Those of you who flatter yourself as being something of a connoisseur of the climate sceptic bashing academic will be very familiar with the name Sander van der Linden. He is described in his LinkedIn entry as a Professor of Social Psychology at University of Cambridge, and as the author of the book, “FOOLPROOF: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity“. If that title conjures up thoughts of John Cook and his promotion of the idea of ‘vaccination’ against misinformation, then you would be right; the two have worked together and should be thought of as intellectual stablemates. You are welcome to consult Sander’s laudation on LinkedIn, but all you really need to know is that, like Cook, his academic stature is well-established; and, like Cook, his stature poorly reflects the standard of his work. I say this, not because it is the sort of jibe you might expect from one of the climate sceptic ne’er-do-wells, towards which van der Linden’s research into cognitively challenged conspiracy theorists was aimed; it is because I have actually taken a close look at some of his work. In particular, I have read his paper, “On the relationship between personal experience, affect and risk perception: The case of climate change”. Allow me to share some thoughts with you.

It is often the case that alarm bells start to ring even after only having read a paper’s introduction, since it is here that authors lay down the basic ideas upon which their papers are founded. Get these wrong, and there is little chance that the remainder of the paper will come to your rescue. In van der Linden’s case, it is his opening statement that sounds the alarm:

A “risk” is not something that exists “out there”, independent of our minds and culture (Slovic, 1992, p. 119). Indeed, unlike a physical threat or danger, the human notion of risk is a mental construct (Sjöberg, 1979), it cannot be sensed—it is only perceived (Fischhoff, Slovic, & Lichtenstein, 1983).

It’s an opening statement that appears to be well backed up by citations, but I am prepared to bet that Slovic, Sjöberg, Fischoff and Lichtenstein are all fellow psychologists. The fact that they are making so much of risk being a ‘mental construct’, that can only be perceived, is because such a framing reduces risk management to lttle more than a matter of psychology, and the psychologist’s contributions are therefore not just helpful but quite sufficient. In fact, what we are seeing here is a classic case of déformation professionnelle: when the only tool you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

If you were to ask a risk management professional, rather than a psychologist, for a precis of the conceptual framework for ‘risk’, he or she would tell you that there is a distinction to be made between risk and the perception of risk. They would readily concede that there is much that psychologists can usefully say regarding such perception but, mark my words, they would never reduce risk to being no more than a ‘mental construct’. They would also readily concede that the concept of risk is only meaningful when seen in the context of the values of one or more stakeholders, and so subjectivity is ever-present. But mark my words, they would never say that risk is not ‘out there’ and would never reduce risk to being something that ‘cannot be sensed’. So the problem with the van der Linden paper is that someone who clearly lacks the required professional background is about to embark on a discourse of risk management that has very shaky foundations indeed. Let’s see how that pans out.

Sander continues by pointing out that ‘climate change is mostly a statistical concept…and as such, it cannot be experienced directly’. This, he believes makes climate change ‘relatively unique…in the sense that it is not directly “situated” in our daily environment’. This may be true, but there is also another aspect of climate change that he completely overlooks. Climate change science is mostly a complicated subject and, as such cannot be understood directly by the vast majority of lay people. It is also in that sense that it is ‘not directly “situated” in our daily environment’. I will come back to this important point later.

It is the indirectness of climate risk that van der Linden then explores in his paper, and in so doing he tries to answer a number of questions that only a psychologist could find interesting:

Taken together, these research findings raise a number of important and unresolved questions about the relationship between personal experience, affect, and risk perception: does personal experience with extreme weather predict affective judgments? And in turn, do these affective judgments guide public risk perceptions of climate change? Or does personal experience predict risk perception, and in turn, does risk perception predict affect? Alternatively, is it possible that personal experience predicts risk perception and that risk perception and affect simultaneously and reciprocally influence each other?

