4
Credibility
Students will learn to . . .
1. Evaluate degrees of credibility
2. Assess whether a source is an interested versus a disinterested party
3. Assess claims in relation to their
own observations, experiences, or
background information
4. Evaluate a source based on veracity, objectivity, and accuracy
5. Evaluate a source based on knowledge or expertise
6. Understand the influences and
biases behind the news
7. Become better (and perhaps more
skeptical) evaluators of media
messages
8. Limit the influence of advertising
on their consumer behavior
104
R
aymond James Merrill was the brother of an acquaintance of one of your authors. In his mid-fifties, Merrill
still cut a striking figure—tall and lean, with chiseled
features, a bushy mustache, and a mane of blond hair. But
he had been in a funk. He had broken up with his girlfriend,
and he did not want to be alone. Then a website that featured “Latin singles” led him to Regina Rachid, an attractive woman with a seductive smile who lived in San Jose
dos Campos, a city in southern Brazil, and suddenly Merrill was in love. Desperately so, it seems. He believed everything Rachid told him and was credulous enough to make
three trips to Brazil to be with her, to give her thousands
of dollars in cash, and to buy her a $20,000 automobile.
He even refused to blame her when thousands of dollars in
unexplained charges turned up on his credit card account.
Sadly, Rachid was more interested in Merrill’s money than
in his affection, and when he went to Brazil the third time,
to get married and, he believed, begin a new life, he disappeared. The story ended tragically: Merrill’s strangled and
burned body was found in an isolated spot several miles
out of town. Rachid and two accomplices are now in jail
for the crime, and two accessories are under investigation
CREDIBILITY
as we write this.* The moral of the story: It can be a horrible mistake to let our
needs and desires overwhelm our critical abilities when we are not sure with
whom or with what we’re dealing. Our focus in this chapter is on how to determine when a claim or a source of a claim is credible enough to warrant belief.
A second story, less dramatic but much more common, is about a friend
of ours named Dave, who not long ago received an email from Citibank. It
notified him that there might be a problem with his credit card account and
asked him to visit the bank’s website to straighten things out. (These notices
often include a threat that if you fail to respond, your account may be closed.)
A link was provided to the website. When he visited the site, he was asked to
confirm details of his personal information, including account numbers, Social
Security number, and his mother’s maiden name. The website looked exactly
like the Citibank website he had visited before, with the bank’s logo and other
authentic-appearing details. But very shortly after this episode, he discovered
that his card had paid for a plasma television, a home theater set, and a couple
of expensive car stereos, none of which he had ordered or received.
Dave was a victim of “phishing,” a ploy to identify victims for identity
theft and credit card fraud. As this edition goes to press, the number of phishing
Real Life
The Nigerian Advance Fee 4-1-9 Fraud:
The Internet’s Longest-Running Scam
Is Still Running Strong
If you have an email account, chances are you’ve received an offer from someone in Nigeria,
probably claiming to be a Nigerian civil servant, who is looking for someone just like you who
has a bank account to which several millions of dollars can be sent—money that results from
“overinvoicing” or “double invoicing” oil purchases or otherwise needs laundering outside the
country. You will receive a generous percentage of the money for your assistance, but you will
have to help a bit at the outset by sending some amount of money to facilitate the transactions, or to show your good faith!
This scam, sometimes called “4-1-9 Fraud,” after the relevant section of Nigeria’s criminal
code, is now celebrating more than a quarter century of existence. (It operated by telephone
and FAX before the web was up and running.) Its variations are creative and numerous. Critical thinkers immediately recognize the failure of credibility such offers have, but thousands of
people have not, and from a lack of critical thinking skills or from simple greed, hundreds of
millions of dollars have been lost to the perpetrators of this fraud.
To read more about this scam, check out these websites: and .
*The whole story can be found at www.justice4raymond.org.
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
scams continues to rise, with millions of people receiving phony emails alleging to be from eBay, PayPal, and other Internet companies as well as an assortment of banks and credit card companies. Some of these phishing expeditions
threaten to suspend or close the individual’s account if no response is made.
Needless to say, a person should give no credibility to an email that purports
to be from a bank or other company and asks for personal identifying information via email or a website.
There are two grounds for suspicion in cases where credibility is the
issue. The first ground is the claim itself. Dave should have asked himself
just how likely it is that Citibank would notify him of a problem with his
account by email and would ask him for his personal, identifying information.
(Hint: No bank will approach its customers for such information by email or
telephone.) The second ground for suspicion is the source of the claim. In this
case, Dave believed the source was legitimate. But here’s the point, one that
critical thinkers are well aware of these days: On the Internet, whether by
website or email, the average person has no idea where the stuff on the computer screen comes from. Computer experts have methods that can sometimes
identify the source of an email, but most of us are very easy to mislead.
Dave is no dummy; being fooled by such scams is not a sign of a lack of
intelligence. His concern that his account might be suspended caused him to
overlook the ominous possibility that the original request might be a fake.
In other cases, such as the one described in the “4-1-9 Fraud” box, it may be
wishful thinking or a touch of simple greed that causes a person to lower his
or her credibility guard.
Every time we revise and update this book, we feel obliged to make our
warnings about Internet fraud more severe. And every year we seem to be
borne out by events. The level of theft, fraud, duplicity, and plain old vandalism seems to rise like a constant tide. We’ll have some suggestions for keeping
yourself, your records, and your money safe later in the chapter. For now, just
remember that you need your critical thinking lights on whenever you open
your browser.
THE CLAIM AND ITS SOURCE
As indicated in the phishing story, there are two arenas in which we assess
credibility: the first is that of claims themselves; the second is the claims’
sources. If we’re told that ducks can communicate by quacking in Morse code,
we dismiss the claim immediately. Such claims lack credibility no matter
where they come from. (They have no initial plausibility, a notion that will be
explained later.) But the claim that ducks mate for life is not at all outrageous;
it might be true: it’s a credible claim. Whether we should believe it depends on
its source; if we read it in a bird book or hear it from a bird expert, we are much
more likely to believe it than if we hear it from our editor, for example.
There are degrees of credibility and incredibility; they are not all-ornothing kinds of things, whether we’re talking about claims or sources. Consider the claim that the president of the United States has been hypnotized and
is acting completely under the spell of wizards who are hiding in warehouses in
suburban Washington, D.C. This truly requires a stretch of the imagination; it
is very unlikely. But, however unlikely, it is still more credible than the claim
that the president is not human at all but a robot constructed and controlled
by aliens from another galaxy. Sources (i.e., people) vary in their credibility
THE CLAIM AND ITS SOURCE
just as do the claims they offer. If the next-door neighbor you’ve always liked
is arrested for bank robbery, his denials will probably seem credible to you. But
he loses credibility if it turns out he owns a silencer and a .45 automatic with
the serial numbers removed. Similarly, a knowledgeable friend who tells us
about an investment opportunity has a bit more credibility if we learn he has
invested his own money in the idea. (At least we could be assured he believed
the information himself.) On the other hand, he has less credibility if we learn
he will make a substantial commission from our investment in it.
So, there are always two questions to be asked about a claim with which
we’re presented. First, when does a claim itself lack credibility—that is, when
does its content present a credibility problem? Second, when does the source
of a claim lack credibility?
We’ll turn next to the first of these questions, which deals with what a
claim actually says. The general answer is
A claim lacks inherent credibility to the extent that it conflicts with
what we have observed or what we think we know—our background
information—or with other credible claims.
In the Media
Guaranteeing an Interested Party,
or the Fox Audits the Henhouse
In 2005, an audit program was established by the federal government to root out fraud and
waste in the Medicare program. An Atlanta-based auditing firm, PRG-Schultz, was given the job
of reviewing Medicare records and searching for mistakes and overcharges in three states. So
far, so good.
But the way the program was set up, the auditors were paid only when they found such
mistakes and overcharges—they kept a commission of 25 to 30 cents for every dollar determined to be in error. Naturally, this makes the firm a very interested party, since the more fraud
and waste it finds, the more money it makes.
As a critical thinker might expect, PRG-Schultz found lots of fraud and waste; they had
rejected more than $105 million in Medicare claims by September 2006 and millions more by
the time the program came under review by an administrative law judge. As a critical thinker
might expect, many of the rejected charges were reversed on appeal; they were found to be
legitimate after all.
Remember, putting an interested party in charge of making decisions is an invitation to
error—or worse. That’s why the expression “Don’t put the fox in charge of the henhouse” is an
important warning.
P.S. Because of the way the law was originally implemented, PRG-Schultz will be allowed
to keep the money it received in commissions even though its decisions in many cases were
reversed. The fox got away with this one.
Seattle Times online (seattletimes.nwsource.com), May 19, 2007, and the Sacramento Bee, September 16, 2007.
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
Just what this answer means will be explained in the section that follows.
After that, we’ll turn our attention to the second question we asked earlier,
about the credibility of sources.
ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM
So, some claims stand up on their own; they tend to be acceptable regardless
of from whom we hear them. But when they fail on their own, as we’ve said,
it’s because they come into conflict either with our own observations or with
what we call our “background knowledge.” We’ll discuss each of these in turn.
Does the Claim Conflict with Our Personal Observations?
Our own observations provide our most reliable source of information about
the world. It is therefore only reasonable to be suspicious of any claim that
comes into conflict with what we’ve observed. Imagine that Moore has just
come from the home of Mr. Marquis, a mutual friend of his and Parker’s, and
has seen his new red Mini Cooper automobile. He meets Parker, who tells
him, “I heard that Marquis has bought a new Mini Cooper, a bright blue one.”
Moore does not need critical thinking training to reject Parker’s claim about
the color of the car, because of the obvious conflict with his earlier observation.
In the Media
Incredible Claims!
We’ve had a lot of fun with lunatic headlines from supermarket tabloids in past editions. Here
is this edition of “Run for Your Life” headlines:
Demons Made Jessee Cheat on Sandra!
