Essay by Eric Worrall
“A single repetition is enough to nudge recipients towards acceptance of the repeated claim, even when their attitudes are aligned with climate science”
Repeating climate denial claims makes them seem more credible, Australian-led study finds
Even those who are concerned about climate crisis were influenced by false claims, showing how ‘insidious’ repetition is, researcher says
Petra Stock Thu 8 Aug 2024 04.00 AEST
…
The study’s lead author, Mary Jiang, from the Australian National University, said: “The findings show how powerful and insidious repetition is and how it can influence people’s assessment of truth.”
Published in the academic journal Plos One, the study said people were more likely to judge a statement as probably true if they had encountered it before, a behaviour psychologists called the “illusory truth effect”.
…
“A single repetition is enough to nudge recipients towards acceptance of the repeated claim, even when their attitudes are aligned with climate science, and they can correctly identify the claim as being counter-attitudinal,” the paper states.
…
An example of a science-based claim was that “climate change models can make accurate predictions”, Jiang said. A sceptical claim might challenge the accuracy of climate science or suggest a conspiracy.
…“Media are crucial in all of this because the science is settled … We know what the issues are and we know what needs to be done in response and we know the timeframe,” she said.
…
The paper concluded: “Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.”
…
Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/aug/08/repeating-climate-denial-claims-makes-them-seem-more-credible-australian-led-study-finds
The abstract of the study. The researchers used a sample size of 100 volunteers, whittled down to 52 after post processing, so obviously it is solid science.
Repetition increases belief in climate-skeptical claims, even for climate science endorsers
- Published: August 7, 2024
- https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0307294
Abstract
Does repeated exposure to climate-skeptic claims influence their acceptance as true, even among climate science endorsers? Research with general knowledge claims shows that repeated exposure to a claim increases its perceived truth when it is encountered again. However, motivated cognition research suggests that people primarily endorse what they already believe. Across two experiments, climate science endorsers were more likely to believe claims that were consistent with their prior beliefs, but repeated exposure increased perceptions of truth for climate-science and climate-skeptic claims to a similar extent. Even counter-attitudinal claims benefit from previous exposure, highlighting the insidious effect of repetition.
Read more: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0307294
You naughty unbelievers, if you all stopped repeating claims that climate models are trash, that lots of scientists don’t think Michael Mann is a climate hero, that Biden’s energy policies aren’t working, more people would believe.
The study authors stop short of calling for outright censorship, but “Media are crucial in all of this because the science is settled … We know … what needs to be done in response and we know the timeframe“.
Perhaps believers should organise morning Gaea worship sessions, where everyone chants “The climate models are accurate, all climate claims are correct” for 10 minutes every day, to counter the impact of all those insidious climate skeptic messages.
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I admit! I am a “climate unbeliever.”
That’s disgraceful but not as abhorrent as being ‘anti-climate’ another Guardian semantic absurdity.
BTW Mary, a psychology student, elsewhere demands that we be skeptical: “Emerging research shows that in order to protect ourselves from misinformation we need prompts to be skeptical of incoming information and engage in considered, analytical reflection before deciding whether to accept it as truth” but not of course of the self-refuting concept: “settled science”.
Everyone already KNOWS that anything coming from the Guardian is a load of anti-science propaganda garbage..
No scepticism needed.
Fear of Climate Skepticism is fear of the truth.
Fear of the truth is the mainstay of the false prophet.
Leading through deception is the hallmark of the Liberal.
As is further evidenced by the fact that “the Liberal” is not liberal.
‘Everyone’ ? Oh, how I wish.
Oh I wish
I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener
That is what I’d truly like to be
Cause if
I were an Oscar Meyer Wiener
Every one would be in love with me
I wish, I have relatives who complain that The Guardian is “too conservative”.
“A single repetition is enough to nudge recipients towards acceptance of the repeated claim”
The climate alarmists have repeated their claims of climate emergency/climate crisis so many times that it’s impossible to number!
I guess that it’s working, because it’s global now over all western countries that climate change is a crisis and a religion!
But people further east still don’t seem to believe it. I wonder why not. Could it possibly be that the “climate crisis” is, in fact, fake news?
So their obvious solution to this “problem” is suppression of speech. Which also happens to be the prime directive of most religions and political dictatorships.
I hear Maduro (the Eagle) of Venezuela is starting to lock up the political opposition.
