We don’t have enough peace on Earth, good will toward sentient beings, but we’re making progress. Knocking down disinformation seems to be the quickest way to summon the political will to implement the known Global Warming solutions everywhere. Solutions to poverty, oppression, and stupid wars, too.
Disinfo
Why Fake News About Climate Change is Still So Effective
People buy into bad information for different reasons, said Andy Norman, an author and philosopher who co-founded the Mental Immunity Project, which aims to protect people from manipulative information. Due to quirks of psychology, people can end up overlooking inconvenient facts when confronted with arguments that support their beliefs. “The more you rely on useful beliefs at the expense of true beliefs, the more unhinged your thinking becomes,” Norman said.
Norman says it’s crucial that any intervention to stop the spread of disinformation comes with a “weakened dose” of it, like a vaccine, to help people understand why someone might benefit from lying.
While political identity can explain some resistance to climate change, there are other reasons people dismiss the evidence, as Bloomfield outlines in her upcoming book Science v. Story: Narrative Strategies for Science Communicators. “In the climate change story, we’re the villains, or at least partially blameworthy for what’s happening to the environment,” Bloomfield said.
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