Combatting climate change misinformation: Evidence for longevity of inoculation and consensus messaging effects

By R. Maertens, Frederick Anseel, S. van der Linden. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 2020

124 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Despite the fact that there is a 97% consensus among climate scientists that humans are causing global warming, the spread of misinformation continues to undermine public support for climate action. Previous studies have found that resistance to misinformation can be induced by cognitively inoculating individuals against doubt-sowing about climate change. However, the long-term effectiveness of this approach is currently unknown. In a preregistered replication and extension experiment we combined a scientific consensus message with an inoculation treatment, and exposed participants to an influential misinformation message one week later. We explored 1) whether we can replicate the finding that inoculation is able to protect against a misinformation attack, and 2) whether or not the consensus and inoculation effects remain stable over the course of one week. Successfully replicating the effects of the original study, we found a strong initial consensus effect that is sensitive to doubt-sowing misinformation. Importantly, we also found that the consensus effect can be inoculated against misinformation. Extending the replication, we found that the consensus effect shows partial decay over time, while the inoculation effect remains stable for at least one week. We discuss the impact of our findings for inoculation theory, climate change psychology, and public policy.

Subfields: Literature and Literary Theory, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c2df192964f5305ba8c5b555f764950f991c4492

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Literature and Literary Theory

In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Countering Misinformation and Fake News Through Inoculation and Prebunking (2021, background): “In the study by Maertens et al. (2020), the benefits of playing the “Bad News” game were found to wear off after 2 months without further interventions, but the benefits retained intact for 3 months if the retention interval included a potential booster shot in the form of repeated testing.”
Fake news, disinformation and misinformation in social media: a review (2023, background): “…et al. 2020b; Sharma et al. 2020; Roozenbeek et al. 2020b), environmental science (e.g., climate change) (Treen et al. 2020; Lutzke et al. 2019; Lewandowsky 2020; Maertens et al. 2020), etc. Interesting research has been carried out to review and study the fake news issue in online social networks.”
Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (2021, methodology): “…explanation for this observation is that inoculation often involves making people aware of their own vulnerabilities to attack and revealing the manipulation attempts of the persuader which may elicit enhanced deception monitoring (Cook et al., 2017; Maertens et al., 2020; Sagarin et al., 2002).”