Fourth Task: Critical Thinking Skills

Point Of View:

Here is 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 are well aware it was Noah, not Moses who built the ark in the biblical story.

Argument:

Psychologists like me call this phenomenon the Moses Illusion. It is 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.

Explanation:

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. The Moses Illusion has been studied repeatedly since the 1980s. It occurs with a variety of questions, and the key finding is: Even though people know the correct information, they do not notice the error and proceed to answer the question.