Instead of influencing the scientific community through published research, contrarian scientists have been most impactful by promoting their viewpoints through public engagement. The normative journalist practice of giving both sides of an issue equal weight has allowed the minority of contrarians to obtain disproportionate coverage, thus amplifying their views.
Once people internalize misinformation, it is notoriously difficult to dislodge. Research has shown that even people who remember a refutation continue to be influenced by the refuted misinformation. In more extreme situations, when a refutation is perceived to threaten a person’ s worldview, it can backfire and reinforce false beliefs. Similarly, refutations that place too much emphasis on the refuted myth increase the risk that the myth is later recalled as true. So how can we leverage communication strategies to counter climate misinformation?
One approach showing a great deal of potential in countering misinformation comes from the inoculation theory: a branch of psychological research that adopts the vaccination metaphor; just as biological vaccination neutralizes viruses by exposing people to a weak form of the virus, misinformation can be neutralized by exposing people to a weak form of misinformation. Inoculation is effective in neutralizing persuasive arguments across a range of issues such as health, politics, and climate change.
As well as neutralizing the influence of misinformation, another benefit of inoculation is that inoculated recipients are more likely to discuss the issue; a phenomenon referred to as postinoculation talk. This is a desired outcome with the issue of climate change which is hampered by the conundrum of“ climate silence”. While most people around the world are alarmed or concerned about climate change, they fail to talk about the issue with family or friends. One of the mechanisms driving self-censoring about climate change is the fear of looking incompetent.
Inoculation can therefore mitigate climate silence by providing people with explanations of denialist arguments. While passive inoculation involves oneway communication of messages to an audience, active inoculation involves interactively teaching recipients to reproduce the misleading techniques of denial.
It is my view that climate change must be addressed by people at the collective level. Communication experts must appreciate and embrace the fact that learning is a shared process that taps into people’ s collective identities. Collective identity is a set of values or beliefs that are empowering to those who identify with and share them
Social media outlets such as Twitter and Facebook have exacerbated the problem of misinformation; facilitating the spread of misinformation on science topics. Low quality information is just as or more likely to go viral as high quality information. The structural and social features of social media have facilitated the development of echo chambers, where users are mostly exposed to viewpoints they already agree with. This dynamic accelerates public polarization, and causes people to be more resistant to changing their beliefs.
Blogs have also been a prolific source of misinformation about climate change, employing a range of arguments in order to cast doubt on the broader impacts of climate change. Comment threads on blogs are commonly political in nature, arguing that climate science is illegitimate, politicized, unreliable, and corrupted by conspiracy.
Twitter has particularly been a fertile ground for denialist themes- in the aftermath of the fires that razed Australia, and hurricanes on the west coast of the U. S in California and Oregon, a major theme in Twitter threads was that climate science was a conspiracy designed to increase the size of Government.
However, social media also offers opportunities to correct the negative influence of misinformation. It is possible for heterogeneous relationships to form on social media platforms, allowing people to encounter contrary views. This allows the opportunity to counter misinformation with corrections through social networks.
Technology can also be harnessed to deploy timely corrections through social networks. However, there are potential pitfalls to employing technological solutions in a refutational context.
It may seem obvious that, in order to address the challenges of global climate change, people must be well informed about the issue. It may then also follow that the more people know about the causes and consequences of climate change, the more likely they will be to change their behavior to mitigate or adapt to climate change.
However, knowledge of the phenomenon turns out not to predictably result in individuals making choices that are‘ scientifically informed’ or‘ environmentally friendly’ so, if knowledge is not sufficient to change behaviors and decision-making, what is?
Understanding what actually influences human behavior and decision-making in response to climate change is a difficult communication goal. Climate change knowledge has some influence on attitude and several studies have shown that attitudes can be too sensitive to knowledge-based intervention.
Increasing people’ s knowledge, even if that knowledge has some impact on their attitudes, may not be sufficient for influencing their behavior with regard to climate change. Even among people who are highly knowledgeable about the science of climate change, opinions about what can or should be done are polarized along ideological divides.
This pattern can be attributed to the powerful influence of individuals’ identity groups: the communities on which they are most dependent for social and physical resources. People’ s collective identities have a much stronger influence on their behaviors and beliefs about climate change than their scientific knowledge, which can work for or against the goals of communication interventions. To effectively learn to respond to climate change, people are forced to deal with several interconnected factors outside
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