Guest essay by Eric Worrall
A new study suggests that if people are psychologically “inoculated” with deliberately “weakened” versions of climate skeptic arguments, they are more likely to reject real skeptic positions.
The Press Release;
Psychological ‘vaccine’ could help immunize public against ‘fake news’ on climate change
Sander van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz,Seth Rosenthal, Edward Maibach
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
In medicine, vaccinating against a virus involves exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance.
Social psychologists believe that a similar logic can be applied to help “inoculate” the public against misinformation, including the damaging influence of ‘fake news’ websites propagating myths about climate change.
A new study compared reactions to a well-known climate change fact with those to a popular misinformation campaign. When presented consecutively, the false material completely cancelled out the accurate statement in people’s minds – opinions ended up back where they started.
Researchers then added a small dose of misinformation to delivery of the climate change fact, by briefly introducing people to distortion tactics used by certain groups. This “inoculation” helped shift and hold opinions closer to the truth – despite the follow-up exposure to ‘fake news’.
The study on US attitudes found the inoculation technique shifted the climate change opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats alike.
Published in the journal Global Challenges, the study was conducted by researchers from the universities of Cambridge, UK, Yale and George Mason, US. It is one of the first on ‘inoculation theory’ to try and replicate a ‘real world’ scenario of conflicting information on a highly politicised subject.
“Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” says lead author Dr Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab.
“We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by pre-emptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience. A warning that helps preserve the facts.
“The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible.”
To find the most compelling climate change falsehood currently influencing public opinion, van der Linden and colleagues tested popular statements from corners of the internet on a nationally representative sample of US citizens, with each one rated for familiarity and persuasiveness.
The winner: the assertion that there is no consensus among scientists, apparently supported by the Oregon Global Warming Petition Project. This website claims to hold a petition signed by “over 31,000 American scientists” stating there is no evidence that human CO2 release will cause climate change.
The study also used the accurate statement that “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change”. Prior work by van der Linden has shown this fact about scientific consensus is an effective ‘gateway’ for public acceptance of climate change.
In a disguised experiment, researchers tested the opposing statements on over 2,000 participants across the US spectrum of age, education, gender and politics using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk.
In order to gauge shifts in opinion, each participant was asked to estimate current levels of scientific agreement on climate change throughout the study.
Those shown only the fact about climate change consensus (in pie chart form) reported a large increase in perceived scientific agreement – an average of 20 percentage points. Those shown only misinformation (a screenshot of the Oregon petition website) dropped their belief in a scientific consensus by 9 percentage points.
Some participants were shown the accurate pie chart followed by the erroneous Oregon petition. The researchers were surprised to find the two neutralised each other (a tiny difference of 0.5 percentage points).
“It’s uncomfortable to think that misinformation is so potent in our society,” says van der Linden. “A lot of people’s attitudes toward climate change aren’t very firm. They are aware there is a debate going on, but aren’t necessarily sure what to believe. Conflicting messages can leave them feeling back at square one.”
Alongside the consensus fact, two groups in the study were randomly given ‘vaccines’:
A general inoculation, consisting of a warning that “some politically-motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists”.
A detailed inoculation that picks apart the Oregon petition specifically. For example, by highlighting some of the signatories are fraudulent, such as Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls, and less than 1% of signatories have backgrounds in climate science.
For those ‘inoculated’ with this extra data, the misinformation that followed did not cancel out the accurate message.
The general inoculation saw an average opinion shift of 6.5 percentage points towards acceptance of the climate science consensus, despite exposure to fake news.
When the detailed inoculation was added to the general, it was almost 13 percentage points – two-thirds of the effect seen when participants were just given the consensus fact.
The research team point out that tobacco and fossil fuel companies have used psychological inoculation in the past to sow seeds of doubt, and to undermine scientific consensus in the public consciousness.
They say the latest study demonstrates that such techniques can be partially “reversed” to promote scientific consensus, and work in favour of the public good.
The researchers also analysed the results in terms of political parties. Before inoculation, the fake negated the factual for both Democrats and Independents. For Republicans, the fake actually overrode the facts by 9 percentage points.
However, following inoculation, the positive effects of the accurate information were preserved across all parties to match the average findings (around a third with just general inoculation; two-thirds with detailed).
“We found that inoculation messages were equally effective in shifting the opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats in a direction consistent with the conclusions of climate science,” says van der Linden.
“What’s striking is that, on average, we found no backfire effect to inoculation messages among groups predisposed to reject climate science, they didn’t seem to retreat into conspiracy theories.