To appreciate my concerns, you don’t need to read the paper in full to see what answers he comes up with. All you need to note is that van der Linden believes it is ‘personal experience with extreme weather’, and affect (the experience of feeling or emotion), that lie at the root of the matter, and so any technique that can establish the right affect in an individual, despite the absence of any personal experience of extreme weather, is a valid technique for setting the correct level of risk, i.e. the correct mental state to be in. To see how this works, we need to fast-forward to the paper’s conclusions. Under the subtitle, ‘Implications for Risk Communication’, van der Linden writes:

The practical value of this research is evident in that risk perception, and the experiential system in general has been implicated as an important determinant of actions to help reduce climate change (e.g., O’Connor et al., 1999; Leiserowitz, 2006; Marx et al., 2007; Semenza et al., 2008; Spence et al., 2011). Results of this study suggest that in order to design effective social-psychological interventions, risk communication messages should take into account the interrelated nature of personal experience, affect, and risk perception and the way in which these variables shape perceptions of and beliefs about climate change. Indeed, the interactive engagement of both cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms is key to fostering more public involvement with climate change. [My emphasis]

And just to labour the point, van der Linden adds that ‘risk communication campaigns should try to emphasize the association between more frequent extreme weather events and climate change’. Is that because he thinks it is necessary in order for us to correctly sense the risk? Absolutely not. As van der Linden claims in his introduction, risk is a mental concept and does not have an objective existence that can be sensed. On the contrary, as far as van der Linden is concerned, it is all about forming an association in order to establish the right affect, because, as van der Linden goes on to explain, ‘once this link is made salient, a mutually reinforcing relationship between risk perception and affect is established’.

Let me put that into plain language for you: You can promote cognitive awareness until you’re blue in the face but you will never get anywhere until the required level of fear has been established. And how might that be achieved? How about a relentless ‘communication’ campaign that places extreme weather centre stage? But don’t bother mentioning the statistics because they cannot be ‘experienced directly’. Instead, just tell stories that make the viewer respond emotionally.

My question in all of this is this: If risk is a ‘mental construct’ that is not ‘out there’ to be objectively sensed, but only psychologically perceived, then what would be the basis for determining the appropriate level of affect for us all to share? Is it van der Linden’s risk perception that we should be calibrated to? Perhaps it should be mine, or maybe yours. Or is it the scientists’? In van der Linden’s thinking, Net Zero is a proposed solution for a given perception of risk, but who is to say it is the correct perception? As I have pointed out earlier, most of us, including van der Linden, do not have the details of climate science ‘directly “situated” in our daily environment’. So is it the science or someone’s affect when listening to the scientists that matters? By using a definition of risk level that excludes the possibility of objective verification (to be replaced instead with validation by appeal to authority), he actually denies the possibility of an objectively verifiable, correct determination of society’s exposure to risk.

Yes, there are the climate statistics, but why should scientists, who are just as prone to cognitive bias as the rest of us, be granted free reign to use those statistics to set the mood music and dictate the values? Are climate scientists who say they fear for their children’s future really that reliable as arbiters of risk perception? More to the point, why should the likes of van der Linden, or any other lay person, be allowed to say which mood-setting scientist should be listened to and which should not? He says that establishing affect is ‘key to fostering more public involvement with climate change’, but he fails to establish why more involvement would be appropriate, because he can’t do so without getting bogged down in arguments over who’s perception is valid. Mantra’s such as ‘the science is settled’ are not relevant because we are not talking about science, we are talking about risk, and the appropriate perceptions and risk appetites are far from settled.

Of course, if the likes of the IPCC had sought advice from true experts in risk management rather than psychologists, such as van der Linden, then we wouldn’t be in this mess. Psychological manipulation wouldn’t be so important when establishing policy, because actual risk levels, established using actual risk analysis, would be more relevant than inculcated mental states. And risk management wouldn’t be seen as an exercise in establishing acceptable perceptions, it would be an exercise in establishing correct actions. Perhaps then it might finally be recognised that climate change is a quintessentially wicked problem for which Net Zero is not a solution. I think we should all rue the day when academics such as van der Linden decided to muscle in on matters of practical importance just because they wanted to feed at the climate change trough.

43 Comments

  1. These fools are so dense, light bends around them – the more climate crisis claptrap nonsense I read and hear, the louder I laugh, it’s the only way to treat these malfeasants, with utter, comical disdain – as you say, they’re all at it, the deceiving, self serving types, trying to hoover up as much free climate narrative funding from taxpayers, via globalist controlled western leaders

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  2. energywise,

    It does seem that the psychology profession has decided, as a group, to join what they see as the winning team. But the real shame is that their support for the ‘good cause’ has been so enthusiastically accepted. The same people are not so keen to ask for help from actual risk management experts because they are much less likely to respond with the ‘right’ goods.

