SIFT

Introducing SIFT

It’s one thing to know the context you need. It’s another to build a habit of seeking it out. In our scholarly work, we’ve often pretested participants on examples, telling them that they should assess the credibility of a claim by whatever means might help, including leaving a site and searching the web. We get a variety of responses. Some participants remained glued to the original website, descending into “plausibility analysis”—that is, given what I know, do I think this thing is likely to have happened? Does it “sound” right? Never mind that the issue at hand is about cell biology and one’s experience consists solely of having watched the TV show House, M.D.

More perplexing is the response of a smaller number of participants, often formulated as “I’d have to know.” For example, a student might say, “To know if this was credible, I’d have to know more about the author.” That’s true, of course, but misses the bigger question: What’s stopping the student from finding out more? It’s a simple act of opening another tab and starting the search. Still, for some students, the gap between thought and action proves to be too large.

For this reason, the main tool we give students is formulated not as a set of questions to ask but as a set of things to do before they start reasoning about a specific piece of content that reaches them through the web. Here’s a brief definition of these “things to do,” used in SIFT. We’ve put them in an easy-to-remember acronym: SIFT.

• Stop. Ask yourself what you really know about the claim and the source that’s sharing it. For the moment, forget about questions of truth or falsehood. Do you really know what you’re looking at? Are you sure? If you find it upsetting or surprising, why?
• Investigate the source. Do a quick check to see if the source is trustworthy for this purpose. In a lot of cases, for simple claims, you can stop here if the source is good.
• Find other coverage. Whether you are looking at a news report or a research claim, take a second to zoom out and see what other sources say. If the story or claim is not being picked up by other reputable sources, proceed cautiously.
• Trace the claim, quote, or media to the original context. Sometimes the first source you encountered isn’t great, but it links to where it got its information. Go to that original source and judge (a) whether it’s reputable, and (b) whether it actually supports the assertion.