批判性思维 (5).pdf

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1、 Raymond James Merrill was the brother of an acquain-tance of one of your authors.In his mid-fi fties,Merrill still cut a striking fi guretall and lean,with chiseled features,a bushy mustache,and a mane of blond hair.But he had been in a funk.He had broken up with his girlfriend,and he did not want

2、to be alone.Then a website that fea-tured“Latin singles”led him to Regina Rachid,an attrac-tive woman with a seductive smile who lived in San Jose dos Campos,a city in southern Brazil,and suddenly Mer-rill was in love.Desperately so,it seems.He believed every-thing Rachid told him and was credulous

3、enough to make three trips to Brazil to be with her,to give her thousands of dollars in cash,and to buy her a$20,000 automobile.He even refused to blame her when thousands of dollars in unexplained charges turned up on his credit card account.Sadly,Rachid was more interested in Merrill s money than

4、in his affection,and when he went to Brazil the third time,to get married and,he believed,begin a new life,he disap-peared.The story ended tragically:Merrill s strangled and burned body was found in an isolated spot several miles out of town.Rachid and two accomplices are now in jail for the crime,a

5、nd two accessories are under investigation Students will learn to.1.Evaluate degrees of credibility2.Assess whether a source is an inter-ested versus a disinterested party3.Assess claims in relation to their own observations,experiences,or background information4.Evaluate a source based on verac-ity

6、,objectivity,and accuracy5.Evaluate a source based on knowl-edge or expertise 6.Understand the influences and biases behind the news 7.Become better(and perhaps more skeptical)evaluators of media messages8.Limit the influence of advertising on their consumer behavior 4 Credibility 104 moo38286_ch04_

7、104-145.indd 104moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10412/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PMas we write this.*The moral of the story:It can be a horrible mistake to let our needs and desires overwhelm our critical abilities when we are not sure with whom or with what we re dealing.Our focus in this chapter is on ho

8、w to deter-mine when a claim or a source of a claim is credible enough to warrant belief.A second story,less dramatic but much more common,is about a friend of ours named Dave,who not long ago received an email from Citibank.It notifi ed him that there might be a problem with his credit card account

9、 and asked him to visit the bank s website to straighten things out.(These notices often include a threat that if you fail to respond,your account may be closed.)A link was provided to the website.When he visited the site,he was asked to confi rm details of his personal information,including account

10、 numbers,Social Security number,and his mother s maiden name.The website looked exactly like the Citibank website he had visited before,with the bank s logo and other authentic-appearing details.But very shortly after this episode,he discovered that his card had paid for a plasma television,a home t

11、heater set,and a couple of expensive car stereos,none of which he had ordered or received.Dave was a victim of“phishing,”a ploy to identify victims for identity theft and credit card fraud.As this edition goes to press,the number of phishing*The whole story can be found at www.justice4raymond.org.Re

12、al LifeThe Nigerian Advance Fee 4-1-9 Fraud:The Internets Longest-Running Scam Is Still Running StrongIf you have an email account,chances are youve received an offer from someone in Nigeria,probably claiming to be a Nigerian civil servant,who is looking for someone just like you who has a bank acco

13、unt to which several millions of dollars can be sentmoney that results from“overinvoicing”or“double invoicing”oil purchases or otherwise needs laundering outside the country.You will receive a generous percentage of the money for your assistance,but you will have to help a bit at the outset by sendi

14、ng some amount of money to facilitate the transac-tions,or to show your good faith!This scam,sometimes called“4-1-9 Fraud,”after the relevant section of Nigerias criminal code,is now celebrating more than a quarter century of existence.(It operated by telephone and FAX before the web was up and runn

15、ing.)Its variations are creative and numerous.Criti-cal thinkers immediately recognize the failure of credibility such offers have,but thousands of people have not,and from a lack of critical thinking skills or from simple greed,hundreds of millions of dollars have been lost to the perpetrators of t

16、his fraud.To read more about this scam,check out these websites:and.CREDIBILITY 105moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 105moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10512/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PM106 CHAPTER 4:CREDIBILITYscams continues to rise,with millions of people receiving phony emails alleg-ing to be from eBay,PayPa

