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4 Credibility

Students will learn to . . . 1. Evaluate the sources of claims 2. Evaluate the content of claims 3. Evaluate the credibility of sources 4. Understand the influences and biases behind media messages 5. Understand the impact of advertising on consumer behavior

aymond James Merrill was 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 southern Brazil, and suddenly Merrill

was in love. Desperately so, it seems. He believed everything Rachid told him and was credulous

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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.* 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. 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.

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Dave was a victim of “phishing,” a ploy to identify victims for identity theft and credit card fraud. The number of phishing 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. (Once again, 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.

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 thirty years 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, google “419 scam.”

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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 time 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-or-nothing kinds of things, whether we’re talking about claims or sources. Consider the claim that a month from now everyone in the world will die in an epidemic caused by a mysterious form of bacteria. This is highly unlikely, of course, but it is not as unlikely as the claim that everyone in the world will die a month from now due to an invasion of aliens from outer space. Sources (i.e., people) vary in their credibility 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.

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.

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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.

But observations and short-term memory are far from infallible. Stories abound of recalled observations that turned out to be mistaken, from cases of surgeons operating on the wrong limb of a patient to, maybe most notoriously, cases in which witnesses misidentified the perpetrators of a crime. The box above, “When Personal Observation Fails . . .” gives some startling statistics about innocent persons being wrongly convicted as a result of faulty eyewitness identifications. In August 2012, the Supreme Court of New Jersey ruled to make it easier for defendants to question the credibility of eyewitness testimony in criminal cases.

Incredible Claims!

Lunatic headlines from the supermarket tabloids (as well as from “straight” newspapers) provide more fun than information. Most of the following are from the Weekly World News.

Statistics show that teen pregnancy drops off significantly after age 25. [Amazing what you can prove with statistics.]

Homicide victims rarely talk to police. [And even the ones who do don’t have all that much to say.]

Starvation can lead to health hazards. [Dr. Donohue’s health column breaking new dietary ground.]

End of World Confirmed (December 20, 2012) [Mayan archaeologists met in Guatemala and confirmed the end date of December 20, 2012.]

End of the World Postponed (December 21, 2012) [Make up your mind.]

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China Buys Grand Canyon [They’re trying to figure out how to move it nearer to Beijing.]

Aliens Abduct Cheerleaders [They say they want to learn how to make those pyramids.]

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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 may be much more unreliable than we generally give it credit for being.

Our observations and our recollections of them can go wrong for all manner of reasons. An observer might be tired, distracted, worried about an unrelated matter, emotionally upset, feeling ill, and so on. Further, physical conditions can affect our observations such as bad lighting, noise, and the speed of events.

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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 may be apt to believe that the work those students produce is better than average, even when it is not.

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In Chapter 6, we discuss a very common error 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 the box on page 97) are almost surely victims of wishful thinking. It is unlikely that somebody, somewhere, wants to send you millions of dollars just because you have a bank account and that the money the person asks 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 likely to see more evidence for that success than is actually present. On the other hand, if we wish for a project to fail, we may 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.

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 straightedge 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.

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Finally, as we hinted earlier, 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.

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.

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.

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 middle of winter” cannot command much initial plausibility because of the obvious way it conflicts with our background information about eighty-seven-year-old people, about Lake Michigan, about swimming in cold water, 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 that we’re being tricked or fooled by an illusion.

Obviously, not every oddball claim is as outrageous as the one about Charlie’s grandmother. Several years ago, we read a report about a house being stolen in Lindale, Texas—a 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 turn out to be true. That, of course, means that it can be worthwhile to check out implausible claims if their being true might be of benefit to you.

Unfortunately, there are no neat formulas that can resolve conflicts between what you already believe and new information. Your job as a critical thinker is to trust your background information when considering claims that conflict with that information—that is, claims with low initial plausibility—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,

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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.

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■ This optical illusion has made the rounds on the web. It takes a very close look to identify how the illusion works, although it’s certain that something sneaky is going on here. The problem is solved in the answers section at the back of the book.

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 Lindsay Lohan has a PhD 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.

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

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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.

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Exercise 4-1 ▲—See the answers section at the back of the book.

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

_____. 7. True/False: Initial plausibility is an all-or-nothing characteristic; that is,

a claim either has it or it doesn’t.

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. Stevie Wonder is 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. The Kansas City Star has reported that the Kansas Anti-Zombie Militia is preparing for a zombie apocalypse. A spokesperson said, “If you’re ready for zombies, you’re ready for anything.”

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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.

15. Hugh Hefner, eighty-seven-year-old founder of Playboy magazine, recently married Crystal Harris, who is sixty years younger than her new husband.

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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.

Gold and silver are money, Everything else is credit.

—J. P. MORGAN

Not All That Glitters

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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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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 sizing up a person’s credibility. Simply being taller, louder, and more assertive can enhance a person’s credibility, according to a Stanford 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.”)

Do our 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. 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

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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.

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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.

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

Bush later changed his mind about Putin, seeing him as a threat to democracy. So much for the “blink” method of judging credibility.

Which considerations are relevant to judging someone’s credibility? We will 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 103.)

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 the service rep convinces your author that the oil leak is serious, the dealership makes almost a thousand dollars. This makes it worth a second opinion, or, in this case, the author’s own investigation. He now believes his car will never need this thousand-dollar repair.

Remember: Interested parties are less credible than other sources of claims.

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.