    Liked by 1 person

  3. A very competent example of the “climate scientist” charlatan’s favourite standby “if you can’t dazzle ’em with science, baffle ’em with bullshit”.

    Liked by 2 people

  4. John,

    I like to think that I’m not stupid (perhaps I delude myself) but van der Linden’s way of expressing himself leaves me cold. I found myself asking “do people get paid for writing this stuff?”.

    However, I understood and liked your concluding paragraph. 🙂

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  5. Mark,

    I’m afraid that psychologists have their own jargon and way of expressing themselves. But if you strip away the fluff there is an obvious intention to van der Linden’s paper, and I think it represents all that is wrong with the psychological approach to climate policy implementation.

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  6. John – found this partial quote interesting –

    “Results of this study suggest that in order to design effective social-psychological interventions, risk communication messages should take into account the interrelated nature of personal experience, affect, and risk perception and the way in which these variables shape perceptions of and beliefs about climate change. Indeed, the interactive engagement of both cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms is key to fostering more public involvement with climate change“

    Well the MSM are good at getting emotional about climate change, so he/she wins in the MSM.

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  7. I decided to take the *risk* of actually trying to read the paper, knowing that it would most probably result in negative affectivity! I only managed to skim through of course. Had I dwelt seriously on any part of it, then brain circuits would have started to melt.

    What stands out, to me at least, is that this is basically an exercise in how to deliver effective fear-based, scientifically unjustifiable ‘climate crisis’ propaganda, dressed up in fancy academic language. Ring any bells? This for instance:

    Previous research has noted that because climate change (as an object) cannot be experienced directly, it fails to activate a primal affective/associative risk response (Weber, 2006). In fact, it has been suggested that in order for an individual to develop negative affectivity toward climate change, that individual must first cognitively attribute personal experience with extreme weather to climate change (Helgeson et al., 2012; Weber, 2010). Results of the current study are congruent with this post-cognitive interpretation, as the effect of personal experience with extreme weather events is fully mediated by risk perception. These results strongly suggest that people first perceive, interpret, and appraise risk events in terms of their personal meaning and relevance (at least in the context of climate change).

    Sander identifies the ‘problem’: people must directly experience extreme weather and associate that extreme weather with ‘climate change’ in order to be propelled into a state of fear (negative affect) and thus a heightened perception of risk. It’s a problem, because the process requires actual extreme weather to happen and to keep happening at the same time as the communication of the supposed scientific link between extreme weather and climate change. We have seen this process in action over the last few years, with the media bigging up ‘extreme’ weather events in order to enhance cognition along with the risible attempts by Otto and others to connect actual physical weather events with statistical ‘climate change’. But it ain’t enough and it don’t seem to be working too well, because people have become acutely aware of the fear-based propaganda tricks played by the media and cognition is still king – a few hot days and a named storm which rearranges the garden furniture just don’t hack it. Most especially, many cold, miserable wet days throughout a thoroughly miserable winter and ‘spring’ really do get in the way of the global boiling/extreme weather narrative which is why the media and the Met office have been so keen to play down our perception of a particularly cold April this year, by arguing that it was ‘all in our minds’ – yes, the Telegraph actually ran that headline.

    The author proposes to solve the above problem, hence:

    Yet, the experienced affect is geared toward the risk object (i.e., the hurricane) and does not necessarily influence perceptions of climate change (unless a conscious link between the extreme weather event and climate change is made salient). However, as this study shows, once this link is established, negative affective reactions appear to be a strong determinant of climate change risk perceptions, where risk perception and affect mutually reinforce each other in a stable feedback system. This is consistent with prior research that has shown that affective judgments of climate change predict cognitive risk perceptions and vice versa (Sundblad et al., 2007). In conclusion, the current study strongly suggests that (at least in the context of climate change) both theoretical perspectives hold true: affect can be seen as a post-cognitive process as well as an information processing heuristic that guides perceptions of risk.

