Introduction to Psychology: Critical Evaluation of Information Sources

Because our time and attention are not infinite, we want to use them well and efficiently. The pre-evaluation scan method we will learn takes only about 1 minute, and it gives us a good idea if a source is likely to be bias, false, or simply unreliable. Please note: pre-evaluation is not a substitute for close evaluation. Instead it's designed to save us time and attention, and avoid the exhaustion of information overload.

This type of pre-evaluation is also called "lateral reading". It's called this because instead of diving right in to evaluate each source you encounter, you first take a sort of side-step to find out about the source from a third party. Let's take a look:

Let's point out a few important things to keep in mind:

1. As the example in the video showed us, pre-evaluation can:

• Quickly tell us if a site comes from a known "bad actor". That is, a person or organization that is trying to manipulate our attention, spread false information, or otherwise mislead us.

I think we can easily see how helpful this method could be to us in our daily lives of encountering information from all kinds of unknown sources. It can also be helpful in our research, so we spend less time trying to figure out if a source is potentially reliable.

2. You may wonder why we depend on Wikipedia for this step, when we've all heard how Wikipedia isn't an authoritative source of information. It's true that Wikipedia isn't an academic source. However, one thing Wikipedia is very good at is sharing information that is factual, and also sharing information about which there is a consensus. So if most knowledgeable people agree on something, that's the kind of information that will remain in a Wikipedia article. 

• Remember: we are not using pre-evaluation to thoroughly evaluate the source, we're using it to get a sense of whether a source is likely to be bias or unreliable, so that we don't have to waste time with an in-depth evaluation. Wikipedia is perfect for this.
• Wikipedia will also quickly give us helpful information about a legitimate source. Recall the example in the video, where he found that a news article had been published in a well-known and legitimate news site. If you wanted to refer to that news article in your research, you would then go back to the article and take the next steps of thoroughly evaluating it. You'll find out about this in the next step of this tutorial.
• Wikipedia will also tell us if a journal is peer-reviewed. We will see in the next step that this information is also very useful in our in-depth evaluation of a source.