Melting of glaciers, rising sea levels, extreme heat waves: the consequences of climate change are more visible than ever, and the scientific community has confirmed that humans are responsible. Yet studies show that a third of the population still doubts or disputes these facts.
The cause is disinformation spread by certain vested interests. To try and prevent this phenomenon, a team from the University of Geneva (UNIGE) has developed and tested six psychological interventions on nearly 7,000 participants from twelve countries. The research, published in the journal Nature Human Behavior, highlights the extremely persuasive nature of disinformation and the need to strengthen our efforts to combat it.
Fighting disinformation about climate change is a major challenge for society. Although scientific consensus on human responsibility—reaffirmed by the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—has been in place for decades, a third of the population still doubts or disputes it. This phenomenon can be explained by the disinformation spread by certain companies and lobbies over the last 50 years.
“For instance, these messages can take the form of an unfounded questioning of the scientific consensus or an overestimation of the socio-financial burden of climate policies,” explains Tobia Spampatti, a Ph.D. Student and Teaching and Research Assistant in the Consumer Decision and Sustainable Behavior Lab (CDSB Lab) at the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences and at the Swiss Center for Affective Sciences of the UNIGE.
This phenomenon weakens the support of a part of the population for climate policies. To combat this, Tobia Spampatti and researchers from the UNIGE developed a theoretical framework to describe the formation and updating of (anti)scientific information. This framework, built on previous theoretical takes on the psychology of misinformation (Philippe Mueller et al. and Ulrich Ecker et al. in 2022), takes into account the source of the message, its content, its recipients, and the psychological factors that can influence their processing.
2023-11-30 11:41:03
Link from phys.org