    It’s pretty obvious what he’s up to: brainwashing the public. By pummelling the public consciousness repeatedly with the concept that (extreme) weather = climate change, by hard-wiring that unscientific association into our brain circuitry, he hopes to influence affect (negative emotion) directly and thus ‘guide’ perception of risk without necessarily having to wait for an actual genuine extreme weather event to happen in order to trigger the usual cognition/affect/risk perception causal cascade. He hopes to induce a self-reinforcing feedback loop in the public consciousness which will greatly enhance the perception of risk. Ring any bells? Forecasters for instance could just conjure up the prediction of a month long ‘exceptional’ heatwave and the public response would be ‘OMG, it’s the CLIMATE CRISIS; run for the hills and put a down payment on a heat pump whilst you’re at it!’

    Liked by 3 people

  8. Jaime, tried reading the excerpts you chose, but as you predicted, my brain scrambled and I fell asleep. Would appreciate greater care when you afflict such material upon unsuspecting persons such as myself. She who must be listened to wondered why I was asleep at 9oclock this morning.

    Liked by 2 people

  10. Jaime.

    What you said 😀

    Risk is evaluated as a function of likelihood and impact, both of which are amenable to objective calculation. So, despite what the psychologists say, risk is ‘out there’. That said, individual stakeholder perspectives mean that there are several equally valid calculations of impact that can be made. This means that risk is multifaceted — yet it is still out there. Then there are the cognitive biases that can lead to individuals misjudging the likelihood. These lead to different perceptions of risk. These perceptions are the mental constructs.

    Psychologists are taking the view that there are ‘correct’ perspectives and ‘correct’ perceptions leading to the ‘correct’ affect, and that it is their job to manipulate the public accordingly. What they fail to appreciate, however, is the role of uncertainty. It doesn’t explicitly enter into the equation for risk but it can massively affect it. It also influences risk perspective, to the extent that it can even substitute for risk in becoming the prime determinant of affect.

    Personally, I wouldn’t trust any psychologist to properly understand the nature of climate change uncertainty, and so I fail to see how they can possibly say that they know the correct affect to be felt. They are just as clueless as the rest of us but not nearly as humble. Their attitudes require uncritical acceptance of the authorised narrative and, rather than doing their best to promote it, they should be using their talents to investigate how such narratives arise in the first place, and therefore how much trust should be placed in them.

    Liked by 2 people

  11. Here is Sander’s brainwashing agenda in full swing in the Mirror. First bit of pleasant warm weather since September last year and it immediately gets hyped as “extreme”, “hot” and a “very high” wildfire risk. It’s blatant, in your face now.

    Large parts of the northern UK are under extreme risk of wildfires due to high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds fire chiefs have said, after 30 firefighters battled flames for two days.

    An “extreme” warning for wildfire risk has been issued for large parts of the northern UK as hot weather takes hold.

    Large parts of northern Scotland and the Highlands are under extreme risk of wildfires due to high temperatures, low humidity and strong winds, The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) warned.

    Much of the rest of Scotland was also at “very high” risk of wildfires, the service said, with warnings in place throughout Saturday as the UK bakes in scorching temperatures.

    https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/extreme-wildfire-warning-issued-after-32786918

    Scorching? The intent is obviously to pummel the public very hard with blatant disinformation and extreme exaggeration of normal weather in order to massively increase the perception of an imaginary ‘climate risk’.

    Liked by 2 people

  12. Ugh! Forgot to remove the links in my last comment. It’s consequently gone into moderation. Don’t you just love WordPress?

    But whilst I’m here again, I would suggest that there is a very real risk unrelated to the mythical ‘climate crisis’ – it’s called opportunistic arson.

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  13. Jaime,

    Sorry, I was having my breakfast and missed your comment in spam. It’s been released now.

    Liked by 1 person

  14. Jaime,

    There is this from AR5, WG3, Chapter 2:

    One challenge is how to facilitate correct inferences about the role of climate change as a function of extreme event frequency and severity. Many parts of the world have seen increases in the frequency and magnitude of heat waves and heavy precipitation events…That said, the perception that the impact of climate change is neither immediate nor local persists (Leiserowitz et al., 2008), leading many to think it rational to advocate a wait-and-see approach to emissions reductions (Sterman, 2008; Dutt and Gonzalez, 2013).

    Note there the use of the phrase ‘facilitate correct inferences’. Then there is this:

    One of the major determinants of popular support for climate policy is whether people have an underlying belief that climate change is dangerous. This concern can be influenced by both cultural factors and the methods of communication (Smith, 2005; Pidgeon and Fischhoff, 2011).

