Deconstructing climate misinformation to identify reasoning errors

By John Cook, P. Ellerton, David Kinkead. 2018

146 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Misinformation can have significant societal consequences. For example, misinformation about climate change has confused the public and stalled support for mitigation policies. When people lack the expertise and skill to evaluate the science behind a claim, they typically rely on heuristics such as substituting judgment about something complex (i.e. climate science) with judgment about something simple (i.e. the character of people who speak about climate science) and are therefore vulnerable to misleading information. Inoculation theory offers one approach to effectively neutralize the influence of misinformation. Typically, inoculations convey resistance by providing people with information that counters misinformation. In contrast, we propose inoculating against misinformation by explaining the fallacious reasoning within misleading denialist claims. We offer a strategy based on critical thinking methods to analyse and detect poor reasoning within denialist claims. This strategy includes detailing argument structure, determining the truth of the premises, and checking for validity, hidden premises, or ambiguous language. Focusing on argument structure also facilitates the identification of reasoning fallacies by locating them in the reasoning process. Because this reason-based form of inoculation is based on general critical thinking methods, it offers the distinct advantage of being accessible to those who lack expertise in climate science. We applied this approach to 42 common denialist claims and find that they all demonstrate fallacious reasoning and fail to refute the scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic global warming. This comprehensive deconstruction and refutation of the most common denialist claims about climate change is designed to act as a resource for communicators and educators who teach climate science and/or critical thinking.

Subfields: Communication, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/f448a765429476904991d2b1899e8d19f0251eef

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In Sociology and Political Science

Citations in the corpus

Testing the Effectiveness of Correction Placement and Type on Instagram (2020, background): “Once an individual is familiar with common misinformation techniques—for example, oversimplification or use of fake experts (Cook et al. 2018; van der Linden et al. 2017)—they can apply this knowledge to other misinformation that uses the same technique.”
Inoculation theory in the post‐truth era: Extant findings and new frontiers for contested science, misinformation, and conspiracy theories (2021, background): “…97% of climate scientists have concluded that humans are causing global warming (Cook et al., 2016), decades of concerted misinformation campaigns have attempted to mislead the public about the link between carbon dioxide emissions and climate change (Conway &Oreskes, 2010; Cook et al., 2018).”