SODAS Lecture with Stephan Lewandowsky
Title: Climate Change Fake News: The Challenges to Science in a "Post-Truth" World
Abstract: I examine both the “supply side” and “demand side” of climate denial and the associated “fake news”. On the supply side I report the evidence for the organized dissemination of disinformation by political operatives and vested interests, and how the media respond to these distortions of the information landscape. On the demand side, I explore the variables that drive people’s rejection of climate science and lead them to accept denialist talking points, with a particular focus on the issue of political symmetry. The evidence seems to suggest that denial of science is primarily focused on the political right, across a number of domains, even though there is cognitive symmetry between left and right in many other situations. Why is there little evidence to date of any association between left-wing political views and rejection of scientific evidence or expertise. I focus on Merton’s (1942) analysis of the norms of science, such as communism and universalism, which continue to be internalized by the scientific community, but which are not readily reconciled with conservative values. Two large-scale studies (N>2,000 altogether) show that people’s political and cultural worldviews are associated with their attitudes towards those scientific norms, and that those attitudes in turn predict people’s acceptance of scientific. The norms of science may thus be in latent conflict with a substantial segment of the public. Finally, I survey the options that are available to respond to this fraught information and attitude landscape, focusing on consensus communication and psychological inoculation.
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol whose main interest is in the pressure points between the architecture of online information technologies and human cognition, and the consequences for democracy that arise from those pressure points.
He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society, and a Humboldt Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (UK) and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science. He was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education. He was elected to the Leopoldina (the German national academy of sciences) in 2022. Professor Lewandowsky also holds a Guest Professorship at the University of Potsdam in Germany. He was identified as a highly cited researcher in 2022 and in 2023 by Clarivate, a distinction that is awarded to fewer than 0.1% of researchers worldwide.
His research examines the consequences of the clash between social media architectures and human cognition, for example by researching countermeasures to the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society, including conspiracy theories, and how platform algorithms may contribute to the prevalence of misinformation. He is also interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science.
He has published hundreds of scholarly articles, chapters, and books, with more than 200 peer-reviewed articles alone since 2000. His research regularly appears in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and Psychological Review. (See www.lewan.uk for a complete list of scientific publications.)
His research is currently funded by the European Research Council, the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, the UK research agency (UKRI, through Centre of Excellence REPHRAIN), the Volkswagen Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s “Honesty Project”), Google’s Jigsaw, and by the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Mercury Project.
Professor Lewandowsky also frequently appears in print and broadcast media and has contributed around 100 opinion pieces to the global media. He has been working with policy makers at the European level for many years, and he was first author of a report on Technology and Democracy that has helped shape EU digital legislation.