On Digital Media, Fluency, and Fact-Checking

Blogger changed their format for viewing the blogs I follow as well as accessing my own blog.

It used to be that my blog was listed at the top, with a few buttons underneath it, to add a new post, access previous posts, and view the blog itself. Underneath that was my blog list, an RSS feed of recent posts from the blog I follow.

Now, the default screen is the "posts" view with a button to write a new post, and a button to access my reading list. I usually log on to Blogger a few times a day to look at my RSS feed, and will frequently do so even if I'm not planning to write a post. So the new format is great for people who only use Blogger for blogging, but not so great for people like me who use it to track favorite blogs.

My initial response is that I don't like it, but I know that's because it's different and therefore, it's taking me a little bit longer to access things I used to be able to access with little thought. I've blogged before about what happens when "thinking feels hard" - in cognitive psychology, we refer to the ease or difficulty of thinking as "processing fluency" and we refer to the conclusions we draw from monitoring our thinking as "metacognition." So I'm completely aware that's the reason for my initial, knee-jerk reaction. I prefer to put the thinking into my posts themselves, as opposed to getting to a blank post template.

Fluency can explain a lot of reactions to information. Information that is easy to read, makes us feel good, or aligns with our preconceived notions is more likely to be believed. This could be why various sites, such as Facebook, are trying to limit posts from fake news sources. And a recent study out of Stanford University offers some support for these steps:

Some 82% of middle-schoolers couldn’t distinguish between an ad labeled “sponsored content” and a real news story on a website, according to a Stanford University study of 7,804 students from middle school through college. The study, set for release Tuesday, is the biggest so far on how teens evaluate information they find online. Many students judged the credibility of newsy tweets based on how much detail they contained or whether a large photo was attached, rather than on the source.

More than two out of three middle-schoolers couldn’t see any valid reason to mistrust a post written by a bank executive arguing that young adults need more financial-planning help. And nearly four in 10 high-school students believed, based on the headline, that a photo of deformed daisies on a photo-sharing site provided strong evidence of toxic conditions near the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan, even though no source or location was given for the photo.

Obviously, a better step would be to teach critical thinking skills, so that kids can determine for themselves what information should be trusted. But, as the article points out, fewer schools have librarians who would teach students research skills, and increases in standardized curriculum and assessment to ensure students are performing at grade level means there is no longer extra class time that could be spent on media literacy and critical thinking skills. This places the burden of that instruction on parents, who may not be any better at recognizing fake v. legitimate news.

This is the reason for post-its on our parents' computers that simply say, "Check Snopes first."

Fluency, Lie Detection, and Why Jargon is (Kind of) Like a Sports Car

A recent study from researchers at Stanford (Markowitz & Hancock) suggests that scientists who use large amounts of jargon in their manuscripts might be compensating for something. Or rather, covering for exaggerated or even fictional results. To study this, they examined papers published in the life sciences over a 40 year period, and compared the writing of retracted papers to unretracted papers (you can read a press release here or the abstract of the paper published in the Journal of Language and Social Psychology here).

I've blogged about lie detection before, and that (spoiler alert) people are really bad at it. Markowitz and Hancock used a computer to do their research, which allowed them to perform powerful analyses on their data, looking for linguistic patterns that separated retracted papers from unretracted papers. For instance, retracted papers contained, on average, 60 more "jargon-like" words than unretracted papers.

Full disclosure: I have not read the original paper, so I do not know what terms they specifically defined as jargon. While a computer can overcome the shortcomings of a person in terms of lie detection (though see blog post above for a little bit about that), jargon must be defined by a person. You see, jargon is in the eye of the beholder.

For instance - and forgive me, readers, I'm about to get purposefully jargon-y - my area of expertise is a field called psychometrics, which deals with measuring concepts in people. Those measures can be done in a variety of ways: self-administered, interview, observational, etc. We create the measure, go through multiple iterations to test and improve it, then pilot it in a group of people, and analyze the results, then fit it to a model to see if it's functioning the way a good measure should. (I'm oversimplifying here. Watch out, because I'm about to get more complicated.)

My preferred psychometric measurement model is Rasch, which is a logarithmic model that transforms ordinal scales into interval scales of measurement. Some of the assumptions of Rasch are that items are unidimensional and step difficulty thresholds progress monotonically, with thresholds of at least 1.4 logits and no more than 5.0 logits. Item point-measure correlations should be non-zero and positive and item and person OUTFIT mean-squares should be less than 2.0. A non-significant log-likelihood chi-square shows good fit between the data and the Rasch model.

Depending on your background or training, that above paragraph could be: ridiculously complicated, mildly annoying, a good review, etc. My point is that in some cases jargon is unavoidable. Sure, there is another way of saying unidimensional - it means that a measure only assesses (measures) one concept (like math ability, not say, math and reading ability) - but, at the same time, we have these terms for a reason.

