A lot of people have flagged Benedict Carey’s piece in yesterday’s Times, “In Battle, Hunches Prove to Be Valuable,” and with good reason: it’s a fascinating report on research into the way the brain combines visual data and emotional responses to shape the sort of instant-gut-reaction decisions that soldiers make as they evaluate threats.
The examples the piece draws on are from U.S. soldiers’ experiences in Iraq, where every stray boulder or trashheap by the roadside could be hiding a deadly bomb.
Reading Carey’s story, I thought of parallels in the distinctly less lethal — but still occasionally perilous — informational environment of the Web. What are the little signals that tell us, “You can trust this page”? And what are the red flags that tell us, “Watch out, something’s off here”?
These are important. Of course, they can help us protect ourselves from outright scammers (phishers who build lookalike bank websites to try to steal your passwords, and so on). But they can also help us sift and sort through the news and information that flows through our browsers, focusing on the good and discarding the bad.
Some of these signals are glaringly obvious (no “About” page? come on!). Others are subtler (are the writer’s arguments logical? Are statements of fact documented by links?).
What are some of the tools you use? I’ll be teaching a workshop this coming weekend as part of the Stanford Professional Publishing Course, and would love to hear your suggestions.
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Not that the truth can't be written badly. It can, and I allow for that in things like personal narratives in forms such as blogs (then the power of the human story may carry me). But if I'm trying to assess information to see it's useful or factual, I lean towards sites that have writers with good skills, correct spelling and grammar and other markers of education, intelligence and attention to detail.
After all, if someone doesn't bother to check their spelling, what are the chances they check their facts??
That's a great question, and I have to confess that you had me looking through the literature because I didn't know the answer at all (but probably should). The issue of online trust is more complicated than it might seem, and it's not as well-researched as I'd expected. Two not-too-old survey articles I came across were interesting:
C. L. Corritore, B. Kracher, and S. Wiedenbeck (2003). On-line trust: concepts, evolving themes, a model, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 58(6): 737-758.
and
Y. Wang (2005). An overview of online trust: concepts, elements, and implications, Computers in Human Behavior, 21(1): 105-12.
Interesting stuff--the first paper describes a model of trust based on risk, vulnerability, expectation, confidence, and exploitation; it also touches on cues that convey trustworthiness, including various aspects of ease of use and professional look and feel. The second paper is comparable but goes a bit more deeply into operational details. Food for thought...
Sometimes that's on purpose. I don't know about anyone else but some of my posts that hit serious topics like torture or investigations are void of links because I'm pretty much just showing off that i don't have to Google It every ten seconds to know what I'm talking about.
Thus we come to the final layer of the Web, in my eyes. Some people might look real polished in their layout or color schemes but in reality they are quite literally just plagerizing me and others.
Do you want their names? So do I.