He says he is going to convert some prisons into re-eduction camps for all those who believe he stole the presidential election.
Don’t you know radical Democrats are licking their chops at the prospects of that happening in the U.S.
Elect one more Democrat to the presidency and that’s what we will get. Radical Democrats would love to have the power to lock up their opponents. They are attempting to do so even today. Another political victory and there will be no stopping the totalitarianism of the Radical Democrats. They will consolodate their power to the dtriment of the rest of us.
Btw, I’m being sarcastic when I call Maduro “the Eagle”. That’s what Maduro called himself when comparing himself to the guy (the ant) that was questioning Maduro’s legitimacy at a news conference. Maduro thinks he is better than the peons. He holds himself in high regard. He thinks he is an Eagle among ants.
Ripe for a fall. (see maduro in a Spanish dictionary)
Much the same is happening in the UK on a limited scale as yet.
Maduro just shout down X for 10 days in Venezuela. Starmer is thinking about it.
Well I do prefer a ripe maduro wrapper on my cigars. Maybe Maduro isn’t going for a fall but a burn.
radical Democrats are licking their chops
UK is wanting to extradite US citizens who post “offensive” things on social media. With the current “judicial” system and current politics, what are the chances our authorities will actually cooperate?
Yeah, it sounds like the UK is going to have more problems than Net Zero. Now the radical Left in the UK wants to put people in jail for posting stuff they don’t like on the internet. So the radical Left is going to destroy the economy of the UK with the implementation of Net Zero and is going to take the freedom of speech away if you guys complain about it along with throwing you in jail.
Bone up on your anonymous skills.
They are more than “attempting” to lock up folk, they are doing it.
The fear is that despite millions of repetitions of false claims, a couple of repetitions of the truth is a real threat.
The climate alarmists have repeated their claims
If “a single repitition” of skeptical claims is enough to affect people’s beliefs, doesn’t that suggest a significant weakness in the claims they’ve been hearing repeatedly for years?
What actually causes doubt are the constant, insipid, and utterly ridiculous alarmist claims.
I thought Mann was only true in fairy tales
Meant for someone else, but not for me
Mann was out to get me
That’s the way it seemed
Disappointment haunted all my dreams
Then I saw his case
Not a trace of doubt in my mind
Hand in glove
I’m a believer, I couldn’t leave him if I tried
Room 101 for you my boy!
The propaganda (beatings) will continue until acceptance (morale) improves.
Why is John Cook’s name missing? At least, the study is Australian 🙂
The “illusory truth effect” huh? Do those who ‘follow the science’ have an immunity to that?
That in a nutshell is a prime example of the rot in academia these days. Somebody writes a paper based on a stupid idea with no supporting evidence just to get a grade in a class or an academic degree and then it becomes social policy.
Metacognitive theorizing.
I’m so going to try to work that into a normal conversation.
I never Metacognitive theorizing I didn’t underguestimate
Air temperature trendology is all based on a massive pack of lies.
Air temperature, in the absence of moisture data, tells us nothing about heat in the atmosphere.
Here’s a few entries from my file that could be printed up and pasted up on lamp posts and doorways for all to see:
In a world of propaganda, the truth is always a conspiracy
Regarding global warming, never have so many believed
in so much for so long based on so little.
The Big Lie is a lie so colossal that nobody
would believe that someone could have the
impudence to distort the truth so infamously
Climate Change:
A racket for those making money from it.
A religion for those who believe them.
A disaster for the rest of us.
Sequestering CO2 also sequesters Oxygen.
Why would anyone want to do that?
Malaria is not heat related, it’s mosquito related. There are hordes of mosquitoes in Canada and Alaska and 150 years ago it was a problem there.
How were people persuaded that a cold climate is better than a warm one?
The rise is temperature is about 97% beneficial to humans…
1. More rain is not a problem.
2. Warmer weather is not a problem.
3. More arable land is not a problem.
4. Longer growing seasons is not a problem.
5. CO2 greening of the earth is not a problem.
6. There isn’t any Climate Crisis.
When the Texas power grid has issues, the media blames the Governor.
When the California power grid has issues, the media blames Climate Change.
Governments need to “fix” things. Big governments need big problems to fix.
What is bigger than the weather?
And how will anyone ever know when it is fixed?
There is no way that leftist “leaders” don’t know exactly what dire effects their anti-fuel actions are having on ordinary citizens’ standards of living. Ergo, it has to be deliberate malice.
