Seepage: Climate change denial and its effect on the scientific community

By Stephan Lewandowsky, Naomi Oreskes, J. Risbey, Ben R. Newell, Michael Smithson. 2015

192 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Vested interests and political agents have long opposed political or regulatory action in response to climate change by appealing to scientific uncertainty. Here we examine the effect of such contrarian talking points on the scientific community itself. We show that although scientists are trained in dealing with uncertainty, there are several psychological reasons why scientists may nevertheless be susceptible to uncertainty-based argumentation, even when scientists recognize those arguments as false and are actively rebutting them. Specifically, we show that prolonged stereotype threat, pluralistic ignorance, and a form of projection (the third-person effect) may cause scientists to take positions that they would be less likely to take in the absence of outspoken public opposition. We illustrate the consequences of seepage from public debate into the scientific process with a case study involving the interpretation of temperature trends from the last 15 years. We offer ways in which the scientific community can detect and avoid such inadvertent seepage.

Subfields: Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0bf0a83354dc1db35cb27fb28db3b03a144c353e

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects (2020, unknown): “Efforts to tackle the climate change problem have suffered from the influence of various forms of misinformation (Farrell, 2019; Lewandowsky et al., 2015; McCright et al., 2016; Oreskes & Conway, 2010).”
Making the Truth Stick & the Myths Fade: Lessons from Cognitive Psychology (2016, background): “This is particularly likely in scientific controversies, where the facts are difficult for the public to evaluate, as is the case with certain dietary approaches or health treatments(4) as well as for climate change.(13,46) The strategy of emphasizing controversy to engage readers is problematic whe”
Science audiences, misinformation, and fake news (2019, background): “What do we know from evidence-based social science about the origins and drivers of misinformation? What can research in communication, psychology, political science, and related fields tell us about potential solutions? What agendas for future research have emerged from the existing body of work on”