A preregistered replication of “Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change”

Abstract

A strong consensus exists amongst climate scientists that the Earth is warming, and that this warming is due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Members of the public are nevertheless frequently exposed to misinformation about climate change (and the degree of scientific consensus on climate change). One strategy to combat such misinformation is attitudinal “inoculation”—exposing individuals to a weakened item of misinformation along with a pre-emptive refutation. Van der Linden, Leiserowitz, Rosenthal, and Maibach (2017) reported that exposing participants to misinformation reduced the extent to which the participants perceived there to be a scientific consensus about climate change, but that the effect of this misinformation was successfully countered by an attitudinal inoculation. In this study, we report a preregistered replication of van der Linden et al. (2017). Our replication study used a mixed between-within design, with data collected via Mechanical Turk (N = 792). We were able to replicate some (but not all) of van der Linden et al.’s findings. Specifically, we found that providing information about the scientific consensus on climate change increased perceptions of scientific consensus, as did an inoculation provided prior to provision of misinformation. However, we were unable to replicate their finding that an inoculation counteracted the effect of misinformation to a greater extent than simply providing information about scientific consensus—although this may have been due to a ceiling effect in our study. Our preregistration and data are available at https://osf.io/8ymj6/