17、l,and other Internet companies as well as an assort-ment of banks and credit card companies.Some of these phishing expeditions threaten to suspend or close the individual s account if no response is made.Needless to say,a person should give no credibility to an email that purports to be from a bank

18、or other company and asks for personal identifying informa-tion via email or a website.There are two grounds for suspicion in cases where credibility is the issue.The fi rst ground is the claim itself.Dave should have asked himself just how likely it is that Citibank would notify him of a problem wi

19、th his account by email and would ask him for his personal,identifying information.(Hint:No bank will approach its customers for such information by email or telephone.)The second ground for suspicion is the source of the claim.In this case,Dave believed the source was legitimate.But here s the poin

20、t,one that critical thinkers are well aware of these days:On the Internet,whether by website or email,the average person has no idea where the stuff on the com-puter screen comes from.Computer experts have methods that can sometimes identify the source of an email,but most of us are very easy to mis

21、lead.Dave is no dummy;being fooled by such scams is not a sign of a lack of intelligence.His concern that his account might be suspended caused him to overlook the ominous possibility that the original request might be a fake.In other cases,such as the one described in the“4-1-9 Fraud”box,it may be

22、wishful thinking or a touch of simple greed that causes a person to lower his or her credibility guard.Every time we revise and update this book,we feel obliged to make our warnings about Internet fraud more severe.And every year we seem to be borne out by events.The level of theft,fraud,duplicity,a

23、nd plain old vandal-ism seems to rise like a constant tide.We ll have some suggestions for keeping yourself,your records,and your money safe later in the chapter.For now,just remember that you need your critical thinking lights on whenever you open your browser.THE CLAIM AND ITS SOURCE As indicated

24、in the phishing story,there are two arenas in which we assess credibility:the fi rst is that of claims themselves;the second is the claims sources.If we re told that ducks can communicate by quacking in Morse code,we dismiss the claim immediately.Such claims lack credibility no matter where they com

25、e from.(They have no initial plausibility,a notion that will be explained later.)But the claim that ducks mate for life is not at all outrageous;it might be true:it s a credible claim.Whether we should believe it depends on its source;if we read it in a bird book or hear it from a bird expert,we are

26、 much more likely to believe it than if we hear it from our editor,for example.There are degrees of credibility and incredibility;they are not all-or-nothing kinds of things,whether we re talking about claims or sources.Con-sider the claim that the president of the United States has been hypnotized

27、and is acting completely under the spell of wizards who are hiding in warehouses in suburban Washington,D.C.This truly requires a stretch of the imagination;it is very unlikely.But,however unlikely,it is still more credible than the claim that the president is not human at all but a robot constructe

28、d and controlled by aliens from another galaxy.Sources(i.e.,people)vary in their credibility moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 106moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10612/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PM THE CLAIM AND ITS SOURCE107just as do the claims they offer.If the next-door neighbor you ve always liked is arreste

29、d for bank robbery,his denials will probably seem credible to you.But he loses credibility if it turns out he owns a silencer and a.45 automatic with the serial numbers removed.Similarly,a knowledgeable friend who tells us about an investment opportunity has a bit more credibility if we learn he has

30、 invested his own money in the idea.(At least we could be assured he believed the information himself.)On the other hand,he has less credibility if we learn he will make a substantial commission from our investment in it.So,there are always two questions to be asked about a claim with which we re pr

31、esented.First,when does a claim itself lack credibilitythat is,when does its content present a credibility problem?Second,when does the sourceof a claim lack credibility?We ll turn next to the fi rst of these questions,which deals with what a claim actually says.The general answer is A claim lacks i

32、nherent credibility to the extent that it confl icts with what we have observed or what we think we knowour background informationor with other credible claims.In the MediaGuaranteeing an Interested Party,or the Fox Audits the HenhouseIn 2005,an audit program was established by the federal governmen

33、t to root out fraud and waste in the Medicare program.An Atlanta-based auditing firm,PRG-Schultz,was given the job of reviewing Medicare records and searching for mistakes and overcharges in three states.So far,so good.But the way the program was set up,the auditors were paid only when they found su

34、ch mistakes and overchargesthey kept a commission of 25 to 30 cents for every dollar deter-mined to be in error.Naturally,this makes the firm a very interested party,since the more fraud and waste it finds,the more money it makes.As a critical thinker might expect,PRG-Schultz found lots of fraud and

