“Something that’s difficult for people is: we all want to have answers, we all want to come to a definitive conclusion. And sometimes that’s not there — and we have to be okay with that.” ~ Dan Evon

As much as I champion curiosity, sometimes it can take us down bad paths.

Thank goodness there are excellent resources that help us lean into our curiosity and recognize misinformation to stop it in its tracks.

RumorGuard is an initiative of the News Literacy Project to do just that. It fact-checks viral rumors and offers concrete tips to help us build our news literacy chops.

Dan Evon is NLP’s senior manager of education design and the lead writer for RumorGuard. We talk about launch points into critical thinking like getting curious about source, evidence, context, reasoning and authenticity; the speed of (mis)information; the importance of slowing down, especially in times of breaking news; “pre-bunking”; being wary of celebrities pictured in political T-shirts; the wonderfulness of reverse image searches; and building our “Huh Muscle“.

Curiosity can help us avoid things like confirmation bias or motivated reasoning, where we’re looking for answers that we want to find. But when we’re curious and we’re just looking for more information — we’re just trying to get more context — that leads us to a better understanding of a situation.

Listen to Choose to Be Curious #290: RumorGuard: Curiosity Takes on Misinformation, with Dan Evon

Dan Evon is senior manager of education design at The News Literacy Project. NLP advances the development and teaching of news literacy in K-12 education. They created RumorGuard to help us all learn how to recognize misinformation and stop it in its tracks.

Join RumorGuard and help fight for facts. Here’s their fact check on that Harvard story…

Learn more about NLP in these C2BC Classics: The News Literacy Project, with Ebonee Rice & in the classroom, News Literacy with Patricia Hunt.

Check out my conversation about science communication and pre-bunking bad science on social media: A Special Alchemy: Curiosity, Empathy & Social Media with Dr. Ben Rein.

Read up on reverse image searches.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Heartland Flyer” by The Balloonist, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.