Truth: Can You Handle It?

If he's doing Web research that's not for school, and he finds multiple answers to the same question, "I'll just pick the hit that seems right." Usually that means a Web site that ends in .gov or .org, something with a little clout behind it. "But sometimes I might even just choose the one that favors my argument."

His classmate Hillary Swaim uses books, but says she's an exception to a lot of her friends. And unless she's being graded on her research, she estimates she'll spend about five minutes trying to track down an answer before giving up.

Corbin Lyday, the professor who moderated Choudhry and Swaim's discussion, looks horrified. "That's the most profound change" he's noticed in students since he taught his first class some 30 years ago. "The way they manage information. There's a growing impatience and a real passivity."

But Johnson, Choudhry and Swaim do not seem lazy, nor do they seem in the least ignorant. They seem like busy teens who are treading water the best they can in a sea of information that gets increasingly deeper. "We can get information so fast, and pretty reliably . . . " says Choudhry.

At least they are weaning themselves from having that information spoon-fed.

Back in Hyattsville, Stark accepts another question, from a user who wants to know the distance between New Jersey and Venezuela for a science project on migration. Stark asks which cities in New Jersey and Venezuela, explaining that this variable could drastically change the answer. The user seems annoyed -- it's just science homework, dude. No need for such crazy accuracy. Stark finds the distance using two random cities, then answers three more questions from the same patron, including "In what continent is Venezuela?"

Stark stares at the screen for a second before typing in "South America." He doesn't bother to cross-reference this information.

"This kid doesn't know where Venezuela is, but he managed to log on and use this service," Stark says quietly. "That is pretty amazing."

True or False?

People have always struggled with perceptions of truth, which ultimately come down to this general rule: We believe what we want to believe.

Two researchers who studied this in the 1960s learned that, when listening to debates on the risks of smoking, nonsmokers tuned in to the parts of the speeches that linked cigarettes to cancer. Smokers, on the other hand, paid closer attention to the parts that denied a health risk.

Rather than use the speeches as an opportunity to better educate themselves, subjects used them as an opportunity to reinforce their own beliefs.

So what's the big deal about now? How does the addition of Cumul.us or collateral misinformation really change things?

The answer, of course, is volume: millions of YouTube speeches, millions of Web pages -- including the 4,440 hits that still come up today when you type "Smoking does NOT cause cancer" into Google.

"We're reading in niches," says Manjoo, the author of "True Enough," who discusses the smoking study in his book. "Since people have more choice, they can choose to read the things that reflect what they already believe."

Making it even messier is the way our brains separate good information from bad. In 2003 a group of psychologists had a group of senior citizens read several statements. Some of the statements were labeled as true and some -- "Shark cartilage helps arthritis" -- were labeled as false.

But later, when asked to recall which information was false, the seniors couldn't do it. They remembered all of the information as true, knowing that they'd heard something about shark cartilage somewhere.

In fact, the more times that they were told the information was false, the more they believed it was true.

When younger subjects were tested, they eventually misremembered at the same rate as the seniors.

"People are very insensitive to where they hear things," says Norbert Schwarz, a University of Michigan psychologist who worked on the study. If one quack repeats the same piece of information to you five times, it's nearly as effective as hearing the sound bite from five different reputable sources.

Same goes for reading e-mails -- if you get three spam e-mails relating Abraham Lincoln's folksy wisdom about truth and dogs, you'll eventually believe it as strongly as if you heard it from the reference desk at the Lincoln Library.

"The basic psychological process is the same" as it's always been, Schwarz says. "But in the olden days you might have seen something once in your newspaper . . . now the likelihood that you'll see it again and again and again" -- on blogs, in your inbox, on YouTube -- has exploded.

Abraham Lincoln talked about cows, not dogs. But good luck remembering that.

* * *

There is a lot of information out there. It overwhelms us. It grows at a choking rate.

You wonder: Who is right?

The student who lives online? Or the lame teacher who thinks that books are a necessary component to a well-rounded understanding of how information works?

As students must absorb increasingly more information throughout their education, perhaps expecting them to assess whether it's true is simply too much. Four errors to Britannica's three ain't bad -- and probably good enough for the research the average person does on a daily basis.

Grill, the AP government teacher, listens to this argument thoughtfully before offering one of his own: "The lessons that come through understanding a process should never become a thing of the past," he says. The question of truth in a user-generated world isn't about the accuracy of information so much as it is about an appreciation for the intricacies of the search, for understanding that truth can be elusive, but the fight for it can be rewarding.

Sometimes it's a losing battle.

"My wife is in sales, and she's always saying, 'Why do the kids need to know this?' " Grill says. "She's the one who makes all the money, so I can't really argue."