ABSTRACT
There are intellectual blind spots that cause the reader to make mistakes in very special circumstances. Errors of quality are random errors that simply miss the truth. In this chapter, the authors take a closer look at seven different heuristics and the errors they produce. Men are particularly bad at gauging their own intelligence. Psychologists call this error the Lake Wobegon effect after the fictional town described by Garrison Keillor as a place where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Confirmation bias impacts both the production and the consumption of the news. Not only does myside bias make it difficult to assess whether the people opponent's starting assumptions are true, it makes it harder for the reader to tell when their arguments are logically valid. It should be obvious how framing effects and order bias play a role in the fake news crisis.