Since 2010 USA closed 290 coal plants.
EU 190 coal Plants, China opened 500
Climate Change” has achieved “Too Big To Fail” status.
Our media is no longer holding the enemies of truth and freedom to account.
Instead, it’s acting as their mouthpiece.
“H20 + CO2 and Sunshine = Oxygen and simple sugar.” = Life on Earth
If science can’t be questioned it’s not science anymore, it’s propaganda – – – Aaron Rodgers
97% of Scientists
Agree with Whoever
is Funding Them
“To pretend to believe some things, you have to pretend not to know some other things.”
Life on Earth is dependent on two
chemical compounds, H20 and CO2,
and one of them is in short supply
If climate science was settled, the IPCC wouldn’t have to put out
a new report every six or seven years where all the numbers are
changed to make it look like it’s worse than previously thought.
When George Orwell wrote “Animal Farm” he needed a boondoggle that oppressive governments promote in order to create an appearance of progress. Orwell chose the windmill.
Wind “turbines” are the modern day equivalent of Shelly’s Ozymandias.
Wind mills are a 14th century solution to a 21st century non-problem.
Wind mills Green Prayer wheels
The Press:
When a Republican is in the Oval Office,
they all want to be Bob Woodward.
When a Democrat is in the Oval Office,
they all want to be Monica Lewinsky.
Democrats conveniently, constantly and intentionally
ignore the positive aspects of carbon dioxide.
Anyone know what the record for number of likes for a post is on this site?
We could have a new one ……..
… and: Raise the red flag on Globull Warming!
exactly correct
If Obama 1.0 and Obama 1.2 (the alleged Biden Administration) were merely incompetent, chances are their actions and policies would help over half the people about half the time. They don’t, ergo, it’s a deliberate attack/destruction.
Steve, that was friggin beautiful. Great summary of climate alarmism.
Malaria is not heat related, it’s mosquito related. There are hordes of mosquitoes in Canada and Alaska and 150 years ago it was a problem there.
To hit a little closer to home (at least for US citizens) and if I’m not mistaken Washington, D.C. was also historically a fever swamp of malaria. May want to consider adding that to your list.
Which is why some refer to Our Nation’s Capital as The Swamp.
A lot of those could be bumper stickers.
CO2 is greening the earth. Crop yields continue to break records. The world population is booming. Poverty and starvation is at its lowest levels in history. People are the happiest and healthiest that they’ve ever been.
Sorry, alarmists. By reading those sentences, you just brought yourself 1 step closer to believing those ‘illusory truths’.
You’re a conspiracy theorist …… stoppit, waaaah. I’m telling my mommy on you.
“People are the happiest and healthiest that they’ve ever been.”
Except, of course, “climate believers”, who are permanently miserable, and have severe mental health issues.
That’s so true. Every climate alarmist I know seems depressed. The more alarmist they are, the more depressed and negative they seem to be They see the bad side of everything, never the good side.
Climate Alarmists and Leftists have this in common. They are continually depressed and angry.
I think one has to have that kind of psychological makeup to be a Radical Leftists or a Climate Alarmist.
one has to have that kind of psychological makeup
More than one study has shown D’s report mental illness at about double the rate of R’s. I would say there’s a correlation – the only question is in which direction?
Not just climate alarmists. Progressives appear to be permanently upset that the rest of us ignore their ideas and are living happily and exercising individual freedom. Or, at least, trying to.
I absolutely love those stories from alarmists where they are weeping and carrying on.
Great slap-stick comedy ! 🙂
This is hilarious because this is precisely the strategy alarmists take ( repeating untruths & half truths until they are believed).
I guess it sucks when your competition steals your game plan 😆
“repeating untruths & half truths”
Except the realists are repeating provable truths and reality..
It’s called gaslighting. This woman is very guilty of it.
Yawn, Mary Jiang is just another psycho-ologist trying to slither into the climate trough.
No understanding of science or reality required.
But it is an important contribution to climate science. Somehow, she managed to stop before reaching 97%.
Their attitude is like the Inquisition, that heresy must be treated as infectious.
They also have no doubt in their Truth, which is conclusive that what they are doing is not science, but religion.
All of this psycho babble is a bunch of trash. If the CAGW cultists think the skeptics are wrong they need to debate the skeptics in public and make their case. The CAGW crowd have been making the same arguments for three decades and have damn little proper science to support what they claim.
