Researchers Want To Vaccinate People Against Contrary Thought

At the same time parents are dutifully vaccinating their kids against viruses, social psychologists claim that they are exploring the possibility of vaccinating people against some of their beliefs based on what the psychologists determine to be “fake news.”

According to a study, published in the journal Global Challenges, psychologists discuss the possibility of inoculating people against “fake news” about climate change.

Still today, a large number of people across the globe do not believe in climate change and fewer believe that humans have caused a change in the climate. Yet researchers compare a failure to accept the theory as fact to a virus and argue that there is a need to “inoculate” the public against misinformation,” and the damaging influence of ‘fake news’ websites propagating myths about climate change.”

Social psychologists at the University of Cambridge believe that the logic of inoculations: “vaccinating against a virus by exposing a body to a weakened version of the threat, enough to build a tolerance,” can be used on climate change skeptics.

“A new study compared reactions to a well-known climate change fact with those to a popular misinformation campaign. When presented consecutively, the false material completely cancelled out the accurate statement in people’s minds – opinions ended up back where they started,” according to a press release from the University of Cambridge.

Researchers claim that their “inoculation” helped shift and hold opinions closer to the truth – despite the follow-up exposure to ‘fake news.”

Cambridge, Yale and George Mason researchers found “the most compelling climate change falsehood currently influencing public opinion.” They determined that be the “assertion that there is no consensus among scientists.” They cite the Oregon Global Warming Petition Project’s website, which “claims to hold a petition signed by “over 31,000 American scientists” stating there is no evidence that human CO2 release will cause climate change.”

They also used “the accurate statement that “97% of scientists agree on manmade climate change.”

“Misinformation can be sticky, spreading and replicating like a virus,” stated lead author Dr. Sander van der Linden, a social psychologist from the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the press release.

Efforts to reach  Dr. Sander van der Linden were unsuccessful.

“We wanted to see if we could find a ‘vaccine’ by pre-emptively exposing people to a small amount of the type of misinformation they might experience. A warning that helps preserve the facts,” continued Sander van der Linden. “The idea is to provide a cognitive repertoire that helps build up resistance to misinformation, so the next time people come across it they are less susceptible.”

Here is how it worked:

“In a disguised experiment, researchers tested the opposing statements on over 2,000 participants across the US spectrum of age, education, gender and politics using the online platform Amazon Mechanical Turk.

“In order to gauge shifts in opinion, each participant was asked to estimate current levels of scientific agreement on climate change throughout the study.

“Those shown only the fact about climate change consensus (in pie chart form) reported a large increase in perceived scientific agreement – an average of 20 percentage points. Those shown only misinformation (a screenshot of the Oregon petition website) dropped their belief in a scientific consensus by 9 percentage points.

“Some participants were shown the accurate pie chart followed by the erroneous Oregon petition. The researchers were surprised to find the two neutralised each other (a tiny difference of 0.5 percentage points).

Alongside the consensus fact, two groups in the study were randomly given ‘vaccines’:

  • A general inoculation, consisting of a warning that “some politically-motivated groups use misleading tactics to try and convince the public that there is a lot of disagreement among scientists.”
  • A detailed inoculation that picks apart the Oregon petition specifically. For example, by highlighting some of the signatories are fraudulent, such as Charles Darwin and members of the Spice Girls, and less than 1% of signatories have backgrounds in climate science.
  • For those ‘inoculated’ with this extra data, the misinformation that followed did not cancel out the accurate message.

The general inoculation saw an average opinion shift of 6.5 percentage points towards acceptance of the climate science consensus, despite exposure to fake news.

When the detailed inoculation was added to the general, it was almost 13 percentage points – two-thirds of the effect seen when participants were just given the consensus fact.

Contrary to the researchers’ “facts,” geologist and ADI science writer Jonathan DuHamel noted in his article, The 97 Percent Consensus Of Human Caused Climate Change Debunked Again, that there is hardly a consensus. He writes, “The myth of the much-quoted 97% consensus comes, most recently from a paper by John Cook; “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature.” Cook claimed that a survey “of over 12,000 peer-reviewed climate science papers by our citizen science team at Skeptical Science has found a 97% consensus among papers taking a position on the cause of global warming in the peer-reviewed literature that humans are responsible.”

When DuHamel took a closer look at Cook’s work he found that “out of 11,944 peer-reviewed papers examined, only 64 papers (0.5%) explicitly endorsed and quantified AGW as being greater than 50% of warming.”

In his article, On Consensus In Science, DuHamel quotes Michael Crichton to rebut those who “credulously invoke the “97% consensus” on global warming as an argument” and thereby display “an ignorance of the facts and of how science works.” “The work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus,” wrote Crichton. “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.”

Van der Linden’s team believes their inoculation can “reverse” independent thinking and “promote scientific consensus, and work in favor of the public good.”

Van der Linden’s team also studied democrats, republicans and independents. They found that “Before inoculation, the fake negated the factual for both democrats and independents. For republicans, the fake actually overrode the facts by 9 percentage points.”

Researchers found that “the positive effects of the accurate information were preserved across all parties to match the average findings (around a third with just general inoculation; two-thirds with detailed).”

“We found that inoculation messages were equally effective in shifting the opinions of Republicans, Independents and Democrats in a direction consistent with the conclusions of climate science,” says van der Linden.

“What’s striking is that, on average, we found no backfire effect to inoculation messages among groups predisposed to reject climate science, they didn’t seem to retreat into conspiracy theories,” stated van der Linden. “There will always be people completely resistant to change, but we tend to find there is room for most people to change their minds, even just a little.”

Senator Ted Cruz was the first to state that “climate change is not science — it’s religion.” The fact that van der Linden and her team appear to see it as their mission to protect subjects from contrary thought seems to lend credence to Cruz’s finding.