“There will always be people completely resistant to change, but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”
Source: https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/uoc-pc011917.php
The Abstract of the study;
Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change
Effectively addressing climate change requires significant changes in individual and collective human behavior and decision-making. Yet, in light of the increasing politicization of (climate) science, and the attempts of vested-interest groups to undermine the scientific consensus on climate change through organized “disinformation campaigns,” identifying ways to effectively engage with the public about the issue across the political spectrum has proven difficult. A growing body of research suggests that one promising way to counteract the politicization of science is to convey the high level of normative agreement (“consensus”) among experts about the reality of human-caused climate change. Yet, much prior research examining public opinion dynamics in the context of climate change has done so under conditions with limited external validity. Moreover, no research to date has examined how to protect the public from the spread of influential misinformation about climate change. The current research bridges this divide by exploring how people evaluate and process consensus cues in a polarized information environment. Furthermore, evidence is provided that it is possible to pre-emptively protect (“inoculate”) public attitudes about climate change against real-world misinformation.
Read more: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/gch2.201600008/full
I was curious about exactly how the inoculation is performed, the following from the full study is revealing;
… The rate of cultural transmission, or infection, may be slowed through a process known as attitudinal inoculation. In medicine, resistance to a virus can be conferred by exposing someone to a weakened version of the virus (a vaccine)—strong enough to trigger a response (i.e., the production of antibodies), but not so strong as to overwhelm the body’s immune system. The social–psychological theory of attitudinal inoculation[56] follows a similar logic: A threat is introduced by forewarning people that they may be exposed to information that challenges their existing beliefs or behaviors. Then, one or more (weakened) examples of that information are presented and directly refuted in a process called “refutational pre-emption” or “prebunking.”[14] In short, attitudinal resistance is conferred by pre-emptively highlighting false claims and refuting potential counterarguments. …
Read more: Same link as above
In the supplemental information document, the study authors provide an example of inoculation. They authors present the Oregon Petition claim “31,487 American scientists have signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs“, along with an image of Physics Giant Edward Teller’s Oregon Petition signature (see image at the top of this post), followed by the following “counterargument”.
General (In1) and Detailed (In2) Inoculation Messages
General: Nearly all climate scientists—97%—have concluded that human-caused climate change is happening. Some politically-motivated groups use misleading tactics to try to convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists. However, scientific research has found that among climate scientists “there is virtually no disagreement that humans are causing climate change”.
Detailed: One such politically motivated group claims to have collected signatures from over 31,000 “scientists” (including over 9,000 who hold Ph.D.’s) on a petition urging the U.S. government to reject any limits on greenhouse gas emissions because; “there is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of Earth’s climate.” They claim that these signatures prove that there is no scientific consensus on human-caused climate change.
This may sound convincing at first. However, several independent investigations have concluded that the “Petition Project” is extremely misleading. For instance, many of the signatures on the petition are fake (for example, past signatories have included the long- deceased Charles Darwin, members of the Spice Girls, and fictional characters from Star Wars). Also, although 31,000 may seem like a large number, it actually represents less than 0.3% of all US science graduates (a tiny fraction). Further, nearly all of the legitimate signers have no expertise in climate science at all. In fact, less than 1% of those who signed the petition claim to have any background in Climate or Atmospheric Science. Simply calling yourself a “scientist” does not make someone an expert in climate science. By contrast, 97% of actual climate scientists, agree that human-caused climate change is happening.
In my opinion this counter argument is deeply misleading.
- There is no mention that the 97% consensus claim is based on a disputed study.
- There is no mention of who Edward Teller is. As a skeptic I don’t defer to anyone’s authority, even Edward Teller doesn’t get a free pass. But having someone like Teller onboard surely means that the position he supports is worthy of closer examination.
- Suggesting that people from fields related to climate science have no right to criticise how climate science is conducted is ridiculous. For example, excluding input from non-climate scientists would exclude criticism from statisticians, who frequently object to the sloppy use of statistics by non-statisticians. Statistics matters – in scientific studies which rely on statistical analysis, sloppy use of statistics can lead to erroneous conclusions.
Are the authors aware of these flaws in their counterargument? Quite possibly – but their intention with their study was to test the impact of deliberately weakened skeptic positions, to test their “inoculation” theory, not to educate people about climate change.
The moral premise of this study is my most serious concern – it is not OK to play increasingly devious psychological tricks on people to win support. Of course it is possible to convince more people by providing them with a distorted, “weakened” version of your opponent’s position, which is what “inoculation” theory seems to be about – but that doesn’t make it right.
