359. Influencer Red Flags Miniseries, Part 16: “Do your own research…”

0:00Have you ever wondered how two people could look at the exact same thing and come away with two very different opinions on what it means? Or have you been baffled how someone could believe something that to you is obviously untrue? This kind of thing happens all the time, but how can you be sure you're the one seeing things accurately? Hi, I'm Kathy, a homeschool mom, passionate about teaching critical thinking to the next generation, so they're propaganda proof and impossible to fool with bad arguments. I like to have fun doing it. Welcome to the filter through a brain cell podcast. Hey, what is up, thinkers? Kathy Gibbons here. Okay, let's start off today's episode by reviewing a type of media bias that we covered back earlier in season two called The Opinion Statements Presented as Fact, bias, I guess you could call. So, do you want to hit pause real quick and see if you can remember what Opinion Statements Presented as Fact is? So, an opinion statement presented as a fact happens when the media states opinions in a way that makes them sound like proven facts.

1:01Instead of clearly separating opinions from news, journalists, commentators or news outlets will often frame personal beliefs, interpretations, opinions or judgments as if they are actual truths or actual facts. So, if you want to review or hear more about this bias, you can go back and check it out at episode 281. Did you know that I have resources for you to be able to practice the skills that you're learning here on the podcast with your middle schoolers, with your high schoolers? I do. If you are running a co-op and you want to offer a class on critical thinking, I've got resources for that. If you want to just practice the skills that you're learning here and practice recognizing fallacies and biases, I've got something for you. It's my membership called Crazy Thinkers, where every single month I send out a curated list of headlines, articles, memes, posts, whatever, just stuff that I find from real life so that you can show it to your kids. You can have a great discussion about it, see if you can recognize the fallacies and biases.

2:02And don't worry, I always give the answer, so you know that you got it right. So if you want to learn more, you can go check it out at filterthroughbrainsile.com forward slash crazy. Okay, so today is the final episode in our influencer red flag mini-series. And I cannot believe that this turned out to be 16 episodes long. When I originally had the idea to do this mini-series topic, I thought I could cover them in about two episodes, but as I got started, I realized there are a lot more than I had originally thought of and that I needed to spend a little more time on this series to really do it justice. So I hope it's been helpful and if it has been, would you just take a few seconds and leave a review for the show or a comment or something truly, truly as a podcaster rating, leaving a comment and sharing is the best ways that you can think us and I really appreciate it. Okay, let's get to the last line that we are covering today and that one is do your own research. Okay, now I just want to say this one is tricky because I am actually a huge advocate

3:06for doing your own research. I have a whole podcast with hundreds of episodes telling you to think for yourself and not to just take someone else's word for it. So why am I now blasting someone when they tell you to do your own research? Well, that's a great question. And that brings us to the nuance behind this line and why it can be tricky because at first, it seems like somebody is just inviting you to do some critical thinking after all. What could be better than researching something for yourself? Well, nothing, right? But here is what can be tricky. And someone online says, do your own research. Here is what it can look like often. Someone makes a claim, usually something that sounds novel or controversial, but they give zero evidence for it. Instead, they just tell you to go do your own research, implying that when you do, you will come to the same controversial opinion that they have. It is not meant to be an invitation to learn more. It's an invitation to just believe them, even though they're not giving any evidence.

4:08So you got to understand that doing your own research is good if you know how to do it well. Otherwise, it's just searching until you find what you already believe or until you find what they're asserting to be true. Okay, can you see the nuance there behind this and how it can be used sometimes on social media? So let me give you a few simple examples of what this can sound like. This drink totally detoxes your body. Don't believe me? Fine. Do your own research. Okay? Or how about this one? I can't explain it all here, but do your own research and you'll see that I'm right. See how they're not giving any evidence? Here's another one. The power of crystals has been proven already. You just need to do some research. Or they're hiding the true history of the world from you. Do your own research. Okay, can you see what's happening? They're making some kind of a claim and then telling you to go do research. Because once you do research, you will also believe the claim. So can you guess the fallacies or the biases that might be happening behind this statement?

