The internet is full - and I do mean full - of people and organizations attempting to influence opinions and otherwise benefit by leveraging research findings. Some of these folks make good efforts to accurately represent the findings they're using, while others...not so much. Your job in this activity is to find an instance of someone on the internet trying to utilize research findings in a way that communicates to a mass audience and evaluate just how well they do so . These could be in the form of advertisements, "clickbait" articles, news sites, press releases, topic-specific discussion forums, and so on (note: text-based communication is preferred here - video will be a bit more cumbersome).

Here's an example of apagethat contains some, at best, incomplete descriptions of scientific findings - use it to help guide your search for a similar site.

Below is a framework to use when evaluating the attempt at communicating about research - go through their information and see how many of these questions you can answer, describing your conclusions for each .

1. Could the event or relationship have occurred by chance (e.g., you just happened to have a car accident on the day that a psychic predicted your car would be damaged)?

2. Is there a control group or comparison group against which to assess the performance of the experimental group? We might see improvement in the experimental group, but would it have occurred anyway without any treatment or intervention (i.e., due to placebo effects, passage of time, regression toward the mean, etc.)?

3. Is the person concluding there is a causal relationship on the basis of correlational data?

4. Is the person trying to generalize the findings to a larger group based on a biased or unrepresentative sample?

5. Did the person ask questions of participants in a biased manner (e.g., leading questions, loaded or emotional wording, or confusing wording)?

6. Has the person made it impossible to falsify his or her theory or hypothesis? Does he or she consider positive evidence as support for the theory and negative evidence as not being relevant? Does he or she claim that the phenomenon disappears once you try to test it?

7. Is the person claiming to have found the cause of some behavior or phenomenon? Most complex behaviors or phenomena have multiple causes.

8. Who benefits from the argument being made?

9. Does the argument suffer from biased or prejudicial thinking (intentional or otherwise)?

Adapted from Lawson et al. (2015).