“Possibly the same ones that got hold of Tiger Woods,” says seer.
How to Tell if You’ve Been Abducted by Aliens
Memory loss, other symptoms can tell for sure, according to Dr. Brad Steiger.
Elvis Alive and Working in Vegas as Elvis Impersonator
He’s better at it than most of them, reviews say.
Beer Can Prevent Prostate Cancer
Very few career drinkers die of it, say medicos.
Nebraska Doesn’t Exist, Says Author
Admission process was botched, according to historian.
We don’t have to make these up.
ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM
Real Life
When Personal Observation Fails . . .
According to the Innocence Project, a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions,
eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of conviction of innocent persons. Of
all the convictions overturned by DNA analysis, witness misidentification played a role in over
75 percent. Of the first 239 DNA exonerations, 62 percent of the defendants were misidentified by one witness; in 25 percent of the cases, the defendant was misidentified by two witnesses; and in 13 percent of the cases the same innocent defendant was misidentified by three
or more separate eyewitnesses. Even though eyewitness testimony can be persuasive before a
judge and jury, it is much more unreliable than we generally give it credit for being.
But observations and short-term memory are far from infallible, or professional dancer Douglas Hall would not have been awarded $450,000 in
damages by a New York jury in January 2005.* It seems Dr. Vincent Feldman, twenty minutes after having placed a large “X” on the dancer’s right
knee, where the latter had complained of pain, sliced open the patient’s left
knee, which had been perfectly healthy up until that moment, and effectively
ended his dancing career in the process. Although he had just seen where he
was to operate and had marked the spot, he nonetheless managed to confuse
the location and the result may have put a serious wrinkle in his own career
as well as that of the dancer.
*New York Post, January 29, 2005.
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All kinds of factors influence our observations and our recollections of
them, and Dr. Feldman may have been affected by one or more of them: tiredness, distraction, worry about an unrelated matter, or emotional upset could
easily account for such mistakes. There are also physical conditions that often
affect our observations: bad lighting, lots of noise, the speed of events, and
more. We are also sometimes prey to measuring instruments that are inexact,
temperamental, or inaccurate. Parker once blew out a tire at high speed as a
result of a faulty tire-pressure gauge.
It’s also important to remember that people are not all created equal
when it comes to making observations. We hate to say it, dear reader, but there
are lots of people who see better, hear better, and remember better than you.
Of course, that goes for us as well.
Our beliefs, hopes, fears, and expectations affect our observations. Tell
someone that a house is infested with rats, and he is likely to believe he
sees evidence of rats. Inform someone who believes in ghosts that a house
is haunted, and she may well believe she sees evidence of ghosts. At séances
staged by the Society for Psychical Research to test the observational powers
of people under séance conditions, some observers insist that they see numerous phenomena that simply do not exist. Teachers who are told that the students in a particular class are brighter than usual are very likely to believe that
the work those students produce is better than average, even when it is not.
In Chapter 6, we cover a fallacy (a fallacy is a mistake in reasoning) called
wishful thinking, which occurs when we allow hopes and desires to influence our judgment and color our beliefs. Most of the people who fall for the
4-1-9 Fraud Internet scam (see box, p. 105) are almost surely victims of wishful
thinking. It is very unlikely that somebody, somewhere, wants to send you
millions of dollars just because you have a bank account and that the money
they ask for really is just to facilitate the transaction. The most gullible victim, with no stake in the matter, would probably realize this. But the idea of
getting one’s hands on a great pile of money can blind a person to even the
most obvious facts.
Our personal interests and biases affect our perceptions and the judgments we base on them. We overlook many of the mean and selfish actions of
the people we like or love—and when we are infatuated with someone, everything that person does seems wonderful. By contrast, people we detest can
hardly do anything that we don’t perceive as mean and selfish. If we desperately wish for the success of a project, we are apt to see more evidence for that
success than is actually present. On the other hand, if we wish for a project
to fail, we are apt to exaggerate flaws that we see in it or imagine flaws that
are not there at all. If a job, chore, or decision is one that we wish to avoid, we
tend to draw worst-case implications from it and thus come up with reasons
for not doing it. However, if we are predisposed to want to do the job or make
the decision, we are more likely to focus on whatever positive consequences
it might have.
Finally, as we hinted above, the reliability of our observations is no better than the reliability of our memories, except in those cases where we have
the means at our disposal to record our observations. And memory, as most of
us know, can be deceptive. Critical thinkers are always alert to the possibility
that what they remember having observed may not be what they did observe.
But even though firsthand observations are not infallible, they are still
the best source of information we have. Any report that conflicts with our
own direct observations is subject to serious doubt.
ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM
111
In Depth
Incredible but True
Believe it or not, these two tables are identical in both size and shape. You’ll probably have to check
with a ruler or other straight edge to believe this; we did. The illusion was designed by Roger Shepard
(1990). (Reproduced with permission of W. H. Freeman and Company.) This illusion shows how easily our
observations can be mistaken—in this case, simply because of perspective. As indicated in the text, many
other factors can influence what we think we see.
Does the Claim Conflict with Our Background Information?
Reports must always be evaluated against our background information—that
immense body of justified beliefs that consists of facts we learn from our own
direct observations and facts we learn from others. Such information is “background” because we may not be able to specify where we learned it, unlike
something we know because we witnessed it this morning. Much of our background information is well confirmed by a variety of sources. Reports that conflict with this store of information are usually quite properly dismissed, even
if we cannot disprove them through direct observation. We immediately reject
the claim “Palm trees grow in abundance near the North Pole,” even though we
are not in a position to confirm or disprove the statement by direct observation.
Indeed, this is an example of how we usually treat claims when we first
encounter them: We begin by assigning them a certain initial plausibility,
a rough assessment of how credible a claim seems to us. This assessment
depends on how consistent the claim is with our background information—
how well it “fits” with that information. If it fits very well, we give the claim
some reasonable degree of initial plausibility—there is a reasonable expectation of its being true. If, however, the claim conflicts with our background
information, we give it low initial plausibility and lean toward rejecting it
unless very strong evidence can be produced on its behalf. The claim “More
guitars were sold in the United States last year than saxophones” fits very
well with the background information most of us share, and we would hardly
require detailed evidence before accepting it. However, the claim “Charlie’s eighty-seven-year-old grandmother swam across Lake Michigan in the
There are three types of men
in the world. One type learns
from books. One type learns
from observation. And one
type just has to urinate on the
electric fence.
—DR. LAURA SCHLESSINGER
(reported by Larry Englemann)
The authority of experience.
112
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
middle of winter” cannot command much initial plausibility because of the obvious way it conflicts with our
Below, the
background information about eighty-seven-year-old peoffour parts are
ple, about Lake Michigan, about swimming in cold water,
moved around.
and so on. In fact, short of observing the swim ourselves,
it isn’t clear just what could persuade us to accept such a
claim. And even then, we should consider the likelihood
The partitions
are exactly the
that we’re being tricked or fooled by an illusion.
same as those
Obviously, not every oddball claim is as outrageous
used above.
as the one about Charlie’s grandmother. Recently, we read
a report about a house being stolen in Lindale, Texas—a
From where comes
this “hole”?
brick house. This certainly is implausible—how could
anyone steal a home? Yet there is credible documentation
that it happened,* and even stranger things occasionally
This optical illusion has
turn out to be true. That, of course, means that it can be worthwhile to check
made the rounds on
out implausible claims if their being true might be of benefit to you.
the web. It takes a very
Unfortunately, there are no neat formulas that can resolve conflicts
close look to identify
between what you already believe and new information. Your job as a critical
how the illusion works,
thinker is to trust your background information when considering claims that
although it’s certain
conflict with that information—that is, claims with low initial plausibility—
that something sneaky
is going on here.
The problem is
solved back in the
Answer Section.
Real Life
Do Your Ears Stick Straight Out?
According to Bill Cordingley, an
expert in psychographicology—
that’s face-reading, in case you
didn’t know (and we certainly
didn’t)—a person’s facial features reveal “the whole rainbow
collection” of a person’s needs
and abilities. Mr. Cordingley (In
Your Face: What Facial Features
Reveal About People You Know
and Love) doesn’t mean merely
that you can infer moods from
smiles and frowns. No, he means
that your basic personality traits
are readable from facial structures you were born with.
Do your ears stick out? That means you have a need to perform in public. The more they
stick out, the greater the need. Other features are said to reliably predict features of your
personality. It appears that President Obama is fortunate in that he (and his ears) have lots of
opportunities to appear in public.
Is there any reason to believe facial features can tell us such things about people? We
think not. The fact that Cordingley was once mayor of San Anselmo, California, adds no credibility to the claim.
*Associated Press report, March 25, 2005.
ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM
Real Life
Fib Wizards
In The Sleeping Doll, novelist Jeffery Deaver invents a character who is incredibly adept at reading what people are thinking from watching and listening to them. This is fiction, but there
seems to be at least a bit of substance to the claim that such talents exist.
After testing 13,000 people for their ability to detect deception, Professor Maureen
O’Sullivan of the University of San Francisco identified 31 who have an unusual ability to
tell when someone is lying to them. These “wizards,” as she calls them, are especially sensitive to body language, facial expressions, hesitations in speech, slips of the tongue, and
similar clues that a person may not be telling the truth. The wizards are much better than
the average person at noticing these clues and inferring the presence of a fib from them.
Professor O’Sullivan presented her findings to the American Medical Association’s 23rd
Annual Science Reporters Conference.
Maybe a few people can reliably tell when someone is lying. But we’d bet there are many
more who merely think they can do this—these are the ones we want to play poker with.
