London Business School professor explains how to improve your critical inquiry skills

My biggest concern with misinformation is that people will claim that something is rigorous

because it's by an authority figure or it's written in a book. But anybody can write a book

We often think that the solution to misinformation is to check the facts

but just checking the facts is not enough. So even if a fact is 100% accurate

it could still be misleading, it could be a single anecdote, the exception that doesn't

prove the rule, or it could be a large-scale correlation when there's no causation. The

solution to misinformation is not that we need to get a PhD in statistics or engage in statistical

pyrotechnics. We often have the discerning skills already within ourselves, we just need to overcome

our biases and deploy them. My name is Alex Edmonds, I'm a professor of finance at London Business

School and author of May Contain Lies, How Stories, Statistics and Studies Exploit Our Biases

and What We Can Do About It. Misinformation is so prevalent today because we suffer from

confirmation bias. This is the idea that we have a view of the world and we will latch on to any

piece of evidence that will support our viewpoint. For example, we often like to think that breast

milk must be good something natural must be better than something man a formula concocted by some giant corporation There is evidence that babies who were breastfed have higher IQ later in life Now it true that one interpretation is breastfeeding causes

the higher IQ. But an alternative suspect, an alternative explanation, is which babies end up

getting breastfed. Those are the ones with a good home environment. Because breastfeeding is tough

it's hard to do without family support. So the babies who are breastfed

it may well be that the mother has a supportive partner at home, maybe help outside the house

So maybe parental background both causes a baby to be breastfed and also leads to the higher IQ

Now, everybody knows that correlation is not causation in the cold light of day

But because of our biases, we might forget this if we like the causal story being created

There's many topics about which there's no pre-existing view. But this is where a second bias comes in

which is black and white thinking. And that is the tendency to see the world in all or nothing terms

So something is either always good or always bad. One example is carbohydrates

So people might have pre-existing views about protein and fat. Right, fat sounds bad, right

Isn't it called fat because it makes you fat? And protein is good

We learn in school that it builds muscle But carbs that sounds pretty neutral But if we suffer from black and white thinking we think that carbs has to be either always good or always bad So the Atkins

diet played on black and white thinking with a diet which claimed that we should eat as few carbs

as possible. When in reality, some things can be moderate. And what this means is that they're

either good up to a point or only bad after a point. So if you take carbohydrates, scientific

advice recommends that carbohydrates are actually good as long as they are within 30 to 50 percent

of your daily calories. But that would be difficult to implement. You would need to track all of your

calories from carbs and fats and proteins and then look are my carbs within this small range

So a simple rule, a black and white rule, such as avoid carbs, that's something that can easily catch on, even if it's not backed up by science

To write a bestseller, Atkins didn't need to be right. He just needed to be extreme

To check the truthfulness of a bold claim, if it's a claim that you would like to be true, imagine it was the opposite claim

And look at how you would try to knock it down. For example, if a study claimed that breastfeeding leads to low IQ

that is something which just jars with us. It just sounds wrong

And how would we try to knock it down? We would appeal to common causes

We might say well who are the mothers who breastfeed They might be poor because they not able to afford formula And it could be the poverty which is leading to the lower IQ not the breast milk itself

So now that we've alerted ourselves to the possibility of common causes

ask ourselves whether those common causes could also explain the actual correlation

Is it that family affluence, family background, is leading to that result rather than breast milk being what's causing the high IQ

Why is healthy scepticism healthy? Often the advice given by some widely paraded studies is highly restrictive

But when we recognise that these studies are actually more flimsy, then we can live more freely

my wife could choose to bottle feed our son or I could choose to help out without feeling guilty

Similarly the idea that you need to avoid carbs to lose weight this will mean that we're always

carb counting we can't even eat some pieces of fruit but when we realize that the evidence behind

this diet is actually almost non-existent then this allows us much more flexibility in our diet

These tools aim to help you reduce the amount of misinformation that you will fall for

It might not completely eliminate it because you're human and you can't get it right all the time

But if you reduce the amount of times that you're susceptible to misinformation

that can improve your life in many ways