35、 waste;they had rejected more than$105 million in Medicare claims by September 2006 and millions more by the time the program came under review by an administrative law judge.As a critical thinker might expect,many of the rejected charges were reversed on appeal;they were found to be legitimate afte

36、r all.Remember,putting an interested party in charge of making decisions is an invitation to erroror worse.Thats why the expression“Dont put the fox in charge of the henhouse”is an important warning.P.S.Because of the way the law was originally implemented,PRG-Schultz will be allowed to keep the mon

37、ey it received in commissions even though its decisions in many cases were reversed.The fox got away with this one.Seattle Times online(),May 19,2007,and the Sacramento Bee,September 16,2007.moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 107moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10712/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PM108 CHAPTER 4:CREDI

38、BILITY Just what this answer means will be explained in the section that follows.After that,we ll turn our attention to the second question we asked earlier,about the credibility of sources.ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM So,some claims stand up on their own;they tend to be acceptable regardless

39、of from whom we hear them.But when they fail on their own,as we ve said,it s because they come into confl ict either with our own observations or with what we call our“background knowledge.”We ll discuss each of these in turn.Does the Claim Conflict with Our Personal Observations?Our own observation

40、s provide our most reliable source of information about the world.It is therefore only reasonable to be suspicious of any claim that comes into confl ict with what we ve observed.Imagine that Moore has just come from the home of Mr.Marquis,a mutual friend of his and Parker s,and has seen his new red

41、 Mini Cooper automobile.He meets Parker,who tells him,“I heard that Marquis has bought a new Mini Cooper,a bright blue one.”Moore does not need critical thinking training to reject Parker s claim about the color of the car,because of the obvious confl ict with his earlier observation.In the MediaInc

42、redible Claims!Weve had a lot of fun with lunatic headlines from supermarket tabloids in past editions.Here is this edition of“Run for Your Life”headlines:Demons Made Jessee Cheat on Sandra!“Possibly the same ones that got hold of Tiger Woods,”says seer.How to Tell if Youve Been Abducted by AliensMe

43、mory loss,other symptoms can tell for sure,according to Dr.Brad Steiger.Elvis Alive and Working in Vegas as Elvis Impersonator Hes better at it than most of them,reviews say.Beer Can Prevent Prostate Cancer Very few career drinkers die of it,say medicos.Nebraska Doesnt Exist,Says AuthorAdmission pro

44、cess was botched,according to historian.We dont have to make these up.moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 108moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10812/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PM ASSESSING THE CONTENT OF THE CLAIM109 But observations and short-term memory are far from infallible,or pro-fessional dancer Douglas Hall w

45、ould not have been awarded$450,000 in damages by a New York jury in January 2005.*It seems Dr.Vincent Feld-man,twenty minutes after having placed a large“X”on the dancer s right knee,where the latter had complained of pain,sliced open the patient s leftknee,which had been perfectly healthy up until

46、that moment,and effectively ended his dancing career in the process.Although he had just seen where he was to operate and had marked the spot,he nonetheless managed to confuse the location and the result may have put a serious wrinkle in his own career as well as that of the dancer.*New York Post,Ja

47、nuary 29,2005 .Real LifeWhen Personal Observation Fails.According to the Innocence Project,a group in New York that investigates wrongful convictions,eyewitness misidentification is the single greatest cause of conviction of innocent persons.Of all the convictions overturned by DNA analysis,witness

48、misidentification played a role in over 75 percent.Of the first 239 DNA exonerations,62 percent of the defendants were misidenti-fied by one witness;in 25 percent of the cases,the defendant was misidentified by two wit-nesses;and in 13 percent of the cases the same innocent defendant was misidentifi

49、ed by three or more separate eyewitnesses.Even though eyewitness testimony can be persuasive before a judge and jury,it is much more unreliable than we generally give it credit for being.moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 109moo38286_ch04_104-145.indd 10912/9/10 2:52 PM12/9/10 2:52 PM110 CHAPTER 4:CREDIBILI

50、TY All kinds of factors infl uence our observations and our recollections of them,and Dr.Feldman may have been affected by one or more of them:tired-ness,distraction,worry about an unrelated matter,or emotional upset could easily account for such mistakes.There are also physical conditions that ofte