Science by social media: Attitudes towards climate change are mediated by perceived social consensus

Stephan Lewandowsky,John Cook,Gilles E Gignac,Nicolas Fay

doi:10.3758/s13421-019-00948-y

Stephan Lewandowsky, John Cook + Show 2 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3758/s13421-019-00948-y

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Abstract

Internet blogs have become an important platform for the discussion of many scientific issues, including climate change. Blogs, and in particular the comment sections of blogs, also play a major role in the dissemination of contrarian positions that question mainstream climate science. The effect of this content on people’s attitudes is not fully understood. In particular, it is unknown how the interaction between the content of blog posts and blog comments affects readers’ attitudes. We report an experiment that orthogonally varied those two variables using blog posts and comments that either did, or did not, support the scientific consensus on climate change. We find that beliefs are partially shaped by readers’ perception of how widely an opinion expressed in a blog post appears to be shared by other readers. The perceived social consensus among readers, in turn, is determined by whether blog comments endorse or reject the contents of a post. When comments reject the content, perceived reader consensus is lower than when comments endorse the content. The results underscore the importance of perceived social consensus on opinion formation.

Highlights

Americans are as likely to resort to the Internet as their primary source of science information as they are to rely on television (Su, Akin, Brossard, Scheufele, & Xenos, 2015)
Internet blogs by design provide a platform for dynamic many-to-one and many-to-many dialogues: visitors can comment on an article or video,1 the author of a post can reply to commenters, and commenters can interact with each other
Are blog posts trustworthy? Do comments on blog posts provide corrections of errors or do they introduce further erroneous content? Can comments reveal how posts are being received by other readers? Many of these questions have far escaped research attention, even though the need to examine the role of blog comments is brought into sharp focus by the proliferation of “sock puppets”, which are fake online identities controlled by a small group of operatives that can create an illusion of support for, or opposition to, an opinion (Bu, Xia, & Wang, 2013; Lewandowsky, 2011)

Summary

Introduction

Americans are as likely to resort to the Internet as their primary source of science information as they are to rely on television (Su, Akin, Brossard, Scheufele, & Xenos, 2015). Internet blogs by design provide a platform for dynamic many-to-one and many-to-many dialogues: visitors can comment on an article or video, the author of a post can reply to commenters, and commenters can interact with each other This multi-layered dynamic has changed the nature of information transfer, with readers no longer just consuming content passively and actively contributing to on-line content. The opportunity for authentic multi-party debate opens the door to misleading, offensive, or inappropriate content This darker side of blogs is of particular concern in the scientific arena: in addition to providing a platform for scientific discussion, Internet blogs constitute a staging ground for the denial of well-established scientific findings (Briones, Nan, Madden, & Waks, 2012; Kata, 2012; Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, 2013; Lewandowsky et al, 2015; Zimmerman et al, 2005). Given that YouTube views and “likes” can be purchased in bulk for very little money on the black market (NATO StratCom COE, 2018), those effects may give rise to concern

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