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Hurricane misinformation is just one piece of America’s rumor habit - The Washington Post washingtonpost.com/technology/

including about recent hurricanes is not only the work of irresponsible politicians, anti-government attitudes or sites with little regard for the truth. It’s also more evidence that misinformation is a natural outgrowth of our human anxieties, turbocharged by online connections. (1/5)

Washington Post · Hurricane misinformation is just one piece of America’s rumor habitMost people don’t intend to spread false online rumors, but we all do it -- and we all can play a role in stopping it.

One lesson is that we’re all susceptible to overreacting to scary-sounding things that may not be true — and we all have a role to play in holding back the tide of misleading information that can hurt us and our neighbors.

Human judgment is a liability on the internet

Sam Wineburg has run experiments with students at Stanford University that show we’re often overconfident in our ability to judge whether online information is true or false. (2/5)

Wineburg, co-founder of the Digital Inquiry Group, a digital literacy nonprofit, showed students a website and gave them a few minutes to decide if it was trustworthy. The students often fell for the trap of a website of gussied-up junk science. Participants do best when they have the humility to recognize they can’t accurately evaluate information that sounds like it could be true. (3/5)

The problem is that good and garbage information online can all seem the same, Wineburg said. That goes double when it’s something that hits us emotionally..

“This stuff does an end-around your prefrontal cortex and hits you in the solar plexus,” he said. (Wineburg is also an emeritus professor at Stanford’s graduate school of education.) (4/5)

Wineburg says we need new skills to rewire our impulses for the internet age. He uses the term “,” a twist on critical thinking, to describe paying less attention to information that’s “misleading but cognitively attractive,” (5/5)