summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of myths. The Debunking Handbook boils the research down into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators

Vaccine denial is dangerous... you might think it would be of the utmost importance to try to talk some sense into these people. But there's a problem: According to a major new study in the journal Pediatrics, trying to do so may actually make the problem worse.

Relevancy is one of the best practices for influencer marketing. The second thing is that it’s useful.... have influencers participate in programs that create something useful for potential customers... Co-creation makes it a lot more interesting for the influencer... more likely that they will participate... it was human.... about people, not ne…

the best gift the publishing industry could hope for... digital advertising technology that will be most frozen by limitations - and that is good news for content makers... collection and processing of the kind of data essential to ad targeting must now be explicitly consented to by readers. Furthermore, consumers will have the right to erase data…

Scientists have conducted a fair bit of research on the factors that can make people more (or less) focused, productive, and creative.

Alan Sokal attempted to prove that the influence of postmodern ways of thinking in the humanities had reached the point where academic nonsense was indistinguishable from academic sense. As a physicist, Sokal found writing about science to be particularly offensive... Sokal was conducting an experiment to see if “a leading North American journal o…

use it only to compare stats about two different topics over time

Pariser’s work has led him to believe that blaming fake news for fractured discourse is a red herring... The filter bubble explains a lot about how liberals didn’t see Trump coming, but not very much about how he won the election... my guess is that talk-radio, local news, and Fox are a much more important piece of that story than random conservat…

People on opposing sides of the political spectrum read the same articles and then the same corrections, and when new evidence was interpreted as threatening to their beliefs, they doubled down. The corrections backfired. Once something is added to your collection of beliefs, you protect it from harm... Just as confirmation bias shields you when y…

In the United States... the chances that two people visiting the same news site have different political views is about 45 percent... the internet is far closer to perfect desegregation than perfect segregation... you are more likely to come across someone with opposing views online than you are offline... a surprising amount of the information …

Now feels like the right time to take a step back, look at the landscape of VR and AR, and share a bit on how we think about the space: where we are, where we’re going, why it matters to Google, and why it matters to the world... VR can put you anywhere, and AR can bring anything to you... in time, these points on the spectrum will blur... let’s c…

reactive storytelling... quickly, nimbly, be part of the cultural conversation in a meaningful way... When you don’t have budget to put behind your campaigns, real-time or reactive storytelling is a really powerful tool to intercept consumers where they are and get them to believe in you...

confidential document prepared by Facebook that revealed the company had offered advertisers the opportunity to target 6.4 million younger users, some only 14 years old, during moments of psychological vulnerability... the big fear isn’t just what Facebook knows about its users but whether that knowledge can be weaponized in ways those users canno…

A little bit of something bad helps you resist a full-blown case... Inoculating text requires two elements. First, it includes an explicit warning about the danger of being misled by misinformation. Second, you need to provide counterarguments explaining the flaws in that misinformation... explaining the misinformation technique completely neutra…

a bias likely to cloud the minds of the audience – the halo effect.... when we see something we like or dislike, and associate this emotional reaction with something else... “illusory truth effect.” This bias causes our brains to perceive something as true just because we hear it repeated... the illusion of control bias occurs when we perceive o…

I’ve been meaning to blog about the ‘backfire effect’ cognitive bias since first coming across it last December. It went to the top of my ToBlog list thanks to a little serendipity...

This comic was inspired by this three-part series on the backfire effect from the You Are Not So Smart Podcast.

a comprehensive Electionland case study. This 66-page playbook provides a detailed account of how Electionland was conceived, planned, and executed as the teams involved worked to track and cover voting on Election Day in 2016.

Our bodies exploit fractal networks to maximize surface areas ... Blood vessels branch out like root systems; the brain houses folds within folds... means we don’t simply enjoy looking at fractals—we are designed to process them effortlessly, and even have a need to be looking at them....That’s also why you might see a face in a cloud... or a prof…

a policy paper on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning to help navigate some of the opportunities and challenges ... de-mystifying some of its fundamental concepts

We went to Antarctica to understand how changes to its vast ice sheet might affect the world.

someone that saw a Facebook native video had a higher likelihood of clicking on a link post in the near future ... we look at top performing articles and then see if we can turn them into short form videos for Facebook... we strive to be original storytellers... We understand what the mission is. It’s not just to get views... it’s always to be tel…

for innovators who are tasked with problem solving and imagining the future, human curiosity and playfulness will always have the advantage.. . machines cannot yet have intuition, nor the ability to empathize, reframe problems and truly innovate.. . The robots may be coming for our jobs, but it is too early to call checkmate on human ingenuity.

Mobile First should not be taken as an opportunity to over-simplify and, by the same token, Desktop First should not be taken as an opportunity to pile on complexity.

Social media is making us miserable... “Don’t compare your insides to other people’s outsides.”

asking the following question of a given activity: will this add significant value to something I find to be significantly important to my life?... is this activity “the best” way to add value to this area of my life? ... focus on finding the small number of activities that offer the most such value... Many of the best uses of the online world s…

It will still need human workers to review the machines’ output and make decisions AI can’t, but the greater need will be for the middle-level employees who have the experience to make judgment calls....[but] Where do those middle-level employees get that experience and judgment?

for your most cherished beliefs about things like climate change or vaccines or Republicans, instead of changing your mind in the face of challenging evidence or compelling counterarguments, you resist... your challenged beliefs then grow stronger.

"Internet subcultures take advantage of the current media ecosystem to manipulate news frames, set agendas, and propagate ideas..." plus a lot more: it's a 100+page report

Cambridge Analytica (part of SCL Group Ltd.) constructed a significant data set based on US voter rolls... Some respected observers argue the firm’s psychographic profiling methodologies may not be nearly as potent as its sales pitch suggests... the firm’s psychographic practices remain as unreviewable as the campaign’s voter advertising. Journal…