Emotional reactions signal confirmation bias, not evidence against a story.

Evidence

One of the barriers to critical thinking is bathing in a constant stream of confirmation bias. If you are getting your information primarily from one source—or you find yourself responding emotionally to what you are hearing from one particular channel—it is probably time to diversify your news feed. Remember the people in the “2, 4, 6” experiment who never tried to disprove what they thought they “knew”? We must not do that. This is not to say that we should start to consume fake news. Nor does it mean that we are justified in drawing some sort of false equivalence between Fox and CNN. But it does mean that we should learn how to vet news sources properly and ask ourselves how it is that we “know” that something we are hearing is fake. Is it just because it makes us mad or—like those fifth graders in Mr. Bedley’s class—do we have a rubric? Especially if we are hearing things that we want to believe, we must learn to be more skeptical. — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 331

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the confirmation-bias experiments (2,4,6 Wason task) and the fifth-grade rubric work referenced earlier in the chapter and book.