To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

Kids can be taught to read the web critically.
Os Tartarouchos/Moment/Getty Images

Sam Wineburg, Stanford University

The web is a treacherous place.

A website’s author may not be its author. References that confer legitimacy may have little to do with the claims they anchor. Signals of credibility like a dot-org domain can be the artful handiwork of a Washington, D.C., public relations maven.

Unless you possess multiple Ph.D.’s – in virology, economics and the intricacies of immigration policy – often the wisest thing to do when landing on an unfamiliar site is to ignore it.

Learning to ignore information is not something taught in school. School teaches the opposite: to read a text thoroughly and closely before rendering judgment. Anything short of that is rash.

But on the web, where a witches’ brew of advertisers, lobbyists, conspiracy theorists and foreign governments conspire to hijack attention, the same strategy spells doom. Online, critical ignoring is just as important as critical thinking.

That’s because, like a pinball bouncing from bumper to bumper, our attention careens from notification to text message to the next vibrating thing we must check.

The cost of all this overabundance, as the late Nobel Laureate Herbert Simon observed, is scarcity. A flood of information depletes attention and fractures the ability to concentrate.

Modern society, wrote Simon, faces a challenge: to learn to “allocate attention efficiently among the overabundance of sources that might consume it.”

We’re losing the battle between attention and information.

A man at a desk with several computer screens and looking at his cellphone.
It’s possible to learn how to ignore what’s calling to us from the web.
MoMo Productions/DigitalVision/Getty Images

‘Glued to the site’

As an applied psychologist, I study how people determine what is true online.

My research team at Stanford University recently tested a national sample of 3,446 high school students on their ability to evaluate digital sources. Armed with a live internet connection, students examined a website that claims to “disseminate factual reports” on climate science.

Students were asked to judge whether the site was reliable. A screen prompt reminded them that they could search anywhere online to reach their answer.

Instead of leaving the site, the vast majority did exactly what school teaches: They stayed glued to the site – and read. They consulted the “About” page, clicked on technical reports, and examined graphs and charts. Unless they happened to possess a master’s degree in climate science, the site, filled with the trappings of academic research, looked, well, pretty good.

The few students – less than 2% – who learned the site was backed by the fossil fuel industry did so not because they applied critical thinking to its contents. They succeeded because they hopped off the website and consulted the open web. They used the web to read the web.

As a student who searched the internet for the group’s name wrote: “It has ties to large companies that want to purposefully mislead people when it comes to climate change. According to USA Today, Exxon has sponsored this nonprofit to pump out misleading information on climate change.”

Instead of getting tangled up in the site’s reports or suckered into its neutral-sounding language, this student did what professional fact checkers do: She evaluated the site by leaving it. Fact checkers engage in what we call lateral reading, opening up new tabs across the top of their screens to search for information about an organization or individual before diving into a site’s contents.

Only after consulting the open web do they gauge whether expending attention is worth it. They know that the first step in critical thinking is knowing when to deploy it.

A man in a suit standing in a rowboat on a sea filled with binary symbols.
A flood of information depletes attention and fractures the ability to concentrate.
bestdesigns/iStock/Getty Images Plus

Critical thinking

The good news is that students can be taught to read the internet this way.

In an online nutrition course at the University of North Texas, we embedded short instructional videos that demonstrated the dangers of dwelling on an unknown site and taught students how to evaluate it.

At the beginning of the course, students were duped by features that are ludicrously easy to game: a site’s “look,” the presence of links to established sources, strings of scientific references or the sheer quantity of information a site provides.

On the test we gave at the beginning of the semester, only three in 87 students left a site to evaluate it. By the end, over three-quarters did. Other researchers, teaching the same strategies, have found similarly hopeful results.

Learning to resist the lure of dubious information demands more than a new strategy in students’ digital tool box. It requires the humility that comes from facing one’s vulnerability: that despite formidable intellectual powers and critical thinking skills, no one is immune to the slippery ruses plied by today’s digital rogues.

By dwelling on an unfamiliar site, imagining ourselves smart enough to outsmart it, we squander attention and cede control to the site’s designers.

Spending a few moments vetting the site by drawing on the awesome powers of the open web, we regain control and with it our most precious resource: Our attention.

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Sam Wineburg, Professor of Education and (by courtesy) History, Stanford University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

11 thoughts on “To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

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    Resources for Addressing Mental Health Challenges at Work
    Every year, about 1 in 5 adults in the United States experiences a mental illness and 1 in 25 lives with a serious mental illness that substantially interferes with or limits at least one major life activity. Mental illness is a top cause of worker disability in the U.S. and 62 percent of missed work days can be attributed to mental health conditions.
    A leader in employee benefits, Unum recently published the report, “Strong Minds at Work,” on the prevalence of mental health issues in today’s workplaces. The research revealed just 25 percent of managers in the U.S. have received training on how to refer employees to mental health resources and more than half of people are unsure how to help a colleague with a mental health issue.
    “The development, implementation, and promotion of mental health strategies have become a top priority for many of today’s employers,” said Michelle Jackson, assistant vice president of market development at Unum. “Creating a workplace culture that promotes mental health resources and encourages employees to take advantage of them helps to destigmatize mental health issues and can lead to a happier, more productive workforce.”
    Some of the report’s findings include:

    Fifty-five percent of employees said their employer did not have, or they were unsure if their employer had, a specific program, initiative or policy in place to address mental health.
    Sixty-one percent of employees felt there’s a social stigma in the workplace toward colleagues with mental health issues; half of them felt the stigma has stayed the same or worsened in the past five years.
    Among employees with a mental health issue, 42 percent went to work with suicidal feelings.

    “The fact that such a high percentage of employees have come to work feeling suicidal is troubling,” Jackson said. “While this is certainly a worst-case scenario and employers would hope issues would not progress to this level, it also emphasizes the need to ensure support and resources are understood and readily available in the workplace.”
    The bulk of mental health resources are usually offered via an employer’s health care provider and can include medical care, an employee assistance program (EAP), counseling referrals and financial and legal counseling. However, employees often don’t fully understand the resources available to them.
    According to the Unum study, HR professionals said 93 percent of their employers offer an EAP, yet only 38 percent of employees were aware of this resource. More than half of HR professionals said they offer financial counseling, legal services, and telemedicine services, but a fraction of employees said they were aware these services exist.
    “Employees should ask their HR department what mental health resources are available and be supportive of colleagues who may be struggling,” Jackson said. “Offering support to others and knowing where to direct them can not only save lives but also help create a more inclusive workplace environment.”
    To download a copy of the mental health report, visit unum.com/mentalhealth.
    Photo courtesy of Getty Images
    SOURCE:Unum

    To navigate the dangers of the web, you need critical thinking – but also critical ignoring

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    Originally posted on June 19, 2019 @ 4:42 pmShare ThisRelated Posts:Improve Your Mental Health with Better Sleep5 Ways Pets can Improve Mental Health‘It Impacts Weight, Sleep and Mental Health10 wings 5-minute IMPOSSIBLE Food Challenges in the USA!10 DOLLAR TREE HACKS THAT ACTUALLY WORK!Get Ready for Work and School this Winter

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