1. The Jekyll and Hyde of scientific discourse on the internet Stephan Lewandowsky Stephan Lewandowsky University of Bristol and University of Western Australia stephan.lewandowsky@bristol.ac.uk @STWorg

2. President Obama was born outside the U.S. AIDS was created by the CIA HPV vaccine infringes civil liberties

3. Jekyll and Hyde of Science on the Internet Dr Jekyll (the good guy) 2010: Claim that bacterium has been discovered that uses arsenic (rather than phosphorus) to build DNA 2010: Instant blog critique by microbiologists 2012: Definitive refutation published in Science

4. Jekyll and Hyde of Science on the Internet Mr Hyde (the seriously bad dude) – vaccination denial – AIDS denial – climate denial Vaccinations: “allegations of conspiracy, cover-up, civil liberty violations, totalitarianism, …” (Zimmerman et al., 2005). AIDS: “Because these denialist assertions are made … on the Internet … many scientists … believe they can safely ignore them as the discredited fringe” (Smith & Novella, 2008).

5. Denial vs. Skepticism: The Triage

6. The Independent Umpire (Lewandowsky et al., 2016) Present contrarian climate claims to experts, but translated into economic or demographic terms Ask whether the claims are justified by data 6 different scenarios involving various climate indicators – contrarian statements sampled from media and online sources – prevalence established by expert opinion and Google search – mainstream scientific statements

7. Sample Trial

8. Combine items into correctness score

9. Blind Test With Economists

10. Blind Test With Statisticians

11. Distribution of Correctness Scores Misleading contrarian interpretations reduce people’s acceptance of climate science (Ranney & Clark, 2016)

12. Denial vs. Skepticism: The Triage

13. Conspiratorial Internet Content

14. What Do People Make of This? (Lewandowsky et al., 2015) Blogosphere response to one of my papers provided potentially conspiratorial material Blind and naïve participants rated web content on attributes of conspiracism “To what extent does the content express …” Nefarious intent Deep-seated suspicion Nothing is an accident (0-9 scale)

15. Web Content (Comments & Posts) Nefarious SuspicionNothing is an intentaccident

16. Web Content vs. Scholarly Critique PhD students asked to be as “critical as possible” to generate comparison stimuli

17. Web Content vs. Scholarly Critique Nefarious SuspicionNothing is an intentaccident

18. Web Content vs. Scholarly Critique “…reasonable and well thought out criticism of the research?”

19. Conspiratorial Discourse In the eyes of naïve and blind participants …. … climate blogosphere discourse is identified as conspiratorial using well-established attributes. Climate blogosphere discourse is not judged to be reasonable and thought-out criticism.

20. Denial vs. Skepticism: The Triage Denial is judged misleading by independent expert umpires Denial is judged conspiratorial by independent umpires

21. Does it Matter?

22. Blogs Media Politicians

23. Broader Fallout of Conspiracism

25. A Study on Blog Comments (Lewandowsky et al., in preparation) Do blog posts matter? Do comments on blog posts matter? Blog Post ScienceDenial Blog Comments Science Denial 3.10 3.103.053.44 3.47 3.47 “Support basic argument in blog post” (1-5 scale)

26. The Role of Comments Climate acceptance Type of post Type of comments Perceived agreement among readers with climate science

27. Conclusions The internet can facilitate rapid self-correction of science The internet is a staging ground for science denial Denial can be differentiated from other forms of discourse by blind (expert) tests – climate denial is misleading – aspects of climate denial discourse are conspiratorial Readers of blogs are affected by posts and comments