莉萨·法齐奥

Why humans stink at finding falsehoods.人類为何拙于发现谎言。

Heres 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 theyre well aware that it was Noah， not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story.

Psychologists like me call this phenomenon the Moses Illusion. Its 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 whats 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 dont 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？”

The Moses Illusion demonstrates what psychologists call knowledge neglect1—people have relevant knowledge， but they fail to use it.

One way my colleagues and I have studied this knowledge neglect is by having people read fictional stories that contain true and false information about the world. For example， one story is about a characters summer job at a planetarium. Some information in the story is correct： “Lucky me， I had to wear some huge old space suit. I dont know if I was supposed to be anyone in particular—maybe I was supposed to be Neil Armstrong， the first man on the moon.” Other information is incorrect： “First I had to go through all the regular astronomical facts， starting with how our solar system works， that Saturn is the largest planet， etc.”

Later， we give participants a trivia test2 with some new questions （Which precious gem is red？） and some questions that relate to the information from the story （What is the largest planet in the solar system？）. We reliably find positive effects of reading the correct information within the story—participants are more likely to answer “Who was the first person to step foot on the moon？” correctly. We also see negative effects of reading the misinformation—participants are both less likely to recall that Jupiter is the largest planet and they are more likely to answer with Saturn.

These negative effects of reading false information occur even when the incorrect information directly contradicts peoples prior knowledge. In one study， my colleagues and I had people take a trivia test two weeks before reading the stories. Thus， we knew what information each person did and did not know. Participants still learned false information from the stories they later read. In fact， they were equally likely to pick up false information from the stories when it did and did not contradict their prior knowledge.

Can you improve at noticing incorrect info？

So people often fail to notice errors in what they read and will use those errors in later situations. But what can we do to prevent this influence of misinformation？

Expertise or greater knowledge seems to help， but it doesnt solve the problem. Even biology graduate students will attempt to answer distorted questions such as “Water contains two atoms of helium and how many atoms of oxygen？”

Many of the interventions my colleagues and I have implemented to try to reduce peoples reliance on the misinformation have failed or even backfired. One initial thought was that participants would be more likely to notice the errors if they had more time to process the information. So， we presented the stories in a book-on-tape format and slowed down the presentation rate. But instead of using the extra time to detect and avoid the errors， participants were even more likely to produce the misinformation from the stories on a later trivia test.

Next， we tried highlighting the critical information in a red font. We told readers to pay particular attention to the information presented in red with the hope that paying special attention to the incorrect information would help them notice and avoid the errors. Instead， they paid additional attention to the errors and were thus more likely to repeat them on the later test.

The one thing that does seem to help is to act like a professional fact-checker. When participants are instructed to edit the story and highlight any inaccurate statements， they are less likely to learn misinformation from the story. Similar results occur when participants read the stories sentence by sentence and decide whether each sentence contains an error.

Its important to note that even these “fact-checking” readers miss many of the errors and still learn false information from the stories. For example， in the sentence-by-sentence detection task participants caught about 30 percent of the errors. But given their prior knowledge they should have been able to detect at least 70 percent.

Quirks of psychology make us miss mistakes

Why are human beings so bad at noticing errors and misinformation？ Psychologists believe that there are at least two forces at work.

First， people have a general bias to believe that things are true. （After all， most things that we read or hear are true.） In fact， theres some evidence that we initially process all statements as true and that it then takes cognitive effort to mentally mark them as false.

Second， people tend to accept information as long as its close enough to the correct information. Natural speech often includes errors， pauses， and repeats. （“She was wearing a blue—um， I mean， a black， a black dress.”） One idea is that to maintain conversations we need to go with the flow—accept information that is “good enough” and just move on.

And people dont fall for these illusions when the incorrect information is obviously wrong. For example， people dont try and answer the question “How many animals of each kind did Nixon take on the Ark？” and people dont believe that Pluto is the largest planet after reading it in a fictional story.

Detecting and correcting false information is difficult work and requires fighting against the ways our brains like to process information. Critical thinking alone wont save us. Our psychological quirks put us at risk of falling for misinformation， disinformation and propaganda. Professional fact-checkers provide an essential service in hunting out incorrect information in the public view. As such， they are one of our best hopes for zeroing in on errors and correcting them， before the rest of us read or hear the false information and incorporate it into what we know of the world.

做个快速测试吧：

·《圣经》故事中，什么吞了约拿？

·摩西带到方舟上的动物，每种带了多少？

你的答案是否分别是“鲸”和“两个”？大多数人都会这么回答吧……虽然明知《圣经》故事中建造方舟的是诺亚而不是摩西。

我是研究心理学的，这种现象在心理学中被称为“摩西错觉”。这仅仅是人拙于发现身边事实性错误的例证之一。即使人们知道正确的信息，也常常察觉不到错误，甚至还会在其他场合沿用错误信息。

认知心理学的研究表明，人类天生就不善于核实，也很难将耳闻目见的信息与已有认知进行比较。在这个人们认为“假新闻”泛滥的年代，这一发现对于了解大众如何阅读新闻、社交媒体及其他公众信息有着重要的启示。

认知错误而不自知

20世纪80年代以来，“摩西错觉”一直是人们反复研究的对象。研究采用的问题各种各样，而重要的发现就是：虽然人们知道正确的信息，却并未察觉到题目中的错误，仍会继续回答问题。

在开头测试涉及的研究中，80%的参与者未能注意到第二个问题中的错误，虽然后续被问及“谁把動物带上了方舟”这一问题时，这些人都回答对了。

“摩西错觉”证实了心理学家所说的“知识忽略”，即人们虽然具备相关知识，却未能调用。

我和同事在研究“知识忽略”时，采用的一种方法便是让参与者读虚构小说，小说提及的现实世界的信息有真有假。例如，有个故事讲主人公暑假在天文馆打工。