From an Associated Press report.
but at the same time to keep an open mind and realize that further information
may cause you to give up a claim you had thought was true. It’s a difficult balance, but it’s worth getting right. For example, let’s say you’ve been suffering
from headaches and have tried all the usual methods of relief: aspirin, antihistamines, whatever your physician has recommended, and so on. Finally, a
friend tells you that she had headaches that were very similar to yours, and
nothing worked for her, either, until she had an aromatherapy treatment. Then,
just a few minutes into her aromatherapy session, her headaches went away.
Now, we (Moore and Parker) are not much inclined to believe that smelling
oils will make your headache disappear, but we think there is little to lose and
at least a small possibility of something substantial to be gained by giving the
treatment a try. It may be, for example, that the treatment relaxes a person and
relieves tension, which can cause headaches. We wouldn’t go into it with great
expectations, however.
The point is that there is a scale of initial plausibility ranging from quite
plausible to only slightly so. Our aromatherapy example would fall somewhere between the plausible (and in fact true) claim that Parker went to high
school with Bill Clinton and the rather implausible claim that Paris Hilton has
a Ph.D. in physics.
As mentioned, background information is essential to adequately assess
a claim. It is pretty difficult to evaluate a report if you have no background
information relating to the topic. This means the broader your background
information, the more likely you are to be able to evaluate any given report
effectively. You’d have to know a little economics to evaluate assertions about
the dangers of a large federal deficit, and knowing how Social Security works
can help you know what’s misleading about calling it a savings account. Read
widely, converse freely, and develop an inquiring attitude; there’s no substitute for broad, general knowledge.
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Exercise 4-1
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
1. The text points out that physical conditions around us can affect our
observations. List at least four such conditions.
2. Our own mental state can affect our observations as well. Describe at
least three of the ways this can happen, as mentioned in the text.
3. According to the text, there are two ways credibility should enter into
our evaluation of a claim. What are they?
4. A claim lacks inherent credibility, according to the text, when it conflicts
with what?
5. Our most reliable source of information about the world is _________.
6. The reliability of our observations is not better than the reliability of
_________.
Exercise 4-2
▲ In your judgment, are any of these claims less credible than others? Discuss
your opinions with others in the class to see if any interesting differences in
background information emerge.
1. They’ve taught crows how to play poker.
2. The center of Earth consists of water.
3. Ray Charles was just faking his blindness.
4. The car manufacturers already can build cars that get more than 100
miles per gallon; they just won’t do it because they’re in cahoots with the
oil industry.
5. If you force yourself to go for five days and nights without any sleep,
you’ll be able to get by on less than five hours of sleep a night for the rest
of your life.
6. It is possible to read other people’s minds through mental telepathy.
7. A diet of mushrooms and pecans supplies all necessary nutrients and will
help you lose weight. Scientists don’t understand why.
8. Somewhere on the planet is a person who looks exactly like you.
9. The combined wealth of the world’s 225 richest people equals the total
annual income of the poorest 2.5 billion people, which is nearly half the
world’s total population.
10. George W. Bush arranged to have the World Trade Center attacked so
he could invade Afghanistan. He wanted to build an oil pipeline across
Afghanistan.
11. Daddy longlegs are the world’s most poisonous spider, but their mouths
are too small to bite.
12. Static electricity from your body can cause your gas tank to explode if
you slide across your seat while fueling and then touch the gas nozzle.
13. Japanese scientists have created a device that measures the tone of a dog’s
bark to determine what the dog’s mood is.
14. Barack Obama (a) is a socialist, (b) is a Muslim, (c) was not born in the
United States.
THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
We turn now from the credibility of claims themselves to the credibility of the
sources from which we get them. We are automatically suspicious of certain
sources of information. (If you were getting a divorce, you wouldn’t ordinarily turn to your spouse’s attorney for advice.) We’ll look at several factors that
should influence how much credence we give to a source.
Interested Parties
We’ll begin with a very important general rule for deciding whom to trust.
Our rule makes use of two correlative concepts, interested parties and disinterested parties:
A person who stands to gain from our belief in a claim is known as
an interested party, and interested parties must be viewed with much
more suspicion than disinterested parties, who have no stake in our
belief one way or another.
Real Life
Not All That Glitters
Since the U.S. dollar began to decline seriously in about 2004, quite a few financial “experts”
have claimed that gold is one of the few ways to protect one’s wealth and provide a hedge
against inflation. Some of the arguments they make contain some good sense, but it’s worth
pointing out that many of the people advocating the purchase of gold turn out to be brokers of
precious metals themselves, or are hired by such brokers to sell their product. As we emphasize
in the text: Always beware of interested parties!
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
It would be hard to overestimate the importance of this rule—in fact, if you
were to learn only one thing from this book, this might be the best candidate.
Of course, not all interested parties are out to hoodwink us, and certainly not
all disinterested parties have good information. But, all things considered, the
rule of trusting the latter before the former is a crucially important weapon in
the critical thinking armory.
We’ll return to this topic later, both in the text and in some exercises.
Physical and Other Characteristics
The feature of being an interested or disinterested party is highly relevant to
whether he, she, it, or they should be trusted. Unfortunately, we often base our
judgments on irrelevant considerations. Physical characteristics, for example,
tell us little about a person’s credibility or its lack. Does a person look you in
the eye? Does he perspire a lot? Does he have a nervous laugh? Despite being
generally worthless in this regard, such characteristics are widely used in siz-
Real Life
Whom Do You Trust?
As mentioned in the text, we often make too much of outward appearances when it comes to
believing what someone tells us. Would you be more inclined to believe one of these individuals than the other? As a matter of fact, we can think of at least as many reasons for the man on
the left telling us something that isn’t true as for the man on the right.
THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
ing up a person’s credibility. Simply being taller, louder, and more assertive
can enhance a person’s credibility, according to a recent study.* A practiced
con artist can imitate a confident teller of the truth, just as an experienced
hacker can cobble up a genuine-appearing website. (“Con,” after all, is short for
“confidence.”)
Other irrelevant features we sometimes use to judge a person’s credibility
include gender, age, ethnicity, accent, and mannerisms. People also make credibility judgments on the basis of the clothes a person wears. A friend told one
of us that one’s sunglasses “make a statement”; maybe so, but that statement
doesn’t say much about credibility. A person’s occupation certainly bears a
relationship to his or her knowledge or abilities, but as a guide to moral character or truthfulness, it is less reliable.
Which considerations are relevant to judging someone’s credibility? We
shall get to these in a moment, but appearance isn’t one of them. You may
have the idea that you can size up a person just by looking into his or her eyes.
This is a mistake. Just by looking at someone, we cannot ascertain that person’s truthfulness, knowledge, or character. (Although this is generally true,
there are exceptions. See the “Fib Wizards” box on page 113.)
Of course, we sometimes get in trouble even when we accept credible
claims from credible sources. Many of us rely, for example, on credible advice
from qualified and honest professionals in preparing our tax returns. But qualified and honest professionals can make honest mistakes, and we can suffer
the consequences. In general, however, trouble is much more likely if we
accept either doubtful claims from credible sources or credible claims from
doubtful sources (not to mention doubtful claims from doubtful sources). If
a mechanic says we need a new transmission, the claim itself may not be
suspicious—maybe the car we drive has many miles on it; maybe we neglected
routine maintenance; maybe it isn’t shifting smoothly. But remember that the
mechanic is an interested party; if there’s any reason to suspect he would exaggerate the problem to get work for himself, we’d get a second opinion about
our transmission.
One of your authors currently has an automobile that the local dealership once diagnosed as having an oil leak. Because of the complexity of the
repair, the cost was almost a thousand dollars. Because he’d not seen any oil
on his garage floor, your cautious author decided to wait and see how serious
the problem was. Well, a year after the “problem” was diagnosed, there was
still no oil on the garage floor, and the car used less than half a quart of oil,
about what one would have expected to add during the course of a year. What
to conclude? The service department at the dealership is an interested party.
If they convince your author that the oil leak is serious, they make almost
a thousand dollars. This makes it worth a second opinion, or, in this case,
one’s own investigation. We now believe his car will never need this thousanddollar repair.
Remember: Interested parties are less credible than other sources of
claims.
*The study, conducted by Professor Lara Tiedens of the Stanford University Graduate School of Business, was reported
in USA Today, July 18, 2007.
117
I looked the man in the eye.
I found him to be very straightforward and trustworthy.
We had a very good dialogue.
I was able to sense his soul.
—GEORGE W. BUSH, commenting
on his first meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin
By the end of 2007, Bush
had changed his mind about
Putin, seeing him as a threat
to democracy. So much for
the “blink” method of judging
credibility.
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Expertise
Much of our information comes from people about whom we have no reason to suspect prejudice, bias, or any of the other features that make interested parties such bad sources. However, we might still doubt a source’s actual
knowledge of an issue in question. The state of a person’s knowledge depends
on a number of factors, especially that person’s level of expertise and experience, either direct (through personal observation) or indirect (through study),
with the subject at hand.
Just as you generally cannot tell merely by looking at someone whether
he or she is speaking truthfully, objectively, and accurately, you can’t judge his
or her knowledge or expertise by looking at surface features. A British-sounding
scientist may appear more knowledgeable than a scientist who speaks, say,
with a Texas drawl, but his or her accent, height, gender, ethnicity, or clothing
doesn’t have much to do with a person’s knowledge. In the municipal park in
our town, it can be difficult to distinguish the people who teach at the university from the people who live in the park, based on physical appearance.
So, then, how do you judge a person’s expertise? Education and experience are often the most important factors, followed by accomplishments, reputation, and position, in no particular order. It is not always easy to evaluate
the credentials of an expert, and credentials vary considerably from one field
to another. Still, there are some useful guidelines worth mentioning.
Education includes, but is not strictly limited to, formal education—the
possession of degrees from established institutions of learning. (Some “doctors” of this and that received their diplomas from mail-order houses that
advertise on matchbook covers. The title “doctor” is not automatically a
qualification.)
