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Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

2018

Active learning

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Fighting Fake News And Biases With Cognitive Psychology, Marlee Givens, Seth Porter, Karen Viars, Liz Holdsworth Sep 2018

Fighting Fake News And Biases With Cognitive Psychology, Marlee Givens, Seth Porter, Karen Viars, Liz Holdsworth

Georgia International Conference on Information Literacy

Fake news, faulty data, and questionable research outputs: how do we find the truth when so much information is uncertain? Part of this problem is cognitive biases in our decision-making process. The mind will create a durable narrative around knowns and ignore unknowns. Scholar Daniel Kahneman (2012) refers to this phenomenon as, "What you see is all there is" or WYSIATI. Another common heuristic, the "availability cascade," causes the mind to prefer immediate examples that come to mind over more reliable information that is less easily recalled. These biases limit the accuracy of the information that people understand, as well …