“We must distort the truth in order to learn the truth”
Distorted Pelosi science.
For now, they talk about innoculating people against skeptical positions as if information that contradicted the government’s position was a disease that had to be eradicated. How long till they start talking of killing the disease at it’s source?
Such is the misinformation about climate change that it is amusing to find psychologists doing experimental work with so-called truth and misinformation when it is clear that their own ability to differentiate between the two is seriously flawed.
Yes, that is the obvious conclusion here. But then the obvious does not generate publications and promotions.
While this approach may inoculate some, more likely it will ‘prepare the ground’ so that when they hear a real argument from one of us, it will ring true, not coming out of left field.
So presenting people with weaken warmists ideas will strengthen the skeptic position, as will usign photos of snowstorms and other misleading information like Al Gore loves. Problem: skeptics have morals and scruples. They are scientists, not bullies out to win at any cost. It’s tough for science to fight the religious zealots of climate change because zealots lie, cheat, steal, whatever it takes. As we certainly see here in their desperate attempt to hang on to the lie.
Sheri = Smart
“It’s tough for science to fight the religious zealots of climate change because zealots lie, cheat, steal, whatever it takes. As we certainly see here in their desperate attempt to hang on to the lie”
I would change your word “tough” to “almost impossible”.
There is no real science on the warmunist side — wrong wild guesses of the future climate, when the causes of climate change are still unknown, are not real science!
Making wrong climate predictions for the past 40 years — starting with global cooling — has nothing to do with real science.
In real science the predictions have to be right.
In cimate science the coming climate catastrophe is always coming but never arrives.
It’s just a false boogeyman and the PhD scientists and their computers are bought and paid for props to make the predictions seem “professional”.
Funny thing is a global warming catastrophe never has to come — if enough people FEAR a catastrophe is coming they will empower their government to control corporate and personal energy use and tell them how to live … which was the leftists goal from the beginning — sell socialism by claiming strong governments are needed to “save the Earth”..
Leftism is a “secular religion’ with many similarities to traditional religions.
Indeed, the source of the disease resides in the mind. The young mush filled brains, that attend our institutions of higher learning are provided no, or very little, means to think critically. This is the nexus, that in most cases separates the warmist from the skeptic. My son, whilst in university, shared with me in his final that he was unaware of critical thinking; until that fortuitous economics class. He shared with me, ” If only I would have known how the methods and results of critical thinking better prepare students for all studies and life choices in general.” I asked him to write the president of the university about his discovery and admonish accordingly, but he demurred.
It has been my experience in daily life, that the warmists are almost always led by their emotions (heart), whereas the skeptics are led by their critical thinking (brain). In the general, coincidence; that the former are Democrats and the latter Republicans????????????
In other news, strawmen are easy to beat.
Is this a post about surveys concerning psychology? These are not scientific at all, pointless meaningless blather. Why bother? Why this post?
No. Try reading again, but this time with your Reading Comprehension cap on.
Reading is fundamental.
“the assertion that there is no consensus among scientists,”
That depends on the question doesn’t it. As we know from the 2014 Heartland CC conference, 100% of skeptics agreed with “the consensus” as it actually exists. The problem is that warmists change the question and then claim that the 97% consensus agree.
100% agree that anthropogenic CC is real, they don’t agree that it is dangerous and it is the dangerous part that warmists slip into the question.
How do we inoculate the gullible masses against the lies and disinformation coming from the IPCC? Their arguments are already so weak they can’t stand up to the slightest scrutiny.
Not sure you can. Since time eternal the gullible have bought perpetual motion machines, tonics that cure everything, believed the government hid the free energy sources, etc. Gullible people are not really easily trained. They love fairy tales and will believe any charming person who tells them whatever they want to hear. The best we can do is reach those who aren’t quite sure, those who have not heard the opposing arguments, and so forth. Plus, the young in schools need to be told the truth, not the propaganda.
Come on man. There is 24/7 fake CAGW news. The public needs to be inoculated against CAGW/AGW fake news.
What we need is some in your face global cooling to help speed the painfully slow end of CAGW and AGW.
Observations and analysis do not support CAGW. Observations and analysis do not support even support AGW:
1.No tropical tropospheric hot spot. The IPPC’s general circulation models (GCMs) predict that the most amount of warming due to the increase in all greenhouse gases on the planet should have occurred in the tropical troposphere at roughly 8km above the surface of the planet. This has not occurred which explains why there has been almost no warming in the tropical region.