Experience—both the kind and the amount—is an important factor in
expertise. Experience is important if it is relevant to the issue at hand, but the
mere fact that someone has been on the job for a long time does not automatically make him or her good at it.
Real Life
War-Making Policies and Interested Parties
In the 1960s, the secretary of defense supplied carefully selected information to President
Lyndon Johnson and to the Congress. Would the Congress have passed the Gulf of Tonkin
Resolution, which authorized the beginning of the Vietnam War, if its members had known that
the secretary of defense was determined to begin hostilities there? We don’t know, but certainly
they and the president should have been more suspicious if they had known this fact. Would
President Bush and his administration have been so anxious to make war on Iraq if they had
known that Ahmad Chalabi, one of their main sources of information about that country and
its ruler, Saddam Hussein, was a very interested party? (He hoped to be the next ruler of Iraq if
Hussein were overthrown, and much of his information turned out to be false or exaggerated.)
We don’t know that either, of course. But it’s possible that more suspicion of interested parties
may have slowed our commencement of two costly wars.
THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
Accomplishments are an important indicator of someone’s expertise but,
once again, only when those accomplishments are directly related to the question at hand. A Nobel Prize winner in physics is not necessarily qualified to
speak publicly about toy safety, public school education (even in science), or
nuclear proliferation. The last issue may involve physics, it’s true, but the
political issues are the crucial ones, and they are not taught in physics labs.
A person’s reputation is obviously very important as a criterion of his or
her expertise. But reputations must be seen in a context; how much importance we should attach to somebody’s reputation depends on the people among
whom the person has that reputation. You may have a strong reputation as a
pool player among the denizens of your local pool hall, but that doesn’t necessarily put you in the same league with Allison Fisher. Among a group of people
who know nothing about investments, someone who knows the difference
between a 401(k) plan and a Roth IRA may seem like quite an expert. But you
certainly wouldn’t want to take investment advice from somebody simply on
that basis.
Most of us have met people who were recommended as experts in some
field but who turned out to know little more about that field than we ourselves
knew. (Presumably, in such cases those doing the recommending knew even
less about the subject, or they would not have been so quickly impressed.)
By and large, the kind of reputation that counts most is the one a person has
among other experts in his or her field of endeavor.
The positions people hold provide an indication of how well somebody
thinks of them. The director of an important scientific laboratory, the head of
an academic department at Harvard, the author of a work consulted by other
experts—in each case the position itself is substantial evidence that the individual’s opinion on a relevant subject warrants serious attention.
But expertise can be bought. Our earlier discussion of interested parties
applies to people who possess real expertise on a topic as well as to the rest of
us. Sometimes a person’s position is an indication of what his or her opinion,
expert or not, is likely to be. The opinion of a lawyer retained by the National
Rifle Association, offered at a hearing on firearms and urban violence, should
be scrutinized much more carefully (or at least viewed with more skepticism)
than that of a witness from an independent firm or agency that has no stake in
the outcome of the hearings. The former can be assumed to be an interested
party, the latter not. It is too easy to lose objectivity where one’s interests and
concerns are at stake, even if one is trying to be objective.
Experts sometimes disagree, especially when the issue is complicated and
many different interests are at stake. In these cases, a critical thinker is obliged
to suspend judgment about which expert to endorse, unless one expert clearly
represents a majority viewpoint among experts in the field or unless one expert
can be established as more authoritative or less biased than the others.
Of course, majority opinions sometimes turn out to be incorrect, and
even the most authoritative experts occasionally make mistakes. For example,
various economics experts predicted good times ahead just before the Great
Depression. The same was true for many advisors right up until the 2008 financial meltdown. Jim Denny, the manager of the Grand Ole Opry, fired Elvis
Presley after one performance, stating that Presley wasn’t going anywhere and
ought to go back to driving a truck. A claim you accept because it represents
the majority viewpoint or comes from the most authoritative expert may turn
out to be thoroughly wrong. Nevertheless, take heart: At the time, you were
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Real Life
Smoking and Not Paying Attention
Can Be Deadly
David Pawlik called the fire department in Cleburne, Texas, in July to ask if the “blue
flames” he and his wife were seeing every time she lit a cigarette were dangerous, and
an inspector said he would be right over and for Mrs. Pawlik not to light another cigarette. However, anxious about the imminent inspection, she lit up and was killed in the
subsequent explosion. (The home was all electric, but there had been a natural gas leak
underneath the yard.)
—Fort Worth Star Telegram, July 11, 2007
News of the Weird
Sometimes it is crucial that you take the word of an expert.
rationally justified in accepting the majority viewpoint as the most authoritative claim. The reasonable position is the one that agrees with the most
authoritative opinion but allows for enough open-mindedness to change if the
evidence changes.
Finally, we sometimes make the mistake of thinking that whatever qualifies someone as an expert in one field automatically qualifies that person in
other areas. Being a top-notch programmer, for example, surely would not be
an indication of top-notch management skills. Indeed, many programmers get
good at what they do by shying away from dealing with other people—or so
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THE CREDIBILITY OF SOURCES
the stereotype runs. Being a good campaigner does not always translate into
being a good office-holder, as anyone who observes politics knows. Even if the
intelligence and skill required to become an expert in one field could enable
someone to become an expert in any field—which is doubtful—having the ability to become an expert is not the same as actually being an expert. Claims put
forth by experts about subjects outside their fields are not automatically more
acceptable than claims put forth by nonexperts.
List as many irrelevant factors as you can think of that people often mistake
for signs of a person’s truthfulness (for example, the firmness of a handshake).
Exercise 4-3
List as many irrelevant factors as you can think of that people often mistake
for signs of expertise on the part of an individual (for example, appearing
self-confident).
Exercise 4-4
Expertise doesn’t transfer automatically from one field to another: Being an
expert in one area does not automatically qualify a person as an expert (or even
as competent) in other areas. Is it the same with dishonesty? Many people
think dishonesty does transfer, that being dishonest in one area automatically
discredits that person in all areas. For example, when Bill Clinton lied about
having sexual encounters with his intern, some said he couldn’t be trusted
about anything.
If someone is known to have been dishonest about one thing, should
we automatically be suspicious of his or her honesty regarding other things?
Discuss.
Exercise 4-5
1. In a sentence, describe the crucial difference between an interested party
and a disinterested party.
2. Which of the two parties mentioned in item 1 should generally be considered more trustworthy? Why?
Exercise 4-6
▲ Suppose you’re in the market for a new television set, and you’re looking for
Exercise 4-7
advice as to what to buy. Identify which of the following persons/subjects is
likely to be an interested party and which is not.
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
a flyer from a local store that sells televisions
the Consumer Reports website
a salesman at a local electronics store
the Sony website
an article in a major newspaper about television sets, including some
rankings of brands
Now let’s say you’ve narrowed your search to two brands: LG and Panasonic.
Which of the following are more likely interested parties?
6. a friend who owns an LG set
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7. a friend who used to own a Panasonic and now owns an LG
8. a salesperson at a store that sells both Panasonic and LG
CREDIBILITY AND THE NEWS MEDIA
You may have heard that newspapers and the print media in general have fallen
on hard times in recent years. It’s true: many newspapers are in bankruptcy,
with advertising revenue falling 23 percent between 2006 and 2009 and one
out of five newspaper journalists losing their jobs between 2001 and 2009.*
Much of the losses in both the print media and in broadcast television have
been the result of more and more people turning to the Internet for their news
and information. During 2008, consumption of news on the Internet increased
by some 19 percent, and it has no doubt expanded hugely since. Strangely
enough, though, as more and more people turn to the web for news, they give
it very low marks for credibility. On the other hand, according to the Pew
Project report for 2009, leading newspapers and television news operations had
stable credibility ratings during the past presidential election year. However,
the ratings held stable at a level that was already pretty low. When evaluating
seven print media sources, an average of only 19 percent of those polled said
they “believe all or most” of what they read. CNN, which topped the list in
believability among television sources, came in at only 30 percent. Why is the
level of confidence in our media so low? Let’s look at some likely factors.
Consolidation of Media Ownership
Although it is not well known to most citizens, one reason the quality of news
available has decreased is that the media have become controlled by fewer and
fewer corporations, the result of many mergers and buyouts over the past three
or so decades. Since 2001, when the Federal Communications Commission
loosened the regulations regarding ownership of newspapers, radio stations,
and television stations, the concentration of media in fewer and fewer hands
has been accelerating. From thousands of independent media outlets in the
mid-twentieth century, media ownership dropped to only fifty companies by
1983. By late 2004, approximately 90 percent of all media companies in the
United States were controlled by just five companies: Time Warner (Warner
Bros., Time, Inc., HBO, CNN, etc.), Disney (ABC, ESPN, Miramax Films, etc.),
News Corp. (Fox Television, Wall Street Journal, New York Post, etc.), General Electric (NBC, Universal Studios, A & E Television, etc.), and Viacom
(Paramount Pictures, MTV, Comedy Central, etc.). The subsidiaries listed in
parentheses are only a tiny portion of these companies’ holdings. No matter
what you see on television, the great likelihood is that one or more of these
companies had a hand in producing it or getting it onto your screen. The fewer
hands that control the media, the easier it is for the news we get to be “managed”—either by the owners themselves or by their commercial advertisers or
even, as we’ll next see, by the government.
*The State of the News Media, the Pew Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2009, a biennial report, from which we
draw heavily in this section.
CREDIBILITY AND THE NEWS MEDIA
© The New Yorker Collection 1991 Dana Fradon from cartoonbank.com. All rights reserved.
Government Management of the News
For a while there, our only known source of fake news was Jon Stewart on
The Daily Show. But the federal government got into the fake news business
as well. In recent years, a number of fake news reports, paid for by the government, have appeared on television touting the virtues of government schemes
from the prescription drug program to airport safety to education programs. No
criticism of the programs was included, and no mention was made that these
were not legitimate independent news reports but rather were produced by the
very same governmental departments that produced the policies in question.