    Remember, AR5, WG3, Chapter 2 was the IPCC’s best shot at explaining how risk works and how it should be managed.

    Liked by 2 people

  15. For anyone who hasn’t already done so, I urge you to read the Geoff Chambers post that WordPress recognised as being related to my own: “Thick Cambridge Professors on Misinformation Susceptibility“

    It shows that I am not the first person on this blog to draw attention to the poor quality work that van der Linden is capable of.

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  16. We plebs are not meant to intrude on the conversations between the priestly class, and if we happen on them, we are not meant to understand them. This way, they can get away with debating among themselves how to make us believe what they want us to believe, while elevating their own beliefs to the status of proven facts.

    They are fond of describing our failings (“the backfire effect”) and trying to find childish means to circumnavigate our defences against their schemes. They are seemingly unaware of other psychological phenomena (e.g. the must-abused “red pill,” which in my dictionary has a definition of “when I catch you trying to brainwash me to believe your position, it is very likely to confirm my believe in the opposite”).

    Liked by 2 people

  18. Jit,

    Indeed he was. So I also need to acknowledge your precedence.

    So if I may summarise. Between us, we Cliscep bloggers have, so far, identified that van der Linden:

    a) Doesn’t understand the basics of risk analysis

    b) Doesn’t know how to compile a meaningful questionnaire to gather data as part of a research project.

    c) Doesn’t live in the real world of climate change discourse.

    None of this gets a mention in his LinkedIn entry, of course. If anyone has any other insights regarding his intellectual prowess, I would be interested to hear them.

    In the meantime, I’m looking into another individual who is often cited by the likes of van der Linden: a certain Baruch Fischhoff. I’ll let you know if I find anything of interest.

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  19. Okay, it’s early days, but first impressions of Fischhoff are very favourable. He is obviously a well-respected and qualified expert on risk analysis. More to the point, however, he doesn’t seem to be bought into the van der Linden et al idea that it’s all about achieving the correct affect. For him it is all about improving layman understanding, as is evidenced by this news release from the US National Science Foundation:

    https://www.nsf.gov/news/news_summ.jsp?cntn_id=119094

    “A major challenge facing climate scientists is explaining to non-specialists the risks and uncertainties surrounding potential” climate change, says a new Perspectives piece published today in the science journal Nature Climate Change.

    The article attempts to identify communications strategies needed to improve layman understanding of climate science.

    “Few citizens or political leaders understand the underlying science well enough to evaluate climate-related proposals and controversies,” the authors write, at first appearing to support the idea of specialized knowledge–that only climate scientists can understand climate research.

    But, author Baruch Fischhoff quickly dispels the notion. “The goal of science communication should be to help people understand the state of the science,” he says, “relevant to the decisions that they face in their private and public lives.”

    Fischhoff, a social and decision scientist at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh and Nick Pidgeon, an environmental psychologist at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom wrote the article together, titled, “The role of social and decision sciences in communicating uncertain climate risks.”

    Fischhoff and Pidgeon argue that science communication should give the public tools that will allow them to understand the uncertainties and disagreements that often underlie scientific discussion. He says that understanding is more likely to happen when people know something about the process that produces the conflicts they hear about in the press.

    “Communications about climate science, or any other science, should embrace the same scientific standards as the science that they are communicating,” says Fischhoff. He says this is crucial to maintaining people’s trust in scientific expertise.

    “When people lack expertise, they turn to trusted sources to interpret the evidence for them,” Fischhoff says. “When those trusted sources are wrong, then people are misled.”

    Liked by 1 person

  20. Since the topic has turned slightly towards online questionnaires (Geoff’s piece from last year), I offer this story from Science:

    “Psychology study participants recruited online may provide nonsensical answers”

    No-one could have foreseen that.

    But as MTurk’s [Amazon’s online survey monkey] popularity surged, so, too, did the number of researchers sounding the alarm about problems with data it generates. Now, a new study reports 96% of the data collected in a mock survey on MTurk made no sense, with participants agreeing equally with contradictory statements such as “I like order” and “I crave chaos.”