2. The latitudinal warming paradox. Almost all of the warming in the last 150 years has been in high latitude regions. As greenhouse gases are eventually distributed in the atmosphere the warming due to increase in atmospheric CO2 should have been global not high latitude. This paradox is related to the tropical tropospheric hot spot paradox.
3. The 19-year period with almost no warming.
4. Recent warming correlates with the highest solar activity in the last 8000 years. The number of geomagnetic field disturbances has increased by a factor of four. Solar wind bursts cause a space charge differential in the ionosphere which in turn causes an electric current to flow from 40 to 60-degree latitude both hemispheres (same region that has experienced the most amount of warming in the last 150 years) to the equatorial region. The electric current flow in the atmosphere with the return path being in the ocean changes cloud amounts and cloud properties in both regions. The observed change in planetary albedo is roughly 7 watts/meter^2 as compared to the 3.5 watts/meter^2 for the incorrectly calculated warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
5. Paleo record shows high latitude regions cyclically warm and cooling correlating with changes in the solar cycle.
6. Phase paradox. Phase analysis shows planet warms and then CO2 increases. As cause, must lead affect, this finding indicates changes in atmospheric CO2 has a small effect on planetary temperature.
7. No correlation paradox. There are periods of millions of years in the paleo when atmospheric CO2 was high and the planet was cold and vice versa.
8. The so called 1-dimensional calculation to determine the warming for a doubling of atmospheric CO2 was done without water. As the planet is 70% covered with water there is a great deal of water vapour in the atmosphere. The absorption of water vapour and CO2 overlap. If the calculation is redone with the known amount of water vapour in the atmosphere the warming due to a doubling of CO2 is reduced from 1.2C by a factor of three to 0.4C. The same 1-dimensional no feedback calculation froze the lapse rate.
It is a physical fact that an increase in greenhouse gases decreases the lapse rate in the atmosphere which in turn reduces the surface warming (due to the increased convection cooling in the atmosphere, hot gases rise and cold gases fall) due to an increase in greenhouse gases. This second ‘error’ reduces the warming due to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 by an additional factor of two, from 0.4C corrected for water vapour to 0.2C.
9. And so on.
Climate alarmists like to compare “denialists” to tobacco industry “shills” who represent a tiny minority opposing a broad and well-educated consensus.
Perhaps the public should be reminded about other industry “shills” and “consensus” stories.
Remember Enron? Remember a guy in Houston named John Olson?
Probably not. You remember, instead, a guy in New York named Paul Krugman, who won a Nobel Prize, and was a spot-lit spokesman for the glorious green energy, information-centric, and progressive energy trading company (formerly a pipeline company) called Enron. Dr Krugman was just one of any number of great and good analysts telling us all how wonderful Enron, and Enron-like, brokerages and data companies were at finding, and making available, and profiting from the sale of, hitherto under-exploited sources of energy. (This, to the extent that anybody at all understood what Enron claimed to be doing. Some promoters of Enron’s activities didn’t know or care what Enron was doing but wanted to be on the right side of history (and the markets) regardless. )
Stock analysts generally bought the story, and “shilled” for the stock. The Houston papers reported that 16 out of 17 energy analysts, all of long experience in the pipe, oil, refining, and energy industry, all advised buying Enron.
One guy in Houston “denied” the consensus. Olson.
He lost his job.
The CEO of Enron called the brokerage Merril Lynch and demanded Olson be fired. The CEO of Merril Lynch bought the consensus, took the “advice” , and let his independently-minded analyst hit the street.
Which of the expert opinions turned out to be right? The “Consensus” — or the “denialist”?
Who were the “Shills”?
When we talk about what to add to or take away from the story of the Consensus regarding Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming, we need to talk about “heretics” more recent than Galileo.
The skeptics with facts must be erased out of an abundance of caution….don’t ya know.
Electric shock therapy is also said to be good for the subjects.
Sander van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz, Seth Rosenthal and Edward Maibach would have made Heinrich Kramer proud.
Eric,
You said, “Suggesting that people from fields related to climate science have no right to criticise how climate science is conducted is ridiculous.”
Should self-described climatologists recuse themselves from criticizing geological studies of past climate?
Felflames January 23, 2017 at 11:57 pm.
Interesting association or comparison between the Borg collective in Star Trek and the climate alarmist faith movement. To wit:
The Borg-Climate Collective is all-knowing and all-powerful. You must cease resistance and submit to it without question. The collective is correct, it cannot be wrong. Any attempt to think independently outside the Borg-Climate collective is unacceptable and threatening to the health of the collective. It is Orwellian thought-crime. Please note those like Griff and other so-called “trolls” of his type here have already wisely seen the light and have submitted to the Borg-Climate collective without question.