These practices provide material for stations that cannot afford to produce
a full plate of news themselves, which includes many, many stations across
the country. Unfortunately, many viewers accept as news what is essentially
official propaganda.
Leaving aside news reporting, problems also crop up on the op-ed page.
Opinion and editorial pages and television commentaries are usually presumed
to present the opinions of the writers or speakers who write or speak in them.
But, as it turned out, some of those are bought and paid for as well. Our favorite
example turned up in 2005: Syndicated columnist Michael McManus was paid
$10,000 by the Department of Health and Human Services for writing positively about one of its programs. Ironically enough, his column is entitled “Ethics and Religion.”
The military has its own methods for managing the media, from not
allowing photographs to be taken of the coffins of slain American soldiers
when they are sent home from Iraq to the more elaborately produced example
seen in the box on p. 125, “Saving Private Lynch.” Sometimes management
takes the form of simple suppression of news, as when it took a whistle-blower
to finally make public the video of a 2007 helicopter attack that killed a news
photographer, his driver, and several others.
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Bias Within the Media
It is commonly said that the media is biased politically. Conservatives are
convinced that it has a liberal bias and liberals are convinced the bias favors
conservatives.
The usual basis for the conservative assessment is that, generally speaking, reporters and editors are more liberal than the general population. Indeed,
several polls have indicated that this is the case. On the other hand, the publishers and owners of media outlets tend to be conservative—not surprisingly, since they have an orientation that places a higher value on the bottom
line: They are in business to make a profit. A book by Eric Alterman* argues
In the Media
Jumping to Conclusions in the News
On March 29, 2010, Fox Nation, the Fox News website, put up a story about a tragedy in
Antarctica:
Famed global warming activist James Schneider and a journalist friend were both found
frozen to death on Saturday, about 90 miles from the South Pole Station, by the pilot of a
ski plane practicing emergency evacuation procedures.
Well, Fox Nation was a bit too quick to jump on a story that fairly dripped with irony—a frozen
global warming activist, indeed. However, the joke turned out to be on Fox: they had gotten the
story from ecoEnquirer.com, a satirical website featuring spoof articles—James Schneider was
a made-up name, not a real person. (Other headlines at the site: “Court Orders Fisherman to
Apologize to Eagle,” “Penguins Fed Up with Media Attention.”)
*What Liberal Bias? (New York: Basic Books, 2003).
CREDIBILITY AND THE NEWS MEDIA
In the Media
Saving Private Lynch
Just after midnight on April 2, 2003, a battle group of Marine Rangers and Navy SEALs
descended in helicopters on the Iraqi town of Nasiriyah. With shouts of “Go, go, go!” and rifle
fire, they charged the hospital where Private Jessica Lynch was being held. The 19-year-old supply clerk was put on a stretcher and carried from the hospital to the choppers, and the unit was
up and away as quickly as it had come. The entire scene was captured by military cameramen
using night - vision cameras.
Eight days earlier, when Private Lynch’s unit had taken a wrong turn and become separated
from its convoy, it was apparently attacked by Iraqi fighters. According to the story in the Washington Post, Lynch put up a defiant stand against the attackers and “sustained multiple gunshot
wounds” and was stabbed while she “fought fiercely and shot several enemy soldiers . . . firing
her weapon until she ran out of ammunition.” The paper cited a U.S. military official as saying
“she was fighting to the death.” This story was picked up by news outlets all over the world.
The ambush and the rescue sound like something out of Black Hawk Down or maybe a
Bruce Willis movie. It also came at a time when the military was looking for some good press
out of the Iraq invasion. Like many stories that seem too good to be true, this one was too good
to be true.
At the hospital in Germany to which Private Lynch was flown, a doctor said her injuries
included a head wound, a spinal injury, fractures in both legs and one arm, and an ankle injury.
Apparently, none of her injuries were caused by bullets or shrapnel, according to the medical
reports. A doctor at the Nasiriyah hospital where she was initially treated said Lynch suffered
injuries consistent with an automobile wreck.
The rescue itself may have been rather seriously overdone. Quoted in the BBC News World
Edition, Dr. Anmar Uday, who worked at the hospital, said, “We were surprised. Why do this?
There was no military, there were no soldiers in the hospital. It was like a Hollywood film. They
made a show for the American attack on the hospital—action movies like Sylvester Stallone or
Jackie Chan.”
The BBC referred to the “Saving Private Lynch” story as “one of the most stunning pieces of
news management ever conceived.” We shall probably never know the truth of the details, but
it seems clear that the episode was stage-managed to some extent: It isn’t likely an accident
that the Special Forces just “happened to have” an American flag to drape over Ms. Lynch as
she was carried to the helicopter on her stretcher.
that the “liberal media” has always been a myth and that, at least in private,
well-known conservatives like Patrick Buchanan and William Kristol are willing to admit it. On the other hand, Bernard Goldberg, formerly of CBS, argues
that the liberal bias of the press is a fact.*
Making an assessment on this score is several miles beyond our scope
here. But it is important to be aware that a reporter or a columnist or a
broadcaster who draws conclusions without presenting sufficient evidence
*Bias, (Washington, D.C.: Regnery Publishing, 2001).
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126
Bias in the universities?
According to CNN news
anchor Lou Dobbs, citing a
Washington Post survey, 72
percent of collegiate faculty
across the country say they
are liberal; 15 percent say
they are conservative. At elite
universities, 87 percent say
they are liberal, and 3 percent
say they are conservative.
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
is no more to be believed than some guy from down the street, even if the
conclusions happen to correspond nicely to your own bias—indeed, especially
if they correspond to your own bias!
What is important to remember is that there are many forces at work
in the preparation of news besides a desire to publish or broadcast the whole
truth. That said, our view is that the major network news organizations are
generally credible, exceptions like those noted above notwithstanding. ABC,
CBS, and NBC do a generally credible job, as does CNN, and the Public Broadcasting System and National Public Radio are generally excellent. Also in
our view, the printed media, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the
Los Angeles Times, and other major newspapers are generally credible, even
though mistakes are sometimes made here as well. News magazines fall in the
same category: usually credible but with occasional flaws.
The rise of the cable news networks has been an influence on what gets
broadcast as news. CNN (which stands, unsurprisingly, for “Cable News Network”) began the trend in 1980 as the first twenty-four-hours-a-day news
broadcaster. Fox News and MSNBC now also compete for viewers’ attention
both day and night. While spreading across the hours of the day, these networks
have also spread across the political spectrum. You can now find “news” that
satisfies nearly any political bias. What’s more, with the need to fill screens
for so many hours, the notion of what actually counts as news has had to
be expanded. The result has affected not just the cable networks but traditional news programs as well: “Feature stories” from prison life to restaurant
kitchen tours take up more and more space that used to be devoted to so-called
hard news. One of our northern California newspapers, the Sacramento Bee,
recently did a story on how “silly news” was taking up more and more space in
local news programs. Ben Bagdikian, author and former dean of the Graduate
School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, has pointed out
that a commercial for Pepsi Cola seems to connect better after a fluff piece or
a sitcom than after a serious piece on, say, massacres in Rwanda or an ambush
in Afghanistan.
It would be difficult to boil down our advice regarding accepting claims
from the news media, but it would certainly include keeping the following
points in mind:
1. Like the rest of us, people in the news media sometimes make mistakes;
they sometimes accept claims with insufficient evidence or without confirming the credibility of a source.
2. The media are subject to pressure and sometimes to manipulation from
government and other news sources.
3. The media, with few exceptions, are driven in part by the necessity to
make a profit, and this can bring pressure from advertisers, owners, and
managers.
Finally, we might remember that the news media are to a great extent
a reflection of the society at large. If we the public are willing to get by with
superficial, sensationalist, or manipulated news, then we can rest assured that,
eventually, that’s all the news we’ll get.
CREDIBILITY AND THE NEWS MEDIA
Talk Radio
On the surface, talk radio seems to offer a wealth of information not available
in news reports from conventional sources. And many talk radio hosts scour
traditional legitimate news sources for information relevant to their political
agenda, and to the extent that they document the source, which they often do,
they provide listeners with many interesting and important facts. But radio
hosts from all sides are given to distortion, misplaced emphasis, and bias with
regard to selection of which facts to report. And, really, the shouting gives us
a headache.
Advocacy Television
We mentioned earlier that some cable networks have moved left while others
have moved right on the political spectrum, so the news you can expect from
them comes with a predictable slant. This is good insofar as it exposes people
to opinions different from their own; it is not so good insofar as it simply
reinforces what the viewer already believes, especially if there is no evidence
offered in support of the opinions.
The Comedy Central channel features The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, which generally approaches the news from a leftish (and completely zany)
viewpoint, and The Colbert Report, in which Steve Colbert, in reality a liberal, plays the part of a right-wing host. (Before the show, Colbert reminds his
guests that “My on-air character is an idiot.”) It is ironic, because he appears
on the Comedy Central channel, but when Jon Stewart isn’t going for the
laughs, we think he may be the best, and the toughest, interviewer currently
on television. He’s doubtless tougher on guests from the right than the left,
but he takes no guff from either.
MSNBC offers The Ed Show, Countdown with Keith Olbermann, and
The Rachel Maddow Show, all of which offer a liberal perspective on the news
of the day, and all of which editorialize from that perspective.
Fox News features Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Glenn Beck, who represent various conservative constituencies and do something similar from the
other side.
We could write an entire chapter on this subject, and maybe, given the
influence the media have on American public opinion these days, we should.
We could discuss other channels and other organizations (e.g., Accuracy in
Media on the right and MoveOn.org on the left, to name just two of a thousand), but we think you get the idea: We remind you to always listen with a
skeptical ear (and maybe a jaundiced eye) to political news and commentary.
