Climate Cult Psychologists Say the Only Way to Confront Climate Skeptics Is to Deny Them All Speech

JoNova has a post up at her site addressing one of the most ridiculous academic reports I have yet seen on the subject of climate. The study is titled “Repetition Increases Belief in Climate-Skeptical Claims, Even for Climate Science Endorsers,” as if repetition wasn’t the entire foundation of the entire climate change narrative emanating from some faraway green castle to support what I call the Big Green Grift.

Here are some key excerpts from this nonsensical report (emphasis and paragraphing added):

Misinformation travels via many means. False claims may originate on fringe websites, be widely shared on social media, and repeated by mainstream media, often with the aim to provide “balanced reporting” that gives a voice to all sides. Unfortunately, the mere repetition of a claim can increase the degree to which people accept it as true.

While this “illusory truth effect” (ITE) is well established, most of the evidence pertains to everyday knowledge and trivia. It remains unclear whether repetition also increases people’s assessments of truth when the content of repeated claims clashes with their own strongly held beliefs and attitudes.

We address this question in a context that has received particular attention in discussions of “balanced reporting,” namely the repetition of claims that are incompatible with well-established insights of climate science.

Specifically, we test, (i) whether repetition increases the perceived truth of climate claims that are aligned with climate scientists vs. climate skeptics, (ii) whether the impact of claim repetition is moderated by recipients’ prior climate change beliefs, with a particular interest in (iii) whether repeating climate skeptic-aligned claims can increase their perceived truth even among recipients who are highly concerned about climate change…

More than 90% of our participants endorsed climate science and were more inclined to believe climate scientist-aligned claims over skeptic or denial-aligned claims. Nonetheless, a single repetition was sufficient to increase the perceived truth of all claims–it made pro-attitudinal climate scientist-aligned claims seem more true and counter-attitudinal skeptic-aligned claims seem less false.

In both experiments, repetition moved counter-attitudinal claims towards the midpoint of the scale, leading people to lean towards believing such claims. In combination, these findings highlight the benefits of repeating true information and the adverse consequences of repeating false information. It is therefore important to emphasize and repeat what is true and not to repeat what is false…

From the perspective of climate science communication, our results highlight the downside of repeating scientifically unsupported claims of climate skeptics: a single repetition is enough to nudge recipients towards acceptance of the repeated claim, even when their attitudes are aligned with climate science and they can correctly identify the claim as being counter-attitudinal.

People may encounter claims in environments where veracity can be carefully inspected—hearing from a climate scientist in a lecture. However, social media and other online news outlets are a significant source of information, where people may encounter falsehoods decoupled from evidence and where claims may be shared repeatedly and rapidly, regardless of veracity. With the proliferation of climate science misinformation on social media and the repetition of skeptic claims in the interest of allegedly “balanced” reporting, skeptic claims can affect not only recipients who may be predisposed to climate skepticism, but also recipients who are strong climate science supporters.

While longitudinal analyses indicate that scientifically accurate media reporting has increased in recent years, there remains considerable variance across countries and news outlets, with more conservative news sources providing less accurate coverage of the scientific consensus across a number of scientific topics.

Unfortunately, the large psychological literature on illusory truth effects shows that the power of repetition is robust over longer delays and difficult to undermine—neither warning people that some of the claims they hear are false, nor individual differences in depth of thought or critical thinking fully eliminate the effect of repetition on assessments of truth, although such variables can (sometimes) attenuate the effect size.

Fortunately, however, the power of repetition is not limited to skeptic-aligning information—it also extends to the repetition of scientifically correct information. Our participants rated claims that were aligned with climate scientists as truer when they were repeated than when they were not, even though most of our climate science-endorsing participants were already familiar with what they read. Moreover, the influence of repetition was independent of how strongly participants endorsed climate science. This implies that it is beneficial to repeat scientist-aligning information, even when recipients are already in agreement with it.

Finally, further research is warranted to better understand whether repeating counter-attitudinal information has similar effects on other samples, such as climate skeptics who were underrepresented in our samples, as well as for other topics where people hold divided beliefs and attitudes, such as immigration, education, and healthcare policies. It is also important to understand whether the effects hold over time, or with more repetitions…

While ITE research demonstrates that one repetition of a trivia statement can lead to an increase in perceived truth a month after an initial exposure, with repeated exposures increasing perceived truth even up to 16 exposures later, we do not know whether such persistent effects also emerge when the initial content is counter-attitudinal. For instance, under a motivated reasoning framework, people may seek out more evidence that is congruent with their beliefs and regard such evidence as stronger than incongruent evidence, which over time may lead to more elaboration, higher accessibility, and more fluent processing of attitudinally congruent content.

In sum, the present results converge with insights from other content domains in supporting a straightforward communication recommendation: Do not repeat false information. Instead, repeat what is true and enhance its familiarity.

Have you ever read anything less objective? Climate scientists advocating for the politically correct position are assumed to be truthful (“attitudinally congruent”) and climate scientists questioning the narrative are assumed to be deniers. Moreover, the solution to ensure the former prevail is to avoid all balanced reporting and simply shut down the voices of the questioners. This is the mindset of the climate establishment, which may be summed up as “do not tolerate any alternative views and accept no questions.” Stick with the cult, in other words, and believe what we tell you. That’s their message and there’s nothing scientific about it, nothing at all.

#Climate #BigGreenGrift #FreeSpeech #Science #ClimateSkeptics #ClimateScience