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  21. John, what Fischhoff says there ought to be the automatic attitude of any scientist. It should be unremarkable, normal. What we seem to see in climate science though is a weak case that needs artificial bolstering and the suppression of counter-arguments to survive.

    Liked by 1 person

  22. Jit,

    Indeed. And it seems odd that people like van der Linden cite Fischhoff so often, yet don’t seem to have understood where he was coming from. I suspect that they know that Fischhoff’s credibility is so well-established that citing him is all that is needed for the credibility to rub off on them.

    And speaking of the backfire effect and credibility, this is what Lewandowsky and Cook said about it in the first version of their Debunking Handbook:

    Hence the backfire effect is real.

    This is what they said in the 2020 update:

    Early evidence was supportive of this idea, but more recently, exhaustive experimental attempts to induce a backfire effect through familiarity alone have come up empty.

    Pathetic.

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  23. Here’s an interesting interview in which van der Linden talks you through the ‘logic’ behind his concept of immunisation against misinformation. I say ‘logic’ but one might be forgiven for assuming that an individual is a stranger to logic if they can come out with something like this one:

    We found that some epidemiology models can be used to predict the spread of viral information just like the spread of a biological pathogen. In some cases, misinformation acts like a simple virus, infecting humans after a single exposure. The logical consequence of this was: if misinformation behaves like a virus, then we should be able to produce a vaccine to counter it.

    Logic like that is as about as sound as that behind homeopathy, if you ask me. Also, the interview catches van der Linden boasting that his ‘inoculations’ can overcome the backfire effect, i.e. that infamous non-effect that turned out to be a figment of the psychologists’ imagination:

    Notably, we found no backfire effect. There is a fear that exposing people who already have sceptical views towards climate change to even small bits of misinformation as part of a fact check could reinforce their original belief in that misinformation, but we found no such effect. On the contrary, after the inoculation, our participants were able to recognise and protect themselves from absorbing more climate change misinformation.

    Anyway, read on and enjoy:

    https://sciencemediahub.eu/2022/09/07/sander-van-der-linden-how-psychological-inoculation-protects-news-consumers-against-false-news/

    Liked by 2 people

  24. Sander vander obviously doesn’t know much about vaccines, epidemiology and immunology and it appears he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about because he contradicts himself:

    After the inoculation, we exposed them to the full dose of misinformation by letting them read the petition’s website. We then tested their beliefs against a control group’s beliefs. It turned out that the treatment group had been successfully inoculated against the information. Notably, we found no backfire effect. There is a fear that exposing people who already have sceptical views towards climate change to even small bits of misinformation as part of a fact check could reinforce their original belief in that misinformation, but we found no such effect. On the contrary, after the inoculation, our participants were able to recognise and protect themselves from absorbing more climate change misinformation.

    This is muddle-headed thinking if ever there was. If, as stated, sceptics have an original belief in specific ‘misinformation’ then they have already been exposed to that ‘misinformation’ and thus are ‘infected’. The fear is that by then inoculating them against said specific misinformation by exposing the infected person to a weakened form of the ‘virus’, it will somehow make the disease (the original belief) more resistant to treatment. But the whole purpose of Sander vander’s inoculation procedure is to render a person who has not been infected by a specific misinformation virus immune to future exposure to that virus. There’s not much point in immunising a person if they’ve already been infected – the Covid farce should have taught him that much. He then proceeds to waffle on about the target-specific inoculation somehow providing widespread immunity against other forms of climate change misinformation but he doesn’t provide a scrap of evidence in support of this notion. Sander vander is just an expert in search of ‘expertise’ via the method of opportunistically hacking into other areas of science in order to cobble together his own unique ‘scientific’ theory. Alas, his quest for self-certification and self-approval is obviously eluding him, even if similarly challenged academics are willing to publish and endorse his work in order to lend him an air of public credibility. Not at Cliscep though. We have developed herd immunity through repeated natural exposure to this type of BS.

    Liked by 2 people

  25. Jaime,

    His concept of a vaccination to immunise against misinformation is just a metaphor he uses to give a scientific gloss to what is nothing more than a crude propagandist ploy (basically, get in there first). He claims to have scientific evidence that ‘pre-bunking’ can overcome the backfire effect — just as he previously claimed to have scientific evidence for the existence of the backfire effect. That proved to be bogus, and I expect the same will emerge regarding his pre-bunking evidence. If the pre-bunking example he gives in his interview is anything to go by, it certainly will.