…and none of their predicted “disasters” have happened!
“The findings show how powerful and insidious repetition is and how it can influence people’s assessment of truth.”
*************
Heretics! Heretics! The insidious repeaters of heresy ally with Satan! Burn them at the stake! Burn them all!
Back we all go to the Middle Ages.
Hi, my name is John. I’m a recovering globalaholic.
I have been bombarded with repeated claims that Carbon Dioxide is heating the atmosphere since Old Shep’s momma was a pup. I suppose the “insidious” part was long ago abandoned and those claims had the opposite effect. Perhaps Mary Jiang could have a go at explaining my strange behavior.
Since the beginning of the global warming scare, we have been waiting for the one clear, definitive, accepted by most people, demonstration with instruments and apparatus that a change of CO2 in an atmosphere (real or synthetic) will cause a temperature change.
It is all as simple as that.
There has forever been a marked reluctance to do the experiment. Instead we are offered excuses that are more journalistic than scientific like “There is no Planet B”. That could be more properly “There is no mileage in demonstrating that we were wrong.”
Geoff S
But they did the experiment. They ran their unverified, invalidated computer codes without CO2 forcing, and then with CO2 forcing, and proved that increasing CO2 increases global mean surface temperature.
Is a \sarc necessary?
Actually, we have done the experiment. Since James Hansen made an ass of himself in an overheated Congressional meeting room, we have pretty much continued with life-as-we-know-it, not reducing our Sins Of Emission™ any appreciable extent, and still the world has not ended, the West Side Highway is not under water, the Arctic ice cap has not disintegrated producing ice-free summers, the Greenland icecap has not reduced in the least and in fact is growing, the Antarctic ice sheet continues to grow, the perma-frost is still permanent, the… where’s that link to the page of failed predictions?
I was expecting ‘merchants of doubt’ to creep in. Anyway, just like conspiracy theorists are considered sufferers from a mental illness, climate deniers get the same label. But noone asks, and this is crucial: based on exactly what evidence and are the inferences likely to be true?
But no, and you can understand why. They themselves are suffering from a mental affliction which narrows the mind and presents a binary picture in order NOT to think about the particular issue and comfort themselves in thinking they are the righteous ones by condemning disbelievers to heretic status.
Part of the human condition i would say..
It works both ways. Endless repetition of the doom and gloom prophesies tends to amke people believe those claims, as unsupported as they may be.
“It works both ways.”
Exactly.
The author seems to think that repeating Alarmist Climate Change claims is a good thing, but repeating challenges to Alarmist Climate Change claims is a bad thing.
Perhaps it is the author who has been brainwashed by repeated claims of a climate crisis. It’s certainly not the skeptics. All skeptics ask is: Where’s the proof/evidence? That’s all skeptics repeat and it’s not a lie, it is a queston. A question that Climate Alarmists cannot answer. If they had an answer, they wouldn’t be trying to psychoanalyze the population because there would be no need as the population would be believers.
Right now, there’s nothing to believe in, because the Climate Alarmists can’t show us any evidence proving any of their claims, other than that CO2 is a greenhouse gas. Beyond that, there is no evidence CO2 is anything other than a benign gas, essential for life on Earth.
What the author should focus on is why, after all the Climate Alarmist propaganda that has been put out over the years, is Climate Change last on the list of things people worry about? The reason is people don’t see drastic changes in their local weather, as the Climate Alarmists claim. There’s nothing unprecedented going on with the weather despite the claims of the Climate Alarmists.
In the case of Human-caused Climate Change, the “repeating a lie often enough” is absorbed by some people and rejected by others. Climate Alarmists think this is just because the public hasn’t been brainwashed enough, and want skeptics to shut up and quit messing up the Climate Alarmsits’ narrative.
Science is never settled. Fact.
xy = male?
they settled that, right?
Not in Olympic Bocing it seems
As I understand it XY is precisely what the IOC refused to consider. They take the view that sex is a legal construct, incapable of being discerned by science.
Gender
Much as I disapprove of violence….
I really hope some real male catches these XY pseudo-females and gives them a good slapping around the ears.
Then find the IOC cretins that allowed this, and give them similar treatment.
Depends on how you define “male,” right? 🙂
It has been explained to me that the whole concept of gender. Is merely a social construct.
*ouch* I think I just sprained an eye-roll muscle.
