“My colleagues and I published a paper recently that found evidence for the involvement of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions—from climate change to the link between tobacco and lung cancer, and between HIV and AIDS—among visitors to climate blogs.”
6 thoughts on “Study: Deniers like conspiracy theorists”
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Blog comments and commenters. Yes, there’s a rigorous study group-control group comparison.
Climate deniers include a number of conspiracists, to go by various comments. Climate alarmists do also, to go by various public statements they make. Every family has a few members who spend most of their time upstairs — but, in my unscientific survey of the web, the alarmists and nannies and moochers and looters have a lot more rooms upstairs than do libertarians.
As for deniers being prone to conspiracy theory — when the same person declares climate a threat, says it’s time to take away our guns, and lies about how to fund our government — yes, that supports a theory that people like that are working against us.
We gotta quit electing them. Or we’ll find out we’re not really electing them anymore because they’re all that’s left.
Guessing the reptillians put these guys up to it… .
Yeah, like the vast right wing conspiracy that is out the get the Clintons, Senator Menendez, Congressman Weiner, etc. I guess this is just another inconvenient truth.
It’s the psychologists old question, “Do you still beat your wife?”
Lewandowsky has a special talent for composing unanswerable questions the answers to which have no meaning. For example his questionnaire asks, “The problem of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) is no
longer a serious threat to the ozone layer.” My answer would be that CFCs were never a serious threat to the ozone layer. He only allowed yes or no answers so I could not respond. There were several other examples.
I did not study his statistics but found that he seems to accept that relationships are conclusively proven by correlation constants r^2 =0.18. This level of statistical significance is often accepted by psychologists.
So to question science is unscientific? Skepticism is the basis for good science while demonization is a sign of conspiracy.