We know it’s difficult, but it’s important to be especially careful about accepting claims (without good evidence), and in particular, those with which you
sympathize.
The Internet, Generally
It is getting to be difficult to overestimate the importance of the Internet—
that amalgamation of electronic lines and connections that allows nearly anyone with a computer and a modem to link up with nearly any other similarly
equipped person on the planet. Although the Internet offers great benefits,
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In the Media
Evaluating Website Credibility: A Tip
from the Professionals
In a study done a few years ago,* it was determined that when it comes to evaluating the credibility of a website, experts in a field go about it much differently than do ordinary consumers.
Since, as we’ve indicated, credibility varies hugely on the web, we must do the best job we can
in assessing this feature of any website we consider important. Unfortunately, as was shown in
the study just mentioned, most ordinary visitors do a much less effective job of evaluating credibility than do people knowledgeable about the field. In particular, while professionals attend
most carefully to the information given at a website, most of the rest of us pay more attention
to its visual appeal. Layout, typography, color schemes, and animation affect the general public’s estimate of a site’s credibility—54 percent of comments are about these features—whereas
the professionals’ interest is more in the quality of the site’s references, the credentials of individuals mentioned, and so on. Only 16 percent of professional evaluators’ comments had to do
with a website’s visual design.
What should we take from this? A general rule: Don’t be taken in by how visually attractive
a website might be. A flashy design with attractive colors and design features is no substitute
for information that is backed up by references and put forward by people with appropriate
credentials.
*Experts vs. Online Consumers, a Consumer Reports WebWatch research report, October, 2009.
(www.consumerwebwatch.org).
the information it provides must be evaluated with even more caution than
information from the print media, radio, or television. We presented two stories at the beginning of the chapter that show just how wrong things can go.
There are basically two kinds of information sources on the Internet. The
first consists of commercial and institutional sources; the second, of individual and group sites on the World Wide Web. In the first category, we include
sources like the Lexis-Nexis facility, as well as the online services provided by
newsmagazines, large electronic news organizations, and government institutions. The second category includes everything else you’ll find on the web—
an amazing assortment of good information, entertainment of widely varying
quality, hot tips, advertisements, come-ons, fraudulent offers, and outright lies.
Just as the fact that a claim appears in print or on television doesn’t
make it true, so it is for claims you run across online. Keep in mind that
the information you get from a source is only as good as that source. The LexisNexis information collection is an excellent asset for medium-depth investigation of a topic; it includes information gathered from a wide range of print
sources, especially newspapers and magazines, with special collections in
areas like the law. But the editorials you turn up there are no more likely to be
accurate, fair-minded, or objective than the ones you read in the newspapers—
which is where they first appeared anyhow.
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CREDIBILITY AND THE NEWS MEDIA
Possibly the fastest-growing source of information in terms of both its size
and its influence is the online encyclopedia Wikipedia. “Wiki” refers to a
collaborative voluntary association (although the word seems to have been
coined by a programmer named Ward Cunningham from the Hawaiian term
“wiki-wiki”—“quick-quick”). Begun in 2001 by Larry Sanger and Jimmy
Wales, the encyclopedia’s content and structure are determined by its users.
This accounts for its major strengths as well as its major weaknesses. Because
there are many thousands of contributors, the coverage is immense. There are
well over three million articles in English alone, and more than two hundred
other languages and dialects are also employed. Because access is available to
virtually everybody who has a computer and modem, coverage is often very
fast; articles often appear within hours of breaking events.
But also because of this wide access, the quality of the articles varies
tremendously. You should be especially wary of recent articles; they are more
likely to contain uncorrected errors that will eventually disappear as knowledgeable people visit the page and put right whatever mistakes are present.
Not just factual errors, but bias and omission can affect the quality of material
found on Wikipedia’s pages. Occasionally, a writer will do a thorough job of
reporting the side of an issue that he favors (or knows more about, or both),
and the other side will go underreported or even unmentioned. Over time,
these types of errors tend to get corrected after visits by individuals who favor
the other side of the issue. But at any given moment, in any given Wikipedia
entry, there is the possibility of mistakes, omissions, citation errors, and plain
old vandalism.
Our advice: We think Wikipedia is an excellent starting point in a search
for knowledge about a topic. We use it frequently. But you should always
check the sources provided in what you find there; it should never be your
sole source of information if the topic is important to you or is to become part
of an assignment to be turned in for a class. That said, we add that articles
dealing with technical or scientific subjects tend to be more reliable (although
errors are often more difficult to spot), with an error rate about the same as
that found in the Encyclopedia Britannica.* Such articles and, as mentioned,
articles that have been around for a while can be extremely helpful in whatever project you are engaged in.
Wikipedia
Now we come to blogs. Blogs are simply journals, the vast majority of them
put up by individuals, that are left open to the public on an Internet site. Originally more like public diaries dealing with personal matters, they now encompass specialties of almost every imaginable sort. Up to three million blogs
were believed to be up and running by the end of 2004, with a new one added
every 5.8 seconds (ClickZ.com, “The Blogosphere by the Numbers”). Nobody
knows how many there are now.
You can find blogs that specialize in satire, parody, and outright fabrication. They represent all sides of the political spectrum, including some sides
that we wouldn’t have thought existed at all. The Drudge Report is a standard
on the right; the Huffington Post is equally well known on the left. On a blog
site, like any other website that isn’t run by a responsible organization such as
Blogs
*“Internet Encyclopedias Go Head to Head,” by Jim Giles, Nature, December 12, 2005.
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
In the Media
Webcheckers
Along with other sites we’ve already mentioned, here are some other places where you can go
to get to the bottom of an issue you’ve seen brought up on the web. We believe these to be
among the most reliable sources currently available; we use them all ourselves.
Snopes.com. The original, and still the best site, for checking out rumors, stories, urban
legends, and any other type of strange claim that turns up on the web. Run by Daniel
and Barbara Mikkelson since 1996, it classifies as true or false a host of claims that circulate on the Internet. Analysis of the history and nature of the claims under investigation
is usually provided.
TruthorFiction.com. A general fact-finding, debunking site. Generally up-to-date findings
by owner Rich Buhler. Analyses tend to be less thorough than those found on Snopes, but
a generally trustworthy site.
Factcheck.org. Run by Brooks Jackson, a former CNN and Wall Street Journal reporter
out of the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg Public Policy Center. Completely neutral politically, the site attacks anybody who stretches the truth concerning any topic in
politics.
PolitiFact.com. Operated by the St. Petersburg (Florida) Times newspaper. Reporters and
editors fact-check claims made by politicians, lobbyists, and interest groups. The website
won a Pulitzer Prize in 2009 for its work during the presidential election of 2008.
Consumerreports.com. Evaluates consumer issues (including health care and financial
planning) and products. Not to be confused with other organizations with similar names,
this site, like the magazine of the same name that sponsors it, accepts no advertising and
bends over backwards to avoid bias. Careful evaluation and analysis can be expected.
The organization buys products to be evaluated from stores, just like we do, rather than
being given them by manufacturers.
For the general evaluation of websites, several checklists are available. You will find Cornell
University’s and the University of Maryland’s checklists at www.library.cornell.edu/olinuris/
ref/research/skill26.htm and www.lib.umd.edu/guides/evaluate.html.
most of those previously indicated, you can find anything that a person wants
to put there, including all kinds of bad information. You can take advantage
of these sources, but you should always exercise caution, and if you’re looking
for information, always consult another source, but be especially careful about
any that are linked to your first source!
Before we leave the topic of web worthiness, we want to pass along a
warning that comes from Barbara Mikkelson, co-founder of Snopes.com. She
reminds us that rumors often give people a great sense of comfort; people
are quick to reject nuance and facts that are contrary to their own point of
view, but quickly accept them when they are agreeable to the hearer. “When
you’re looking at truth versus gossip,” Mikkelson says, “truth doesn’t stand a
chance.” We hope she’s being unduly pessimistic.
So remember, when you take keyboard and mouse in hand, be on guard.
You have about as much reason to believe the claims you find on most sites
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ADVERTISING
as you would if they came from any other stranger, except you can’t look this
one in the eye.
See who in the class can find the strangest news report from a credible source.
Send it to us at McGraw-Hill. If your entry is selected for printing in our next
edition, Moore might send you $100. (In the next chapter you’ll see why we
call the word “might” a weaseler in this context.)
Exercise 4-8
Identify at least three factors that can cause inaccuracies or a distortion of
reports in the news media.
Exercise 4-9
ADVERTISING
Advertising [is] the science of arresting the human intelligence long
enough to get money from it.
—Stephen Leacock
If there is anything in modern society besides politics that truly puts our
sense of what is credible to the test, it’s advertising. As we hope you’ll agree
after reading this section, skepticism is always the best policy when considering any kind of advertising or promotion.
Ads are used to sell many products other than toasters, television sets,
and toilet tissue. They can encourage us to vote for a candidate, agree with a
political proposal, take a tour, give up a bad habit, or join a Tea Party or the
army. They can also be used to make announcements (for instance, about job
openings, lectures, concerts, or the recall of defective automobiles) or to create
favorable climates of opinion (for example, toward labor unions or offshore oil
drilling).
Advertising firms understand our fears and desires at least as well as
we understand them ourselves, and they have at their disposal the expertise to exploit them.* Such firms employ trained psychologists and some of
the world’s most creative artists and use the most sophisticated and wellresearched theories about the motivation of human behavior. Maybe most
important, they can afford to spend whatever is necessary to get each detail
of an advertisement exactly right. (On a per-minute basis, television ads are
the most expensively produced pieces that appear on your tube.) A good ad is
a work of art, a masterful blend of word and image often composed in accordance with the exacting standards of artistic and scientific genius (other ads,
of course, are just plain silly). Can untrained laypeople even hope to evaluate
such psychological and artistic masterpieces intelligently?
