The Three Contexts

The Three Contexts

Our research has examined how students and the general public judge information that reaches them through the web. Our first finding will not surprise you, given both the state of the world and your social media feeds: on the internet, people reason quite poorly.6

The second finding is more surprising. Many so-called experts assumed that the mistakes people made on the web resulted from a lack of critical thinking, at least as critical thinking has been traditionally defined. It certainly looked that way to high school teachers. Presented with web information of unknown origin and veracity, students were unsure about which sources to trust and what evidence to believe. When asked to explain their judgments, students engaged in ungrounded speculation, doubled down on first impressions, and leaned into bias. But when we looked at why people got confused, we found it wasn’t their thinking that malfunctioned. In fact, people were thinking quite hard. But their thinking relied on speculation without checking the available facts. Confronted with a question, they immediately raced toward those other questions: Does this seem plausible? Does this match how I think the world works?

Those are not bad questions. However, in areas where people have little expertise, or lack direct experience, asking such questions isn’t the first order of business. The first task when confronted with the unfamiliar is not analysis. It is the gathering of context. Let’s consider three crucial contexts that ground reasoning on the web and elsewhere:

• The context of the source. What’s the reputation of the source of information that you arrive at, whether through a social feed, a shared link, or a Google search result?
• The context of the claim. What have others said about the claim? If it’s a story, what’s the larger story? If a statistic, what’s the larger context?
• Finally, the context of you. What is your level of expertise in the area? What is your interest in the claim? What makes such a claim or source compelling to you, and what could change that?7

We found that students who attended to these contexts, sometimes spending as little as thirty seconds seeking basic information, improved their judgments. Supposedly weak “critical thinkers” reasoned more effectively without additional training in logic or analysis. They made better decisions, leaned less on faulty presuppositions, and were fooled less by deceptive appearances and dirty tricks. They often showed greater nuance and stronger logical argument.

Consider a death-hoax claim about Keanu Reeves and a snowboarding accident. A brief context check can supply facts that speculation about the plausibility of the accident cannot. People who don’t seek context find themselves devoting a lot of thought to the issue. Their thinking, however, is not a whole lot more advanced than mere playground speculation. People who aren’t experts in snowboarding or the state of Keanu Reeves’s health will find themselves trying to apply logic to a lack of facts, essentially multiplying by zero. Lacking knowledge of whether the source of the information is a close friend of Reeves’s or an internet rando, they judge it by its look and feel, or maybe simply by whether it agrees with their intuitions.

While mistakes initially appear to be related to a deficit of thinking, they are much more related to doing. Once students engaged in context-seeking, the thinking often sorted itself out. With a dose of context, they were able to solve simple problems (such as a death hoax) quickly, and they grounded deeper investigations in better sources, assumptions, and data.