A Field Guide to Lies

How do we distinguish misinformation, pseudo-facts, distortions, and outright lies from reliable information?

We are bombarded with more information each day than our brains can process. It’s raining bad data, half-truths, and even outright lies in amongst the facts. But how can we know if we are being sold mistruths?

Neuroscientist and New York Times bestselling author Daniel J. Levitin visits the RSA to help us sort the wheat from the digital chaff.  

‘Infoliteracy’ means understanding that there are hierarchies of source quality and bias that variously distort our information feeds via every media channel, including social media. We may expect newspapers, bloggers, the government, and Wikipedia to be factually and logically correct, but they so often aren’t. We need to think critically about the words and numbers we encounter if we want to be successful at work, at play, and in making the most of our lives. This means checking the plausibility and reasoning—not passively accepting information, repeating it, and making decisions based on it.