I was reading up on climate change deniers yesterday, and found an interesting resource that discussed how such people (and others) think, and the best debunking tactics to apply when faced with entrenched misinformation.
A common misconception about myths is the notion that removing its influence is as simple as packing more information into people’s heads. This approach assumes that public misperceptions are due to a lack of knowledge and that the solution is more information - in science communication, it’s known as the “information deficit model”.
But that model is wrong: people don’t process information as simply as a hard drive downloading data.
The relevant resource is here:
Skeptical Science - Debunking HandbookAlthough the focus of the handbook is climate change denial, it's obvious that the same debunking methods would be applicable to a lot of other myths.
That would include conspiracy theories, which turn out to be strongly connected to science denial in general. Back when I used to argue with Christian young earth creationists I noticed they were often fixated on conspiracy threories, because they had no other way of explaining how scientists came up with the conclusion that the earth isn't 6,000 years old. It had to be a conspiracy.
It turns out that conspiracy theories are also strongly linked with climate change denial. There's an awesome little paper that demonstrates this wonderfully well. The story is that a few people decided to do a survey on the attitudes of climate change deniers. This survey was posted online on a range of sites, and the results collated and analysed and published as a paper.
That paper is here:
NASA faked the moon landing - Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax: An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science.
It showed that conspiracy theory thinking was rife among deniers. So far, so good.
The really funny bit, and the nail in the coffin, is what happened when this paper was published. Not surprisingly, the deniers took geat offence and basically flipped out. Some other researchers figured this would probably happen, so had things set up so they could do a real-time study of the reaction to the first paper.
You can read the second paper here:
Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideationIt really is funny.
Topic: The psychology of debunking.