Fortunately, it is not necessary to understand the deep psychology of an
advertisement to evaluate it in the way that’s most important to us. When
confronted with an ad, we should ask simply: Does this ad give us a good reason to buy this product? And the answer, in general terms, can be simply put:
*For an excellent treatment of this and related subjects, we recommend Age of Propaganda: The Everyday Use and
Abuse of Persuasion, rev. ed., by Anthony R. Pratkanis and Elliot Aronson (New York: W. H. Freeman and Co., 1998).
According to zFacts.com,
$412 billion dollars were
spent on advertising in
America during 2008.
Somebody really wants to
sell us something!
People watching a sexual program are thinking about sex,
not soda pop. Violence and sex
elicit very strong emotions and
can interfere with memory for
other things.
—BRAD BUSHMAN of Iowa State
University, whose research
indicated that people tend to
forget the names of sponsors
of violent or sexual TV shows
(reported by Ellen Goodman)
132
“Doctor recommended.”
This ambiguous ad slogan
creates an illusion that many
doctors, or doctors in general,
recommend the product. However, a recommendation from
a single doctor is all it takes
to make the statement true.
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
Because the only good reason to buy anything in the first place is to improve
our lives, the ad justifies a purchase only if it establishes that we’d be better off
with the product than without it (or that we’d be better off with the product
than with the money we would trade for it).
However, do we always know when we’ll be better off with a product than
without it? Do we really want, or need, a bagel splitter or an exercise bike? Do
people even recognize “better taste” in a cigarette? Do we need Viagra or are
we just curious? Advertisers spend vast sums creating within us new desires
and fears—and hence a need to improve our lives by satisfying those desires or
eliminating those fears through the purchase of advertised products. They are
often successful, and we find ourselves needing something we might not have
known existed before. That others can instill in us, through word and image,
a desire for something we did not previously desire may be a lamentable fact,
but it is clearly a fact. Still, we decide what would make us better off, and we
decide to part with our money. So, it is only with reference to what in our view
would make life better for us that we properly evaluate advertisements.
There are basically two kinds of ads: those that offer reasons and those
that do not. Those that offer reasons for buying the advertised product always
promise that certain hopes will be satisfied, certain needs met, or certain fears
eliminated. (You’ll be more accepted, have a better image, be a better parent,
and so on.)
Those ads that do not rely on reasons fall mainly into three categories: (1) those that bring out feelings in us (e.g., through humor, pretty
images, scary images, beautiful music, heartwarming scenes); (2) those
that depict the product being used or endorsed by people we admire or
think of ourselves as being like (sometimes these people are depicted
by actors, sometimes not); and (3) those that depict the product being
used in situations in which we would like to find ourselves. Of course,
some ads go all out and incorporate elements from all three categories—
and for good measure also state a reason or two why we should buy the advertised product.
Buying a product (which includes joining a group, deciding how to vote,
and so forth) on the basis of reasonless ads is, with one minor exception that
we’ll explain shortly, never justified. Such ads tell you only that the product exists and what it looks like (and sometimes where it is available and
how much it costs); if an ad tells you much more than this, then it begins
to qualify as an ad that gives reasons for buying the product. Reasonless ads
do tell us what the advertisers think of our values and sense of humor (not
always a pleasant thing to notice, given that they have us pegged so well), but
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ADVERTISING
this information is irrelevant to the question of whether we should buy the
product.
Ads that submit reasons for buying the product, or “promise ads,” as they
have been called, usually tell us more than that a certain product exists—but
not much more. The promise, with rare exception, comes with no guarantees and is usually extremely vague (Gilbey’s gin promises “more gin taste,”
Kleenex is “softer”). In other words, the reasons given are almost never good
reasons.
Such ads are a source of information about what the sellers of the product
are willing to claim about what the product will do, how well it will do it, how
it works, what it contains, how well it compares with similar products, and
how much more wonderful your life will be once you’ve got one. However, to
make an informed decision on a purchase, you almost always need to know
more than the seller is willing to claim, particularly because no sellers will
tell you what’s wrong with their products or what’s right with those of their
competitors. Remember that they are perfect examples of interested parties.
Further, the claims of advertisers are notorious not only for being
vague but also for being ambiguous, misleading, exaggerated, and sometimes
just plain false. Even if a product existed that was so good that an honest,
Real Life
When Is an Ad Not
an Ad? When It’s a
Product Placement!
When Katharine Hepburn threw all of Humphrey Bogart’s Gordon’s gin overboard in
The African Queen, it was an early example
of product placement, since the makers of
Gordon’s paid to have their product tossed
in the drink, as it were. Readers of a certain
age may remember the 1960s television
show Route 66, which starred not just Martin Milner and George Maharis but also a
new Chevrolet Corvette and probably contributed to more than a few Corvette sales.
Reese’s Pieces were centrally placed in the
movie E.T. and the sales of Red Stripe beer
jumped 50 percent after it appeared prominently in the movie The Firm.
■ We suspect the Coke can is there because
These days, the paid placement of prodPepsi wouldn’t pay enough.
ucts in both movies and television (and possibly even in novels) is a serious alternative
to traditional commercials, and it has the advantage of overcoming the Tivo effect: the viewer
records programs and watches them while skipping over the commercials.
We are professional grade.
Meaningless but catchy
slogan for GMC trucks. (We
are professional grade, too.)
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
unexaggerated, and fair description of it would justify our buying it without
considering competing items (or other reports on the same item), and even if an
advertisement for this product consisted of just such a description, we would
still not be justified in purchasing the product on the basis of that advertisement alone. For we would be unable to tell, simply by looking at the advertisement, that it was uninflated, honest, fair, and not misleading. Our suspicions
about advertising in general should undercut our willingness to believe in the
honesty of any particular advertisement.
Thus, even advertisements that present reasons for buying an item do
not by themselves justify our purchase of the item. This is worth repeating,
in stronger language: An advertisement never justifies purchasing something.
Advertisements are written to sell something; they are not designed to be
informative except insofar as it will help with the sales job. Sometimes, of
course, an advertisement can provide you with information that can clinch
your decision to make a purchase. Sometimes the mere existence, availability,
or affordability of a product—all information that an ad can convey—is all you
need to make a decision to buy. But if the purchase is justifiable, you must
have some reasons, apart from those offered in the ad, for making it. If, for
some reason, you already know that you want or need and can afford a car with
an electric motor, then an ad that informs you that a firm has begun marketing such a thing would supply you with the information you need to buy one.
If you can already justify purchasing a particular brand of microwave oven but
cannot find one anywhere in town, then an advertisement informing you that
the local department store stocks them can clinch your decision to make the
purchase.
For people on whom good fortune has smiled, those who don’t care what
kind of whatsit they buy, or those to whom mistaken purchases simply don’t
matter, all that is important is knowing that a product is available. Most of us,
however, need more information than ads provide to make reasoned purchasing decisions. Of course, we all occasionally make purchases solely on the
basis of advertisements, and sometimes we don’t come to regret them. In such
cases, though, the happy result is due as much to good luck as to the ad.
On Language
WAY Too Good to Be True!
Since the country fell into a serious recession in 2008, many people have found themselves
unable to meet their mortgage payments, and many find themselves saddled with more credit
card debt than they can manage. Easy debt-relief schemers to the rescue! Some cable TV and
radio ads promise to help get your mortgage paid off, make your credit card debt shrink or
disappear altogether, or make you rich by teaching you to make quick killings in real estate.
According to a Consumer Reports Money Adviser article (April 2010), these schemes tend
more toward guaranteeing fees for the operators than for debt relief or riches, quick or otherwise, for the client. Many clients wind up worse off than they started after signing up for these
plans. Remember: advertising is always designed to help the folks who pay for the ads. If it
looks too good to be true, you can bet it is.
135
RECAP
A final suggestion on this subject. We know of only one source that maintains a fierce independence and still does a good job of testing and reporting
on products. That’s Consumers Union, the publishers of Consumer Reports, a
magazine (mentioned in the box on p. 130) that accepts no advertising and that
buys all the objects it tests and reports on (rather than accepting them for free
from the manufacturers, as do several other “consumer” magazines). For reliable information and fair-mindedness, we recommend them. They’re also on
the web at .
This list summarizes the topics covered in this chapter.
■ Claims lack credibility to the extent they conflict with our observations,
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
■
experience, or background information, or come from sources that lack
credibility.
The less initial plausibility a claim has, the more extraordinary it seems;
and the less it fits with our background information, the more suspicious
we should be.
Interested parties should always be viewed with more suspicion than disinterested parties.
Doubts about sources generally fall into two categories: doubts about the
source’s knowledge or expertise and doubts about the source’s veracity,
objectivity, and accuracy.
We can form reasonably reliable judgments about a person’s knowledge by
considering his or her education, experience, accomplishments, reputation, and position.
Claims made by experts, those with special knowledge in a subject, are
the most reliable, but the claims must pertain to the area of expertise and
must not conflict with claims made by other experts in the same area.
Major metropolitan newspapers, national newsmagazines, and network
news shows are generally credible sources of news, but it is necessary to
keep an open mind about what we learn from them.
Governments have been known to influence and even to manipulate the
news.
Sources like Wikipedia, institutional websites, and news organizations
can be helpful, but skepticism is the order of the day when we obtain
information from unknown Internet sources or talk radio.
Advertising assaults us at every turn, attempting to sell us goods, services, beliefs, and attitudes. Because substantial talent and resources are
employed in this effort, we need to ask ourselves constantly whether the
products in question will really make the differences in our lives that
their advertising claims or hints they will make. Advertisers are always
more concerned with selling you something than with improving your
life. They are concerned with improving their own lives.
What goes for talk radio, above, also goes for advocacy television.
Recap
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CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
Additional
Exercises
Exercise 4-10
In groups, decide which is the best answer to each question. Compare your
answers with those of other groups and your instructor.
