unSpun_ Finding Facts in a World of Disinformation - Brooks Jackson [72]
That somebody feels quite certain is no guarantee that his or her memory is accurate. Scholars who study the relationship between confidence and accuracy come up with mixed results. Sometimes witnesses who say they are positive are right, and sometimes they are not, and so far psychologists have only a dim understanding of why.
RULE #8: Cross-check Everything That Matters
BY NOW IT SHOULD BE OBVIOUS THAT RELYING ON A SINGLE SOURCE of information is a good way to be steered wrong. However, we can be more confident about a conclusion when different sources using different methods end up agreeing on it.
Different newspapers sometimes convey quite different impressions of the same event. When Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger of California appeared at a breakfast honoring Martin Luther King, Jr., in 2006, the Oakland Tribune reported that he got a “chilly reception” and the San Jose Mercury News described it as “hostile,” but the San Francisco Chronicle’s headline cited a “surprisingly warm welcome.” So which was right? The Mercury News story reported as follows: “After a few scattered boos, the audience listened politely to his speech and laughed at his Terminator jokes.” Some of the labor union people who attended had talked of walking out to embarrass the Republican governor, but didn’t. Whether that was “hostile” and “chilly” or “surprisingly warm” depends on whether you focused on the boos or the laughs. As for the word “surprisingly,” “surprise” depends on who is surprised and what they were expecting. In this case, reading two or three newspapers produced a much more balanced picture of the event than reading any one headline or report.
Weighing Evidence
The rules that apply to evidence in trials give us a good starting point for thinking about how we should weigh facts in our everyday lives. We’ve already mentioned the weakness of hearsay and secondhand accounts and considered why we should give them much less weight than firsthand accounts or physical evidence. And we’ve mentioned our preference for primary sources; we like to check the full transcript of an interview rather than rely on a paraphrase or partial quote. Here are some of the other factors we consider at FactCheck.org.
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The Man in the Hole
How did the United States know it had the right man when soldiers pulled a disheveled wretch from a six-foot-deep “spider hole” in Ad-Dwar, Iraq, on December 13, 2003? How did they prove to Iraqi skeptics that Saddam Hussein had really been captured? By cross-checking and using multiple methods of verification.
The man announced, “I am Saddam Hussein, president of Iraq, and I am willing to negotiate,” but maybe he was one of Saddam’s doubles. First, U.S. officials had to convince themselves. Former ambassador L. Paul Bremer recalls that, after a shave and haircut, the captive looked like the right man: “There could be no doubt: the face in this photo was Saddam Hussein,” Bremer writes in his book My Year in Iraq. Then four captured officials who had worked closely with Saddam Hussein were brought in. “Each prisoner had verified that the wizened man slouched on an army cot in that windowless room was in fact Saddam Hussein.” But maybe they were protecting the real Saddam Hussein. So U.S. officials used digital voice analysis to confirm that their prisoner’s voice was the same as the voice in archived recordings of the Iraqi leader, and they compared saliva swabs from the prisoner with DNA from “Saddam family samples.”
To convince skeptical Iraqis, Bremer brought in a delegation from the U.S.-appointed Governing