This latest study on psychological inoculation will help you to understand the foolishness of attempting to resist the Borg-Climate collective any further. It demonstrates how psychological mind tools must and will be used as necessary to ensure that your thoughts are in union with the collective. This is a just and necessary step because, as said before, the collective cannot be wrong. It is perfect.
Any attempt to the threaten the financial health of the Borg-Climate collective by the withholding of climate change research funding is unacceptable and an abomination. It will be fiercely resisted, and the Borg-Climate collective will take all necessary steps to ensure that its financial well-being is protected. Any U.S. laws or presidential executive actions which pertain to the withholding of said funding are of no consequence to the Borg-Climate collective and have no meaning to it. Any other U.S. laws which negatively affect the collective are also declared null and void by the collective.
Defiance of the Borg-Climate collective will result in the the frying of the Earth and all life on it. It would be merely a matter of when it happens. The health of the Earth and the health of the collective are one. Of that there WILL be no dispute.
You WILL be one with the Borg-Climate collective. Resistance is futile. (Do I really need a sarc tag here?)
Better term: The Borg-Climate-97% collective.
Forest,
The one I like is, “You can lead a donkey to water, but you can’t make it think.”
Their whole approach suggests they are not interested in scientific answers. They know it is a matter of finding the best way to fool the most people. In reality, this is a truly unscientific way to accomplish their goal.
1 – ” LOGIN PUBLIC RELEASE: 22-JAN-2017
Psychological ‘vaccine’ could help immunize public against ‘fake news’ on climate change
UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE”
2 – “Disclaimer:
AAAS and EurekAlert! are not responsible for the accuracy of news releases posted to EurekAlert! by contributing institutions or for the use of any information through the EurekAlert system.”
_____________________________________________
3 – Who believes in UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE
This stream of psychobabble justifies the way our current media lies to us, by deleting context, by deliberate omission of narrative conflicting information, by adding words to “quotes” cause thats what the person meant to say.
For sure “Liberalism” is a progressive disease.
The above “paper” says, faking the argument is OK.
Just like those blogs that edit critical comments to allow the home team to “win”.
Never mind what your opponent says, respond only to what you can easily refute..
Or when you cannot justify your position,lie repeatedly and loudly about your opponent..
Rules for radicals once again.
The farce is strong in these idiots.
Thou shall not lie.
Mighty fine advice if you expect to survive in a civil society.
Video editing to fake the results of an experiment for high schoolers is okay too, right Al?
You were being “inoculated”? …
‘climate acceptance’
A declaration of orthodoxy.
Stop writing things like “carbon dioxide is a colourless gas”. I know its only written as an aside but I have seen it use as a summary of why sceptics think that there is no GHE, even though few are that sceptical.
To chip in here, it’s first worth noting that a term already exists for this (and this study is merely reinventing the wheel) called a ‘strawman argument fallacy’, as noted in critical thinking.
What’s particularly disturbing about this study is, it goes off on this tangent about ‘false information’ whilst it proposes delivering weakened (IE misleading, IE false) arguments of the opposition, making it basically the very monster that it seeks to slay. Basically it’s saying ‘if we lie, we can expose lies!’.
As a seasoned debater who could swing people to one side or another, I can remark several things about this naive propaganda study: yes, people are swayed more by emotions in a debate than facts per se (my saying is ‘half of an argument is PR’), BUT, and here’s a big one: strawman arguments can very quickly collapse, especially if the strawman argument is exposed.
So whilst a person might have seen the weakened (IE distorted) version, which emotionally polarises them against it, if they are already informed about the definition/existence of a strawman or have been shown that XYZ source has a tendency to omit key facts or distort them, it very quickly *backfires*.
That is to say, giving them an exaggerated, misleading or altered version of a claim only makes them polarised against *just* that claim. If the exaggerated, misleading or altered version is pointed out, it polarises them the other way: *against* the exaggerator.
For example, I think most you picked up on the fact the study avoids going into depth on the 97% (how many scientists? What division? How many years worth of experience? What was the distribution of their political stance?) survey claim by calling it ‘accepted’ (by who? When? Based on what?). By then extrapolating and exposing the weakened, misleading argument, distrust of the argument’s author builds.
Of course, those in favour of global warming then try another approach: they try to minimise or silence dissent (either by censoring comments, lawsuits or just not permitting commentary to begin with, or using automated response tools or withholding key data).
Essentially the study boils down into: ‘we can win the argument if we’re the only ones providing the argument!’.
Well, duh!