Several years ago, I met my favorite author, Chuck Palahniuk at a Barnes and Noble at Old Orchard - which coincidentally was the reading that got him banned from Barnes and Nobles (I should blog about that some time). He took questions from the audience, and I asked him why he used so much medical jargon in his books. He told me he did so because it lends credibility to his writing, which seems to tell the opposite story of Markowitz and Hancock's findings above.

That being said, while jargon may not necessarily mean a person is being untruthful, it can still be used as a shield in a way. It can separate a person from unknowledgeable others he or she may deem unworthy of such information (or at least, unworthy of the time it would take to explain it). Jargon can also make something seem untrustworthy and untruthful, if it makes it more difficult to understand. We call these fluency effects, something else I've blogged about before.

So where is the happy medium here? We have technical terms for a reason, and we should use them as appropriate. But sometimes, they might not be appropriate. As I tried to demonstrate above, it depends on audience. And on that note, I leave you with this graphic from XKCD, which describes the Saturn V rocket using common language (thanks to David over at The Daily Parker for sharing!).

Simplistically yours,

~Sara

Puppies Not Politics: A Social Experiment

Its been almost a week since the election, and the political posts seem to have finally died down, replaced with talk of Christmas, Day-After-Thanksgiving sales, and the end of the year (nothing yet on the “End of the World” so many were/are expecting - but we’ll have to wait and see if more 2012 apocalypse talk surfaces). Is it just me, or do the election cycles just seem to get longer and longer, with political advertising starting earlier each time? A columnist for CNN joked that, now that the election is over, it’s time for politicians to get back to what they do best - campaign for the next election.

This year, as a response to all of the political posts I observed from friends on Facebook, I decided to try a little experiment - starting August 26, I posted one puppy picture for every post I saw.

One of the many PNP puppies; you can tell he's trustworthy, because he wears glasses.

The rules were pretty simple:

1. One picture per post I saw. The keyword here is saw - I did not seek out posts purposefully, but only counted ones that I either saw while scrolling through my news feed or that I happened to see when visiting someone’s profile page. If Facebook lumped similar posts together - e.g., X of your friends posted about Barack Obama - I would only count however many were displayed, and did not expand posts. 
2. The picture could contain one or more puppy. I use the term “puppy” pretty generally, to refer to any dog, regardless of age. I have to admit, though, to play on the word “puppy”, I posted a picture of recently born Mongoose puppies from the Brookfield Zoo. Pictures could also contain other animals - several contained cats/kittens, a couple contained fancy rats, and one even had a pig. 

Overall, what I got was a conservative estimate of all the political posts I saw on Facebook between August 26, 2012 and November 6, 2012. The final count: 469 posts. I decided to do the math on exactly how often I saw political posts. The Puppies Not Politics album was up for 73 days or 1752 hours or 105,120 minutes. If I remove the time I spent sleeping (rough estimate - likely an overestimate, considering my life-long battle with insomnia - of 584 hours or 35,040 minutes), I saw on average one political post every 149.4 minutes, or 0.8 per hour, or 6.4 per day. Obviously, this is averaged across the whole period and doesn’t get at the variability in frequency; some days, posts were far more abundant, such as after debates.

As I said, this is a conservative estimate, since I didn’t purposefully visit Facebook just to count political posts - it was only when I wanted to visit Facebook anyway to see what was going with my friends, post a status update, etc. Some days, I didn't have the time or energy to look. I also did not bother counting advertisements, seen either on Facebook or elsewhere. The overarching lesson here is that we see a lot of political ads, and comments - not a surprising conclusion, but still. When one’s newsfeed is packed with information about a certain thing, we often start to block that thing out and gravitate instead to what is unique in the bunch.

If we do happen to notice all those political posts, we are most likely to pay attention to posts with which we agree already, and tend to ignore the ones that run counter to our beliefs or expectations, especially when we don’t feel like engaging in systematic thought (see previous post about Facebook and "when thinking feels hard"). So liberal posts are unlikely to reach (and “convert”) a conservative, and conservative posts are unlike to reach/convert a liberal. Why, then, do we spend so much energy posting political information if it is unlikely to change anyone’s mind? There are a few explanations; this list is not mutually exclusive:

