Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation

Stephan Lewandowsky1*, John Cook1, 2, Klaus Oberauer1, 3 and Michael Marriott4

    1Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia
    2Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland, Australia
    3Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland
    4 Climate Realities Research, Australia

This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Conspiracist ideation has been repeatedly implicated in the rejection of scientific propositions, although empirical evidence to date has been sparse. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, in press; LOG12 from here on). This article analyzes the response of the climate blogosphere to the publication of LOG12. We identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper's conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking. For example, whereas hypotheses were initially narrowly focused on LOG12, some ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors of LOG12, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. The overall pattern of the blogosphere's response to LOG12 illustrates the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science, although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future

Keywords: Science denial, Conspiracy theories, conspiracist ideation, Internet blogs, Climate Change

Citation: Lewandowsky S, Cook J, Oberauer K and Marriott M (2013). Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. Front. Psychol. 4:73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073

Received: 05 Nov 2012; Accepted: 02 Feb 2013.

Edited by:
Viren Swami, University of Westminster, United Kingdom

Reviewed by:
Viren Swami, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
Elaine McKewon, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia 

Copyright: © 2013 Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer and Marriott. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Western Australia, Psychology, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, 6027, WA, Australia, lewan@psy.uwa.edu.au

Rider wrote on Sep 6^th, 2013 at 3:04pm:

And your qualifications are? 

# wrote on Sep 6^th, 2013 at 3:08pm:


Motivated rejection of idiocy. You qualify.

your peer reviewed nonsense has been seriously debunked and reclassified as junk science.

Seriously, you'd have to be paid to push this tripe, are you?

There are no conspiracy theories my friend just facts.

Like for example,

Quote:


Now about the moon landing did that really happen...??

Well between the Earth and the moon there is a radiation belt was the lunar module insulated to stop this radiation passing through.....??

Well it must of been cause the astronauts are still alive today.

The lunar module had a rocket propellant device under its fuselage as it descended to make the landing this rocket should have dug out a little bit of a crater directly under it.

But guess what no crater of any size to report of.

This would have caused a lot of sand particles to become air borne (rocket pressure) even though the moon has only one sixth of the earth's gravity, eventually all these sand particles would have eventually settled back down again.

If one looks at the lunar module after it landed it looks like the astronauts have taken a rag and Mr. Sheen to its exterior, its squeaky clean.

But hell what do I know.......??

Now where the twin towers demolished or did they fall in accordance with the official story the authorities gave.

What pulverises steel reinforced concrete........????

What can melt steel....???

You know we may not be as educated as you would like us to be, but we're not smacking stupid either.....

muso wrote on Sep 6^th, 2013 at 3:38pm:


Dude you can jump up and down until the cows come home but thems is the facts.....?????........

muso wrote on Sep 6^th, 2013 at 3:38pm:


and yet you posted up the video time serious of the artic ice melting as though it had some sort of credibility ..... but that's ok cause you believe in the 'cause' .... pardon me whilst I wipe the tears of derision from my eyes 

muso wrote on Sep 6^th, 2013 at 3:29pm:
The fact that both papers survived peer review is good enough for me.

Almost three decades ago, I was trained in psychology. Nothing fancy, just enough for basic accept/undecided/reject triage of job applicants. Certainly not a formal qualification, by any stretch of the imagination.

I stayed in that job for more than four years and got pretty good at it. The ones I classified acceptable went on to the next phase: formal evaluation by qualified psychologists. At the time, the job market was such that we never got to the ones I classified undecided.

Feedback from the psychologists was that I  was pretty good at weeding out psychotics, but often let psychopaths slip through. Truth be known, even the best had difficulty with the latter. From a labour market perspective, the difference as it was explained to me is that, while a psychotic can affect the profitability of a business, a psychopath can destroy it. The purpose of all that expensive testing was to minimise disruptive (and potentially destructive) influences in the workplace.

Anyway, in Ajax, I recognise something familiar. That set me searching to find out whether anyone else had made the connection. Hence this topic.

The description of conspiracy theories as "self-sealing" is particularly interesting. Anything that contradicts the theory becomes part of the conspiracy. There's a certain psychotic brilliance in that.

The upshot is that, while one such on a forum is not unhealthy, there are too many here. I don't have the time or patience to play this game. I might drop by occasionally, to see whether the lunatics have taken over the asylum.

Muso, if this was a workplace, my advice would be: RUN! As it stands, all I can do is wish you good luck.