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    Thinking Dictionary

    Lateral reading

    What it is

    Lateral reading means judging a website or a post by checking what other sources say about it. "Lateral" means sideways. Instead of reading down the page, you move sideways: you open a new tab and look up the person or organisation behind it. Who are they? Who pays for their work? What do independent sources say about them?¹

    The opposite habit is sometimes called vertical reading: staying on the page and studying it closely, from top to bottom.

    Where the idea came from

    Researchers watched three groups judge websites: professional fact-checkers, historians with PhDs, and Stanford students. The fact-checkers did best. They reached sound judgements faster and more reliably. The main difference was what they did first. The historians and students mostly stayed on the page and read it carefully. The fact-checkers left it almost at once and searched for what others said about it.¹

    This was a small study, with only a handful of people in each expert group. The researchers mainly watched and listened to people as they worked, rather than running a large experiment.¹ So treat it as a strong clue, not the final word.

    Why it matters

    Most of us were taught to read carefully. With an unknown website, though, careful reading can backfire. If the page is built to persuade you, the longer you read it, the more it may convince you.

    And we are not naturally good at this. In tests, most school and university students struggled to judge online sources well.² A later study gave similar tasks to a large national sample of several thousand American high-school students. Most of them struggled too.³

    The good news is that the habit can be taught. In one study across a whole school district, high-school students were given a short series of lessons, and afterwards they judged sources better.⁴ Another set of lessons, built into ordinary school subjects, also helped.⁵ The gains were real but modest. Lateral reading helps, but it is not a cure for misinformation. A 2024 review of research on fighting false information online listed lateral reading among nine tools with evidence behind them.⁶

    In everyday life

    • A shocking claim online. Imagine a viral post claiming that a common food additive is "banned everywhere in Europe." Before reading on, open a new tab and search for the account's name. Imagine you find that it sells a rival supplement. That doesn't prove the claim false. But it tells you to find an independent source first.
    • An organisation you've never heard of. A group with a serious-sounding name publishes a report. Search its name with words like "funding" or "who is behind." A quick look at what independent sources, such as a news outlet or an encyclopedia, say about the group often tells you a lot. Fact-checkers often use Wikipedia this way, as a quick first step to find out who runs an organisation.¹
    • A health tip from a stranger. Before trying the tip, look up the person. What is their training? Do they sell something connected to the advice?

    The common trap

    The trap is trusting surface signs. A professional design, an "About us" page, or a web address ending in ".org" all feel like signs of quality. But they are easy to fake. Anyone can buy a ".org" address, and any group can describe itself kindly on its own "About" page.²˒¹

    Some ways out:

    • Leave the page early. Before reading closely, find out who is behind it.
    • Search sideways. Use the name plus "funding," "who is," or "fact check."
    • Read two or three independent sources. Then come back to the page, if it still seems worth your time.

    Lateral reading is often quick, perhaps a minute or two, though that hasn't been measured precisely. The fact-checkers in the study were faster than the other groups, not slower.¹

    Try it

    Pick a viral post or the website of an organisation you don't know. Set a two-minute timer. Don't scroll down the page. Instead, search the name together with "funding," "who is," or "fact check," and read what two or three independent sources say.

    When the timer goes off, decide: trust, distrust, or "need more information." Then compare that with your first impression of the page. Did lateral reading change your mind?

    Related concepts

    Credible sources · Confirmation bias · Multiple lines of evidence · Probabilistic reasoning · Misinformation vs disinformation · Peer review

    Sources

    1. Wineburg, S., & McGrew, S. (2019). Lateral reading and the nature of expertise: Reading less and learning more when evaluating digital information. Teachers College Record, 121(11), 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1177/016146811912101102

    2. McGrew, S., Breakstone, J., Ortega, T., Smith, M., & Wineburg, S. (2018). Can students evaluate online sources? Learning from assessments of civic online reasoning. Theory & Research in Social Education, 46(2), 165–193. https://doi.org/10.1080/00933104.2017.1416320

    3. Breakstone, J., Smith, M., Wineburg, S., Rapaport, A., Carle, J., Garland, M., & Saavedra, A. (2021). Students' civic online reasoning: A national portrait. Educational Researcher, 50(8), 505–515. https://doi.org/10.3102/0013189X211017495

    4. Wineburg, S., Breakstone, J., McGrew, S., Smith, M. D., & Ortega, T. (2022). Lateral reading on the open Internet: A district-wide field study in high school government classes. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(5), 893–909. https://doi.org/10.1037/edu0000740

    5. McGrew, S., & Breakstone, J. (2023). Civic online reasoning across the curriculum: Developing and testing the efficacy of digital literacy lessons. AERA Open, 9. https://doi.org/10.1177/23328584231176451

    6. Kozyreva, A., Lorenz-Spreen, P., Herzog, S. M., Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Hertwig, R., et al. (2024). Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(6), 1044–1052. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-024-01881-0