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  26. Jit,

    This one will interest you.

    I was searching for van der Linden papers that offered evidence for Inoculation Theory (i.e. pre-bunking) and came across this:

    Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change

    Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change – van der Linden – 2017 – Global Challenges – Wiley Online Library

    Under ‘Method’ it says:

    In Study 2, we conducted a randomized online survey experiment using a large and diverse sample (N = 2167) from Amazon Mechanical Turk (Mturk) to test whether it is possible to “inoculate” people against such misinformation.

    Ah yes, that’ll work!

    If you look online you will find that the whole world seems to have accepted Inoculation Theory. But as these folk say, bad ideas do act like viruses. It’s a shame that no one was on hand to pre-bunk with something like:

    “People will try and misinform you by using studies based upon poor quality data gleaned using Mturk”

    Liked by 1 person

  27. According to the Science mag article, respondents were using AI to answer questions for them and cutting and pasting the answer into the Mturk text box. Which offers the possibility that the questions were generated by AI as in Geoff’s report, and so were the answers. (Presumably there is some incentive for filling in online quizzes?)

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  28. Jaime,

    “Sander vander is just an expert in search of ‘expertise’ via the method of opportunistically hacking into other areas of science in order to cobble together his own unique ‘scientific’ theory.”

    Precisely that.

    The obvious mistake being made is the logical non sequitur that if a phenomenon can be modelled using ideas taken from epidemiology, then it can also be understood using ideas taken from virology and vaccinology. It’s the same sort of woolly-headed thinking that led to homeopathy. Worse still, as you point out, the whole analogy depends upon the idea that there is a disease to be dealt with, and yet, when it comes down to it, the likes of van der Linden cannot even specify with sufficient rigour what that disease is supposed to be. Inoculation Theory is not an idea worthy of being called scientific and so there is no possibility of confirmation using the scientific method. And yet the idea’s popularity seems to suggest that it is evidence based. Well there may be evidence that van der Linden’s methods of propaganda have been successful in manipulating his study subjects, but that goes nowhere near towards validating his half-baked ideas (actually, to be accurate, the ideas of a bloke called McGuire). Let us not forget that van der Linden is an acolyte of Robert Cialdini, one of the forerunners in the use of behavioural science to psychologically manipulate people into making decisions that are not necessarily in their best interest:

    Liked by 2 people

  29. I could add that one of Cialdini’s six nudges goes by the name ‘social proof’. It refers to the fact that humans are very social animals and will tend to go with an idea if you can persuade the individual that it is all the rage.

    Liked by 1 person

  30. When you look at the well-credentialed praise that van der Linden has received for his book, you have to concede that, despite the concerns we are raising here, he must be doing something right. With that in mind, I decided to check out one of the many podcast interviews he has recently undertaken, to better understand where he is coming from. I found this one interesting:

    MiniPix UK V44 16×9 VO1 (youtube.com)

    At 4.00 mins he explains what he means by misleading information:

    Misleading often tends to be information that is not entirely false but it is manipulative in some way, you know, it’s either deliberately lacking context, it’s using a particular kind of framing, or particular techniques to influence them without their knowledge.

    And at 10.30 mins in he provides one of the main ways in which one can detect whether one is being manipulated or misled. Apparently, you should be wary when your manipulator tries to invoke an emotional response. For example:

    “Fear is a very popular emotion, any type of headline that tries to convey a sense of fear — instil a sense of fear in people — or makes people angry and that leads to outrage.”

    That’s very interesting, because you will recall that in his paper ‘On the relationship between personal experience, affect and risk perception: The case of climate change’ he spoke of the need to ‘design effective social-psychological interventions’ and added:

    Indeed, the interactive engagement of both cognitive and emotional processing mechanisms is key to fostering more public involvement with climate change.

    Which, by his own definition, is a classic sign of an effort to mislead.

    I take it back. This guy really knows his stuff.