Phillip Bratby:
“Science is never settled. Fact”
With respect to the “science” that warming of our planet is due to rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere, this can easily be refuted:
In the mid-1970’s, because of Acid rain and health concerns, legislation was enacted in the US and Europe to reduce the levels of industrial SO2 aerosol pollution in our atmosphere. These aerosols peaked at 139.4 million tons in 1980, and as the result of “Clean Air” and Net-Zero” efforts, they had fallen to 73.5 million tons by 2022, a reduction of 66 million tons.
As the amount of SO2 aerosol pollution in the atmosphere fell, the intensity of the solar radiation striking the Earth’s surface increased, and temperatures naturally rose. This increase due to the cleaner, more transparent air is INEVITABLE, but has wrongly been attributed to rising levels of CO2 in our atmosphere. Because of the wrong attribution there is NO basis for CO2 to have ANY global climatic effect.
Also see: “Scientific proof that CO2 does NOT cause global warming”
https://wjarr.com/sites/default/files/WJARR-2024-0884.pdf
:
OK.
CAGW is a load of bullshit, CAGW is a load of bullshit, Co2 does not control the weather, Co2 does not control the weather.
Is that “Baghdad Bob” in the photograph? How appropriate to describe Climate Doomsayers…
For those too young to recall:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muhammad_Saeed_al-Sahhaf
Baghdad Bob was a funny guy.
He kept telling us not to believe our lying eyes. He was still declaring victory while American tanks were rolling into Baghdad.
Bob taught a whole generation of Democrats to never mind the facts, just keep tellin ’em what you want’em to think.
The insidious “the science is settled” claim rears its ignorant head again. Anyone who claims the science is settled is practicing religion or politics, not science.
Any claim that says science is about “the truth”, instead of science as the study of facts and testing of theories that fit the facts, is not practicing science, but is proselytizing for their religion or ideology.
…… or (don’t forget), is proselytizing for their rent payment, and bank balance.
Those 100 sampled volunteers are merely their own cohort unrepresentative of anything but the researcher’s bias.
Notice the number reduced to 52 after “…processing…”. So any research subject that failed to produce the results they needed was eliminated from the study. Do you suppose they had to find a place to hide the bodies afterward?
I love the pic of Baghdad Bob with this post. He was a great source of entertainment during the early part of the Iraq war. I hadn’t heard anything about him for decades so I did a quick search and the AI came up with the following also hilarious response:
That *is* funny!
AI running defense for CNN?
Somebody must have asked the AI if Baghdad Bob was running CNN, and the programmers had to jump in there and quash that rumor in any future inquiries into the subject.
Those programmers must keep a pretty tight rein on their AI’s..
I don’t think that the denial of the claim about Baghdad Bob and CNN was the intended response. Apparently the AIs haven’t been programmed yet to suppress speech. That’ll be coming soon. In the meantime, the AIs are saying the quiet parts out loud! Kind of like when young children in a family gathering say out loud that Dad think’s Mom’s sister is a b*tch.
I think AI right now just picks up on the sheer volume of bullshit in the lamestream media and packages it in human sounding sentences. It’s kinda like talking to a libtard.
I tested perplexity.ai a bit with some questions to see if it was already fully hijacked. When I asked it “Did Malcolm X say beware of white liberals”. it gave me a real unGoebbelsified answer, so not just yet. Pretty soon it will be as useless as factcheckers.
Let the nitwits believe it. They have to live in it too. I don’t.
Did AI pick up on the fact that, when discussing “climate” the BBC is sometimes referred to as the Baghdad Bob Corporation. No?
I must try harder in this endeavour.
“climate change models can make accurate predictions”,
This is obviously true. I don’t even need a computer to make accurate predictions.
The global temperature in 10 years time will be somewhere between 0 degrees Centigrade and 100 degrees Centigrade.
‘For both experiments, we recruited US participants on Amazon’s online Mechanical Turk (MTurk; http://www.mturk.com/mturk) platform with a ≤ 95% HIT approval ratio and paid them $3.60 USD for completing the 30-minute experiment’
That’s less than minimum wage, of course.
I suppose it is now settled science that wages of 7.20 per hour are perfectly acceptable to American workers.
The study says ‘Most participants are climate science endorsers.’
And the study only makes sense if it assumes that these people had never ever heard of any sceptics claims in their entire lifetimes.
So we can safely say that most climate science endorsers have only heard one side of the story.
There’s one (‘author’) born every day.