1. The poster may be unaware that their posts are not changing anyone’s mind, and perhaps believe that, if this [insert type of person] just knew this information, they wouldn’t be a [type]. That may be true, but good luck getting that person to even notice the post, let alone click on it, let alone read it, let alone consider what they’ve read.
2. The poster may be completely aware that their posts are not changing anyone’s mind, but instead share the link or post because they think their like-minded friends will see it and enjoy it. Facebook is one of many ways we can share “things we think are cool” - in fact, this notion of social bookmarking has spawned other services, like Pinterest - and we can share them just in case other people will think they are cool too. 
3. Posting political information that matches with our beliefs is a way of declaring our membership in a group. Group membership is a very important source of our self-esteem. By posting information that declares, “I am a liberal”, or “I am a conservative”, etc., we get the boost in self-esteem that comes with belonging to a group. Of course, research specifically on Facebook status updating shows that comments/likes have a strong effect on self-esteem, so if I posted something and then received largely negative feedback on it, my self-esteem would probably suffer. Would it cause me to distance myself from the group? Like so many things in psychology, it depends. I may actually strengthen my ties to the group, if I believe the derision is unwarranted. 
4. This may be a bit cynical of me, but I have to throw it out there - some people may post political information to appear intelligent and cultured. We’ve all done it, not just with political posts. I’ve certainly shared something that gives me the opportunity to, say, show my knowledge of space exploration TV show (e.g., Star Trek, Firefly, Battlestar Galactica) captains. Or posted one of the “Grammar Nazi” e-cards (only to discover there’s a typo in one’s comments on the picture). Am I calling Facebook users hypocrites? Maybe, but aren’t we all? 

These are just a few of the potential reasons off the top of my head. What do you think, readers? What are some other reasons for all the political posting?

Thoughtfully yours,
~Sara

On Quality Chasms, Interactivity, and Digital Textbooks

As has become increasingly the case recently, the time between this and my previous blog post is much longer than I would have liked. Many people argue that one should only write when one feels inspired, but I’m not one of those people; a writer writes, and I find that if I don’t write regularly, I get out of practice. Ray Bradbury offered advice to young writers, including that they should write a short story every week – at the end of the year, you’ll have 52 short stories and the odds that they will all be awful are pretty slim. Perhaps I should follow his advice and write a blog post every week?

But what I’d really like to write about today is a response to an editorial I read about digital textbooks. Last week, Arne Duncan stated that paper textbooks should become a thing of the past, and we should embrace digital textbooks. Justin Hollander wrote an editorial response to this declaration, arguing for the benefits of paper in education. You can read his editorial here.

It really is a well-written piece and offers may good arguments. At the same time, what Mr Hollander and many others fail to recognize is the power of technology to go beyond merely reproducing the written word on the digital screen.

At my job as a health services researcher, we are spending a lot of our time exploring something called “patient-centered care”. Though this concept has been around in psychotherapy for decades, it came into the forefront of health care and medicine in a report released by the Institute of Medicine.

That report, titled “Crossing the Quality Chasm”, was the second in a series of reports addressing quality issues in American health care, stating, “Between the health care we have and the care we could have lies not just a gap, but a chasm” (p. 1). Specifically, the issue is with the design of the system, which is not aligned with the needs of the current population – a population that has longer life expectancy and more ongoing, chronic conditions requiring a different management approach, is more mobile (so people may not see the same doctor their entire lives) and simply is more abundant (making it difficult for doctors to really know their patients’ situations and needs). The report provided recommendations for safe and effective care, specifically discussing patient-centered care as “encompass[ing] qualities of compassion, empathy, and responsiveness to the needs, values, and expressed preferences of the individual patient” (p. 48).

This report also discusses increased use of technology, to improve access to information, education, and care, so long as the technology is aligned with a patient’s individual needs, values, and preferences. That is, the technology should be customizable and tailored to the patient.

Perhaps you’re asking (or have been asking), “What does any of this have to do with digital textbooks?” Hang in there, kids; we’re almost there.

Patient-centered technology is not about simply digitizing information once recorded only on paper; rather, it is about changing healthcare delivery, efficiency, and quality, and creating a system that is truly patient-centered. People who merely take information from pamphlets and booklets and slap them onto a web-page are entirely missing the point. Where technology really shines is in its ability to shift in response to the user. The concept here is “interactivity”.

Let’s say I’m a physician who wants to teach my patients with diabetes about managing their blood sugar. In the past, I’d probably have them do some in-person training, perhaps with a nurse educator, on checking their blood sugar, giving themselves insulin, and all the other self-care that people with diabetes must do, and I’d probably send them home with some pamphlets. Of course, they would continue seeing me regularly, but so much of what people with diabetes must do involves self-care; they really must become masters of managing the condition.

With technology, I’d still do some in-person training, but I could also have them receive information from the pamphlets through a website or tablet app, where they can select what information to view, access embedded videos, and perhaps even take a quiz to assess their understanding and identify gaps in knowledge. I could even design this program so that, based on quiz results, they are given access to additional reading and videos to specifically address those gaps.

So let’s bring this back to education. Say I’m a student taking a statistics class. I read the section on measures of central tendency (mean, median, and mode), then complete a quiz. If my quiz results show that I’m having some difficulty with mode, I could be taken to additional sections that focus more heavily on that concept, provide more examples, or even take a different approach to presenting the information.