    Liked by 3 people

  31. Speaking of using fear to create the ‘right’ perception of risk, it looks like the Guardian is still in search of the right affect:

    “Economic damage from climate change six times worse than thought – report”

    https://www.theguardian.com/environment/article/2024/may/17/economic-damage-climate-change-report

    Does it not occur to these muppets that when you make revisions of this magnitude the only thing in danger of being damaged is the credibility of all such studies. Perhaps a more honest headline would have been:

    “Guilibity of public may be six times higher than we had previously assumed – report”

    Liked by 2 people

  32. John,

    When I see a headline like that, I always like to read the report/survey/study that is being reported on. This one isn’t yet peer -reviewed (I have no problem with that, but isn’t it interesting that the Guardian will give a not-yet-peer reviewed paper such a striking headline, when non-peer reviewed sceptical literature is so often sneered at for the lack of peer review?). It can be found here:

    Click to access w32450.pdf

    So far as I can see it relies on the idea of global temperature shocks to justify the thesis. I have read it, and can’t begin to see how it pans out. But maybe that’s just me. Obviously my 40+ years old economics A level and ongoing attempts since then to keep up to date with economics literature and developments are inadequate. The economics of climate change is a new subject that I need to learn, it seems.

    Like

  33. Mark,

    I would keep away from studies into the economics of climate change if I were you. It looks like speculation raised to the power of speculation. It doesn’t surprise me that such wide-ranging predictions have been made. The whole field is pure hand-waving in my opinion.

    Like

  34. All this climate endlessly regurgitated doom news makes me think they do ramble on.

    so a song is needed to cheer me up – Bing Videos

    To all posters & readers “ramble on”.

    Like

  35. Mark: re that scary paper cited by the Guardian, it seems to me that the most significant passage was this:

    ‘Both are multiple orders of magnitude above previous estimates and imply that unilateral decarbonization policy is cost-effective for large countries such as the United States.’

    [my emphasis]

    Interesting that the Guardian didn’t mention it.

    Liked by 1 person

  38. Mark Hodgson says (11May 8.41 PM)

    “I like to think that I’m not stupid (perhaps I delude myself) but van der Linden’s way of expressing himself leaves me cold.”

    Well, it leaves me feeling hot under the collar. 

    Opposite affects, but the same effect.

    Like

  40. Jaime,

    Doesn’t this statement make him a conspiracy theorist?

    In a word, yes. Besides which, it isn’t about dismissing those who are trying to ‘address the problem’, it is about criticising how they are going about it. If you are going to advocate stuff like inoculation theory, you have to be pretty damn certain you know the difference between misinformation and a legitimate challenge to an authorized narrative. And when van der Linden et al blather on about climate change scepticism, Covid origin speculation and vaccination hesitancy as examples of conspiracy theories it becomes obvious that they don’t. If you immediately resort to invoking demons whenever anyone challenges your work, then yes, you are as bad as the folk you profess to be exposing.

    Liked by 3 people

  41. Well this is a pleasant turn around I must say:

    In times of growing concerns about climate change, environmental activism is increasing. Whereas several studies have examined associations between environmental activism and the Big Five personality characteristics, the potential “dark side” of environmental activists’ personality has been neglected. Accordingly, this study examined associations between environmental activism, the dark triad traits (i.e., Machiavellianism, psychopathy, narcissism) and left-wing authoritarianism (i.e., antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship). Data came from 839 employed individuals in Germany. Results showed positive associations between environmental activism and Machiavellianism, narcissism, antihierarchical aggression, and anticonventionalism. Most of these associations remained significant after controlling for Big Five characteristics, demographic characteristics, political orientation, and right-wing authoritarianism. These findings suggest that environmental activism, in addition to its potential positive outcomes, may also have a dark side in terms of activists’ personality.

    https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886923004294

    Perhaps this is why Cook the Books, Lew Roll and Sander Vander are so keen to highlight the mental defects supposedly associated with the rejection of consensus climate science; to detract from their own and others’ shortcomings.

    Liked by 1 person

  42. Jaime,

    I shall read the study in good time. In the meantime, I’m not sure how much research would have been required to determine that narcissism is a prime trait for a bloke who refers to himself as a member of a team of ‘All-stars’.

    Liked by 1 person

  43. Psychologists do like to justify their existence John, by pointing out things which are probably quite obvious to most of us ‘normal’ folk and by giving those things fancy sounding names. But it’s nice to know that environmental activists are officially narcissistic sociopaths according to the experts and not just in the judgement of us laypersons.

    Like

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