Truth decayWhy you stink at fact-checking

By Lisa Fazio

Here’s a quick quiz for you:

— In the biblical story, what was Jonah swallowed by?

— How many animals of each kind did Moses take on the Ark?

Did you answer “whale” to the first question and “two” to the second? Most people do … even though they’re well-aware that it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story.

Psychologists like mecall this phenomenon the Moses Illusion. It’s just one example of how people are very bad at picking up on factual errors in the world around them. Even when people know the correct information, they often fail to notice errors and will even go on to use that incorrect information in other situations.

Research from cognitive psychology shows that people are naturally poor fact-checkers and it is very difficult for us to compare things we read or hear to what we already know about a topic. In what’s been called an era of “fake news,” this reality has important implications for how people consume journalism, social media and other public information.

Failing to notice what you know is wrong
The Moses Illusion has been studied repeatedly since the 1980s. It occurs with a variety of questions and the key finding is that – even though people know the correct information – they don’t notice the error and proceed to answer the question.

In the original study, 80 percent of the participants failed to notice the error in the question despite later correctly answering the question “Who was it that took the animals on the Ark?” This failure occurred even though participants were warned that some of the questions would have something wrong with them and were given an example of an incorrect question.

The Moses Illusion demonstrates what psychologists call knowledge neglect – people have relevant knowledge, but they fail to use it.