I can understand the hesitance to completely abandon paper. Paper should still have an important place in reading and education. There is something to be said for the ability to touch, to hold something in your hand, to hear the binding crack, to smell the ink on the pages. And when the choice is between reading a book on paper or reading a book on an e-reader, where the logistics of navigating pages is basically the same, it seems more a matter of personal preference than superiority of one medium over the other. Sure, the ability to search and carry more books without adding weight to one’s bag is nice, but may not be enough for the increased (at least initial) costs of converting from paper to electronic. 

But if we can capitalize on the technology at hand to supplement and tailor material, to really allow students to grasp core concepts so that we may expand upon them in the classroom and move toward mastery of the subject, then Mr. Duncan, I couldn’t agree more.

Thoughtfully yours,
~Sara

 Institute of Medicine. (2001). Crossing the quality chasm: A new health system for the 21st century. Washington, DC: National Academy Press.

When Thinking Feels Hard: New Layouts, New Features, and New Thought Patterns

It feels like the Internet landscape is changing.  Recently, Facebook unveiled its new look (as well as some additional features that have had more than a few express concerns about privacy).  As with any new Facebook roll-out, people are complaining.  The news feed has been replaced with Top Stories and Not So Top Stories (okay, not the term, but that's what it comes down to).  On the side, users not only have the chat list that has been available for some time, but a Twitter-style feed (dubbed the ADD bar) giving real-time updates from friends, friends of friends, and the occasional random friend of a friend of a friend.

As people have pointed out, the people who complain about a Facebook update are likely the same people who complained about the update before that, and before that, perhaps suggesting that some people like to complain.  But just like Dr. Gregory House thinks everyone lies, I say, "Everyone complains", at some time or another.  I think there's more to these layout changes than predisposition to complain.  That's right, ladies and gents, I'm talking about the situational influences - notice a theme here? :)

You may also have noticed the look of this blog has changed.  'Tis the season.  It seems like as a child, I would always want to reinvent myself in the Fall.  Perhaps the same is true for websites.  But how might these changes influence our perceptions?

A few years ago, I had the pleasure of listening to researcher Norbert Schwarz give a talk at my grad school alma mater, Loyola University Chicago.  If you've never checked out his research, you definitely should; visit his homepage here.  Not only is he incredibly friendly and funny, his research, while definitely theory-driven, is incredibly applicable to a variety of social situations.  Or maybe it's that he's really good at taking theories and applying them to a variety of situations; either way, I would love to be able to do that.  Theory is not my strong point.

One area Schwarz has studied a great deal is metacognitive experiences, basically thinking about thinking, and how we use cues from our thinking to influence the way we think.  Wow, that made so much more sense in my head.  Okay, how about a concrete example?  Let's say I show you an ad for a car, then ask you to come up with a list of 10 reasons why you should buy that car.

Go ahead and get started on your list; I can wait.

Unless you know a lot about the car or I offered a really great option to consider (Batmobile anyone?), you probably had a lot of trouble coming up with a list of 10 items.  You might use that cue, "Wow, thinking of 10 items was really hard" to tell you something about whether you really want to buy the car.  That is, because thinking felt difficult, you took that as a cue to mean the thing you were considering was not that good.  Schwarz refers to this perceived ease/difficulty as "processing fluency".

Schwarz has shown that processing fluency can be manipulated in many ways, such as by using an illegible font or by asking participants to remember very specific personal events (such as 12 times you behaved assertively).  Another way is familiarity; more familiar things are easier to process.

Now obviously, we don't always need thinking to feel easy.  Sometimes, we encounter things to which we want to devote our full cognitive effort.  But as I mentioned in a previous blog post, we're cognitive misers.  We're choosey with how we spend our cognitive resources.  If we're asked to learn a new software package for work, for example, we might be willing to devote the effort (there are a lot of other variables operating, but this is just a for instance).  Facebook, on the other hand, is a leisure time activity, and many people who aren't high need-for-cognition folks would rather be able to have fun without thinking too hard.

But people continue to use Facebook, and though some users have likely split recently, Facebook currently has 750 million members (according to Google population data, the Earth's population is currently 6,775,235,700, so that means about 1 of every 9 people uses Facebook).  Perhaps processing fluency is not the only issue at work here; the very nature of the social networking site is, well, it's social.  Your friends are there, and in some cases, it might be your only opportunity for interaction.  That might make some people unlikely to leave (of course, since Google+ is now open to the public, the landscape may continue to shift).

For those who left Facebook, I'd love to hear your reasons (in comments below), even if you left long before the recent update.  For those who stuck around, don't worry; eventually you'll get used to the new look and thinking won't feel so difficult... just in time for the next update.

Thoughtfully yours,
Sara