1. “SPACE ALIEN GRAVEYARD FOUND! Scientists who found an extraterrestrial cemetery in central Africa say the graveyard is at least 500
years old! ‘There must be 200 bodies buried there and not a single one of
them is human,’ Dr. Hugo Schild, the Swiss anthropologist, told reporters.” What is the appropriate reaction to this report in the Weekly World
News?
a. It’s probably true.
b. It almost certainly is true.
c. We really need more information to form any judgment at all.
d. None of these.
2. Is Elvis really dead? Howie thinks not. Reason: He knows three people
who claim to have seen Elvis recently. They are certain that it is not a
mere Elvis look-alike they have seen. Howie reasons that, since he has
absolutely no reason to think the three would lie to him, they must be
telling the truth. Elvis must really be alive, he concludes!
Is Howie’s reasoning sound? Explain.
3. voice on telephone: Mr. Roberts, this is SBC calling. Have you recently
placed several long-distance calls to Lisbon, Portugal?
mr. roberts: Why, no . . .
voice: This is what we expected. Mr. Roberts, I’m sorry to report that
apparently someone has been using your calling card number. However,
we are prepared to give you a new number, effective immediately, at no
charge to you.
mr. roberts: Well, fine, I guess . . .
voice: Again let me emphasize that there will be no charge for this service. Now, for authorization, just to make sure that we are calling Mr.
Roberts, Mr. Roberts, please state the last four digits of your calling card
number, and your PIN number, please.
Question: What should Mr. Roberts, as a critical thinker, do?
4. On Thanksgiving Day 1990, an image said by some to resemble the
Virgin Mary was observed in a stained glass window of St. Dominic’s
Church in Colfax, California. A physicist asked to investigate said the
image was caused by sunlight shining through the window and reflecting
from a newly installed hanging light fixture. Others said the image was a
miracle. Whose explanation is more likely true?
a. The physicist’s
b. The others’
c. More information is needed before we can decide which explanation is
more likely.
5. It is late at night around the campfire when the campers hear awful
grunting noises in the woods around them. They run for their lives! Two
EXERCISES
campers, after returning the next day, tell others they found huge footprints around the campfire. They are convinced they were attacked by
Bigfoot. Which explanation is more likely true?
a. The campers heard Bigfoot.
b. The campers heard some animal and are pushing the Bigfoot explanation to avoid being thought of as chickens, or are just making the story
up for unknown reasons.
c. Given this information, we can’t tell which explanation is more likely.
6. Megan’s aunt says she saw a flying saucer. “I don’t tell people about
this,” Auntie says, “because they’ll think I’m making it up. But this
really happened. I saw this strange light, and this, well, it wasn’t a saucer,
exactly, but it was round and big, and it came down and hovered just over
my back fence, and my two dogs began whimpering. And then it just,
whoosh! It just vanished.”
Megan knows her aunt, and Megan knows she doesn’t make up
stories.
a. She should believe her aunt saw a flying saucer.
b. She should believe her aunt was making the story up.
c. She should believe that her aunt may well have had some unusual experience, but it was probably not a visitation by extraterrestrial beings.
7. According to Dr. Edith Fiore, author of The Unquiet Dead, many of your
personal problems are really the miseries of a dead soul who has possessed you sometime during your life. “Many people are possessed by
earthbound spirits. These are people who have lived and died, but did
not go into the afterworld at death. Instead they stayed on Earth and
remained just like they were before death, with the fears, pains, weaknesses and other problems that they had when they were alive.” She estimates that about 80 percent of her more than 1,000 patients are suffering
from the problems brought on by being possessed by spirits of the dead.
To tell if you are among the possessed, she advises that you look for such
telltale symptoms as low energy levels, character shifts or mood swings,
memory problems, poor concentration, weight gain with no obvious
cause, and bouts of depression (especially after hospitalization). Which of
these reactions is best?
a. Wow! I bet I’m possessed!
b. Well, if a doctor says it’s so, it must be so.
c. If these are signs of being possessed, how come she thinks that only
80 percent of her patients are?
d. Too bad there isn’t more information available, so we could form a reasonable judgment.
8.
EOC—Engine Overhaul in a Can
Developed by skilled automotive scientists after years of research and
laboratory and road tests! Simply pour one can of EOC into the oil in
your crankcase. EOC contains long-chain molecules and special thermoactive metallic alloys that bond with worn engine parts. NO tools
needed! NO need to disassemble engine.
Question: Reading this ad, what should you believe?
137
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
138
9. ANCHORAGE, Alaska (AP)—Roped to her twin sons for safety, Joni
Phelps inched her way to the top of Mount McKinley. The National Park
Service says Phelps, 54, apparently is the first blind woman to scale the
20,300-foot peak.
This report is
a. Probably true
b. Probably false
c. Too sketchy; more information is needed before we can judge
Exercise 4-11
Within each group of observers, are some especially credible or especially
not so?
▲
▲
1. Judging the relative performances of the fighters in a heavyweight boxing
match
a. the father of one of the fighters
b. a sportswriter for Sports Illustrated magazine
c. the coach of the American Olympic boxing team
d. the referee of the fight
e. a professor of physical education
2. You (or your family or your class) are trying to decide whether you should
buy an Apple Macintosh computer or a Windows model. You might
consult
a. a friend who owns either a Macintosh or a Windows machine
b. a friend who now owns one of the machines but used to own the other
c. a dealer for either Macintosh or Windows computers
d. a computer column in a big-city newspaper
e. reviews in computer magazines
3. The Surgical Practices Committee of Grantville Hospital has documented an unusually high number of problems in connection with tonsillectomies performed by a Dr. Choker. The committee is reviewing her
surgical practices. Those present during a tonsillectomy are
a. Dr. Choker
b. the surgical proctor from the Surgical Practices Committee
c. an anesthesiologist
d. a nurse
e. a technician
4. The mechanical condition of the used car you are thinking of buying
a. the used-car salesperson
b. the former owner (who we assume is different from the salesperson)
c. the former owner’s mechanic
d. you
e. a mechanic from an independent garage
5. A demonstration of psychokinesis (the ability to move objects at a distance by nonphysical means)
a. a newspaper reporter
b. a psychologist
EXERCISES
c.
d.
e.
f.
g.
a police detective
another psychic
a physicist
a customs agent
a magician
Exercise 4-12
For each of the items below, discuss the credibility and authority of each
source relative to the issue in question. Whom would you trust as most reliable on the subject?
▲
▲
▲
1. Issue: Is Crixivan an effective HIV/AIDS medication?
a. Consumer Reports
b. Stadtlander Drug Company (the company that makes Crixivan)
c. the owner of your local health food store
d. the U.S. Food and Drug Administration
e. your local pharmacist
2. Issue: Should possession of handguns be outlawed?
a. a police chief
b. a representative of the National Rifle Association
c. a U.S. senator
d. the father of a murder victim
3. Issue: What was the original intent of the Second Amendment to the U.S.
Constitution, and does it include permission for every citizen to possess
handguns?
a. a representative of the National Rifle Association
b. a justice of the U.S. Supreme Court
c. a Constitutional historian
d. a U.S. senator
e. the president of the United States
4. Issue: Is decreasing your intake of dietary fat and cholesterol likely to
reduce the level of cholesterol in your blood?
a. Time magazine
b. Runner’s World magazine
c. your physician
d. the National Institutes of Health
e. the New England Journal of Medicine
5. Issue: When does a human life begin?
a. a lawyer
b. a physician
c. a philosopher
d. a minister
e. you
Exercise 4-13
Each of these items consists of a brief biography of a real or imagined person,
followed by a list of topics. On the basis of the information in the biography,
139
CHAPTER 4: CREDIBILITY
140
discuss the credibility and authority of the person described on each of the
topics listed.
▲
1. Anne St. Germain teaches sociology at the University of Illinois and is
the director of its Population Studies Center. She is a graduate of Harvard
College, where she received a B.A. in 1975, and of Harvard University,
which granted her a Ph.D. in economics in 1978. She taught courses
in demography as an assistant professor at UCLA until 1982; then she
moved to the sociology department of the University of Nebraska, where
she was associate professor and then professor. From 1987 through 1989,
she served as acting chief of the Population Trends and Structure Section
of the United Nations Population Division. She joined the faculty at the
University of Illinois in 1989. She has written books on patterns of world
urbanization, the effects of cigarette smoking on international mortality,
and demographic trends in India. She is president of the Population Association of America.
Topics
a. The effects of acid rain on humans
b. The possible beneficial effects of requiring sociology courses for all students at the University of Illinois
c. The possible effects of nuclear war on global climate patterns
d. The incidence of poverty among various ethnic groups in the United
States
e. The effects of the melting of glaciers on global sea levels
f. The change in death rate for various age groups in all Third World countries between 1970 and 1990
g. The feasibility of a laser-based nuclear defense system
h. Voter participation among religious sects in India
i. Whether the winters are worse in Illinois than in Nebraska
2. Tom Pierce graduated cum laude from Cornell University with a B.S.
in biology in 1973. After two years in the Peace Corps, during which
he worked on public health projects in Venezuela, he joined Jeffrey Ridenour, a mechanical engineer, and the pair developed a water pump and
purification system that is now used in many parts of the world for both
regular water supplies and emergency use in disaster-struck areas. Pierce
and Ridenour formed a company to manufacture the water systems, and
it prospered as they developed smaller versions of the system for private
use on boats and motor homes. In 1981, Pierce bought out his partner
and expanded research and development in hydraulic systems for forcing oil out of old wells. Under contract with the federal government and
several oil firms, Pierce’s company was a principal designer and contractor for the Alaskan oil pipeline. He is now a consultant in numerous
developing countries as well as chief executive officer and chairman of
the board of his own company, and he sits on the boards of directors of
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