberance, showing that times of market speculation among the wealthy can contribute to an overall feeling among the general population that the future seems brighter than it is (qtd in Bissonnette 6).

This would seem nothing more than a humorous cautionary tale, except for the people who dumped their savings to buy toys that retained none of their speculative value and little of their actual value. But it illustrates a more sinister point. Fueled by religion, politics, economics, or other forces of culture, people seem to lose all judgment of information and perspective of fact and get caught up in the fervor of some moment or movement.  Charles McKay sums the thesis of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions: The Madness of Crowds bluntly: “Whole communities suddenly fix their minds upon one object and go mad in its pursuit; that millions of people become simultaneously impressed with one delusion and run after it, till their attention is caught by some new folly more captivating than the first” (xvii). The book plays the thesis out across the panoply of the crusades, witch hunts, haunted houses, and dueling as a way of settling disputes. Indeed, a student of information literacy might aid society by finding what notions are so feverishly pursued today, and through critical investigation of dispassionate sources, begin to provide a corrected course.

If political beliefs influence people’s interpretation and use of information, then, it may concern some to find that political affiliation seems to be ingrained in people and not chosen through the active process of deliberation. The fact that Oxley et al. and Dodd et al. correlated physiology to political beliefs seems to indicate that something intrinsic about people makes them political beings. If that is indeed the case, then it suggests that there are naturally left-leaning people and right-leaning people as a matter of brain function and morphology, and that the two corresponding political parties which represent those predilections naturally followed.

It would make sense from an evolutionary standpoint that people would evolve with variations of those two mindsets. Individualists are akin to archetypal conservatives and community-minded people are archetypal democrats. Both sides have their advantages because the survival of the species depends on the skills of both sides. Sometimes everyone has to work together to solve a problem, and sometimes an individual can succeed where a large group cannot. Likewise, both sides are generally affected by cognitive biases and thinking limited by he margins of their minds. An idealist might suppose that society overall benefits from the interactions of these two mindsets. Richard Lanham in The Economics of Attention: Style and Substance in the Age of Information (2006) acknowledges that two-sided arguments are “profoundly social” and are ultimately a way of solving social problems and disputes in democratic governance (25). In this model, two sides of an argument would be presented and the superior side would presumably win. Political Scientist Arthur Lupia (2004) contends on the other hand that people do not pay attention to most of the information they encounter, and what they do, they do not necessarily understand and entertain the entirety of a concept presented to them (Par. 6). In fact, neuroscience, as Lupia (2016) recounted, suggests that “reason” is suffused in emotion, and that positive and negative feelings about things manifest even before the thought is consciously processed.  Moreover, this theory holds, the conscious thoughts people take as deliberation are actually more like rationalization for why they made the choice they made (108-11).

In other words, people will not even consciously engage an idea before making a decision about how they feel about it, which explains why it is so easy for people to accept information with which they happen to agree and why they often avoid  information with which they think they will disagree. In order to understand why this is so, a brief voyage into brain morphology is required.

Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man (1999) offers an entertaining romp through the human brain, detailing how the different parts of the brain function to process stimuli.  What people think of as a simple decision requires the interaction of approximately 100 billion brain cells and 20 quadrillion synapses.  Ghiglieri breaks the brain down by saying, essentially, that at the bottom of everything is the brainstem, above it is the limbic system, and above that is the cerebral cortex. 

The brain stem (some call it the reptilian brain, because that is pretty much the extent of the reptile’s brain) controls all of the autonomous nervous system stuff such as breathing and heart beats (33). The limbic system makes up about 20% of the brain.  It is comprised of the hippocampus, the amygdala, the thalamus, and the hypothalamus. The hippocampus helps people store and access memories and it generates emotions.  The amygdala helps people understand how other people are feeling, and it also provides the very important service of letting you feel fear.  The thalamus receives all the sensory input from your nerves and muscles.  The hypothalamus, though, for the purposes of information literacy, is the most interesting aspect of the limbic system.  It is responsible for determining how people feel about and react to outside stimuli, such as challenges or dangers. It is important to note that this is all happening pre-cognitively. That is, before people register it in their conscious minds. The signals at that point can either be sent to the body to tell it to react, or they can be sent up to the cerebral cortex for further consideration.  So when people say that fear is irrational, they’re right.  The sensation of fear happens in the hypothalamus, which is in the part of the brain below where the rational thinking happens. The cerebral cortex, representing approximately 70% of brain matter and volume, does the higher thinking people need to do complex activities, such as “rational thought, inspiration, insight, and creativity” (33). In other words, people’s initial interaction with information happens in the limbic system, which is the same system that perceives something is out of order in a person’s surroundings and sets off a fight or flight signal. It is responding to the feeling of cognitive dissonance, the feeling of the brain in disagreement with itself. This could manifest itself in ancient times as a primitive man in the jungle who notices in his favorite place to scavenge for berries a pattern of color that reminds him of a tiger’s stripes, setting off in him the feeling that something is wrong, and that he needs to run away or defend himself; or it could manifest itself in modern times when he encounters information that challenges his core beliefs or values.

This is a reasonable supposition. Ghiglieri points out that the brain does not necessarily measure its response in accordance to whether an emotion is justified and unjustified. For instance, he states: “The spate of hormones that fuel rage are secreted automatically when we conceive an insult or injury, whether it be someone who cuts in line or someone who steals our parking space or our mate….” (36).  In other words, it is hard not to overreact to perceived slights because that reaction happens in a part of the brain that has nothing to do with being calm, cool, and collected. When a person’s brain encounters something that makes it feel cognitive dissonance, the amygdala sends hormones to all parts of the brain and body that it is time to fight or flee. That fear needn’t be rational or necessarily even real and might just manifest itself in the act of changing the channel when a news story challenges someone’s worldview. Because, HEY, something doesn’t seem right here!  

How does Wikipedia determine truth?  Why do you agree or disagree with them?

Heuristics may be simply defined as automatic shortcuts your brain takes in its daily attempt at survival. What are some examples of people’s using heuristics in daily life. How might the use of heuristics help or hinder them?

In the quest for knowledge, people rely on primary, secondary, and tertiary sources of information. What are the advantages and disadvantages of using each kind of source?

The reading lists six cognitive biases. Choose two types of bias and give examples of people you have encountered who exhibited them.

The reading suggests that you use a rubric for evaluating sources. Why is this a good practice?

Joanne Melish writes in “Recovering (from) Slavery” Four Struggles to Tell the Truth,” about a Massachusetts museum wishing to alter its exhibits to tell a more nuanced and accurate story about slavery in the northeastern United States. What were some of the difficulties they encountered, and why?

Michael Ghiglieri’s The Dark Side of Man (1999) details how the different parts of the brain function to process stimuli. In what ways does brain morphology pose a challenge when encountering new information?