5:10All right. So the main fallacy that's happening here is the burden of proof fallacy that we covered back in episode 43. So what's happening here is the person makes a claim, but then they shift all the responsibility for proving the claim onto you or onto the other person and basically says you go prove it to yourself. And remember, the whole thing about burden of proof means that the responsibility of proving it belongs to the person who's making the claim. All right. Then so what happens next in this process is the confirmation bias that we covered in episode 255 that kind of kicks in. So let's say that somebody does try to go do some research a little bit about the claim. They often will search for what they already believe or search for what this person is kind of telling them to search searching for. And then they'll trust sources that already agree with them or that they already agree with and they tend to ignore anything that's conflicting or anything that goes against

6:11what they already think. So quote unquote research turns into find something that confirms my belief. And this gives them the illusion of understanding the illusion. It makes people feel informed. They think that they understand because they think I've researched this when really know all they did was a Google search. There's a difference between search and research. So even if they've only watched a few videos or maybe they just read a few very selective sources or just skimmed some headlines and then they drew these conclusions without actually maybe even reading the whole article or looking at a whole body of work that's been done on something. So when an influencer says do your own research, they could mean a couple different things. Okay. So let's give a little bit of the benefit of the doubt here. It is possible that it truly is an invitation to dig into a topic a little deeper. And that's fantastic. That's exactly what we want. But it's also possible that what they might actually mean is I don't have sources readily available to give you. Okay. That's valid. Or they could say they could mean I've seen things that have convinced me or I don't want

7:15to debate this. Or maybe it's I want you to come to the same conclusion that I did. Or I want you to feel like you discovered this for yourself, right? So it can be hard to know what somebody's motive or stances when they use this line because somebody can also just be saying it because they're saying something completely ridiculous and off the wall that they discovered somewhere and they want to be the person who shares the crazy stuff. And I promise you, there are people who build their whole brand online doing just that. They want to say the crazy stuff and they'll just tell you go to your own research and you might find something about it, but that doesn't mean that the something you found about it is actually true or is actually real. So why does this line work so well to get attention? Well, it feels empowering, right? It feels like you're saying, oh, you're smart. You go figure it out. But the problem is is that it avoids accountability. If they're telling you to go do the work of looking something up, they can feel no need to defend the claim that they just made. They can just say any old thing.

8:16And this line is also effective because it creates the feeling of ownership. And somebody does go and do some research. And that's actually fantastic. If you discover it, you're more likely to believe it. However, you want to make sure that you have done good research. And then lastly, it's effective because it sounds like critical thinking, even if it's not necessarily leading people to doing good research. And you got to remember the question that I've taught you before is this, what would I need to know in order to know if this was true or not? So just simply telling you to go do some research doesn't necessarily mean just go do a Google search and take the first thing that comes up and count it as research. Or don't just go watch two reels and say that you've done research. That's what most people do. They don't actually do real research. So how can we think about it? What should we think when we hear this phrase? Well, as always, just ask some questions to kind of get you started. Here's some questions you could ask in this example.

9:17What specific sources should I look at? You could even ask the person making the claim. You could say, hey, what evidence convinced you? Right? I think that's a very valid question to ask. You could say, are there credible sources on both sides of this issue? And then you can ask yourself, am I being guided or am I just being sent searching? Because remember, there's a huge difference between search and research. And these days, it almost seems like you can find somebody out there who's going to make a case for any bizarre thing that you want to believe and it can sound really convincing. And so you've really got to be able to understand the difference between just searching and hearing somebody say something versus doing real research. So one of the places that I've seen this happening online is around Christianity and the Bible. So there will be reels where somebody will say something like this. The Holy Land was actually in America. Do your own research and you'll discover it's true. Or it without fail, every Easter or somebody posts a meme or says something like, Easter's

10:17from a pagan religion. And if you celebrate it, you're worshiping pagan gods. Go do your own research and you'll see. Or I just saw this one today that the apologist from Canada, West Huff, he was addressing, thankfully he was addressing it. But the claim was that there was this ancient papyrus where Jesus talked about his wife. Now as West was discussing in this post, the papyrus was eventually proven to be a fraud. But the person who published this claim never retracted her statements. So it would be very easy for somebody to say, there's a manuscript where Jesus talks about his wife and it got excluded from the Bible. Don't believe me? Go do your own research. And if somebody doesn't know how to properly do research, they would go to Google and they would Google, you know, manuscript of Jesus' wife. And they could possibly pull up the research from this person and it seems like confirmation that it's true. But if they don't do proper research and keep looking, they could completely miss all the evidence that shows that this papyrus was proven to be a fraud.

11:20Okay, do you see how that works? So here's the deal. If somebody tells you to do your own research, they should be able to show you where to get started. Alright y'all, that's it for today. Remember, biases happen automatically and will affect your ability to discern the truth. You can slow down your thinking by asking, what am I not seeing? And how can my view be incomplete?