Middle-schoolers judge news credibility by whether it includes a picture
Evidence
Another example concerned the resignation of the police chief of Ferguson, Missouri, following a federal report which identified widespread racial bias in his department. Students were asked which, out of the four tweets below, was the best source of information about the event. Fewer than half of the students identified National Public Radio (NPR) as the most trusted source of information. As one student put it: ‘The best tweet for information is the first one because it actually shows him resigning in a picture.’ — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 49
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: The child’s stated reasoning — a picture of the event is the best proof — reveals a deep mismatch between visual-evidence intuitions and institutional-source reasoning that adults share more than they admit.
- QUESTION: How does visual-evidence reasoning, judging truth by seeing the event depicted, map onto adult belief in photographic and video evidence given easy fakes?
- XREF: connects to: Adding a photo raises the judged truth of any accompanying claim — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 85; Images make factual claims more fluently processable and believable — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects…, 105; News aggregators strip away the visual and contextual cues that once signaled reliability — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 193 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Images make factual claims more fluently processable and believable
#expands(0.95) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 105 - Adding a photo raises the judged truth of any accompanying claim
#corroborates(0.90) — Sander van der Linden, Foolproof, 85 - Footnote presence signals scholarly credibility to readers.
#corroborates(0.85) — Bryan A. Garner, Jeff Newman, Tiger Jackson, The Redbook, 247 - News aggregators strip away the visual and contextual cues that once signaled reliability
#complicates(0.75) — Lee McIntyre, Post-Truth, 193