Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change

By S. van der Linden, Anthony Leiserowitz, S. Rosenthal, Edward Maibach. 2017

845 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

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Citations in the corpus

Explanation in Human-AI Systems: A Literature Meta-Review, Synopsis of Key Ideas and Publications, and Bibliography for Explainable AI (2019, background): “Van Der Linden, J. (2002).”
CLIMATE-FEVER: A Dataset for Verification of Real-World Climate Claims (2020, background): “They have confused the public, led to political inaction, and stalled support for climate-change mitigation measures [2, 3, 4, 5].”
False Information on Web and Social Media: A Survey (2018, background): “Very recent research has shown that educating people against possible manipulation strategies used in false information is effective in improving human detection skills [104].”
Creating News Literacy Messages to Enhance Expert Corrections of Misinformation on Twitter (2020, background): “Inoculation research has found that warning people about misleading tactics can neutralize the effects of misinformation messages (J. Cook et al., 2017; van der Linden et al., 2017).”
Do partisanship and politicization undermine the impact of a scientific consensus message about climate change? (2018, background): “In particular, in contrast to other recent work, our warning did not incorporate a detailed refutation of the politicization claim (Cook et al., 2017; van der Linden et al., 2017).”
Fake news game confers psychological resistance against online misinformation (2019, methodology): “…media literacy part of school curricula (Council of Europe, 2017; Select Committee on Communications, 2017), to the automated verification of rumours using machine learning algorithms (Vosoughi, Mohsenvand, and Roy, 2017) to conducting fact-checks in real-time (Bode and Vraga, 2015; Sethi, 2017).”