A toolkit for understanding and addressing climate scepticism

Matthew Hornsey; Stephan Lewandowsky

doi:10.1038/s41562-022-01463-y

A toolkit for understanding and addressing climate scepticism

Matthew Hornsey^*, Stephan Lewandowsky

^*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journal › Article (Academic Journal) › peer-review

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Abstract

Despite over 50 years of messaging about the reality of human-caused climate change, substantial portions of the population remain sceptical. Furthermore, many sceptics remain unmoved by standard science communication strategies, such as myth busting and evidence building. To understand this, we examine psychological and structural reasons why climate change misinformation is prevalent. First, we review research on motivated reasoning: how interpretations of climate science are shaped by vested interests and ideologies. Second, we examine climate scepticism as a form of political followership. Third, we examine infrastructures of disinformation: the funding, lobbying and political operatives that lend climate scepticism its power. Guiding this Review are two principles: (1) to understand scepticism, one must account for the interplay between individual psychologies and structural forces; and (2) global data are required to understand this global problem. In the spirit of optimism, we finish by describing six strategies for reducing the destructive influence of climate scepticism.

Original language	English
Pages (from-to)	1454–1464
Number of pages	11
Journal	Nature Human Behaviour
Volume	6
Issue number	11
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01463-y
Publication status	Published - 16 Nov 2022

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We acknowledge D. Plehwe for helpful discussions and pointers to relevant literature. M.J.H. acknowledges funding support from the Australian Research Council Discovery scheme (DP220101566). S.L. acknowledges financial support from the European Research Council (ERC Advanced Grant 101020961 PRODEMINFO) and the Humboldt Foundation in Germany through a research award. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2022, Springer Nature Limited.

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This is the accepted author manuscript (AAM). The final published version (version of record) is available online via Nature Research at https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-022-01463-y .Please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher.
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Cite this

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title = "A toolkit for understanding and addressing climate scepticism",

abstract = "Despite over 50 years of messaging about the reality of human-caused climate change, substantial portions of the population remain sceptical. Furthermore, many sceptics remain unmoved by standard science communication strategies, such as myth busting and evidence building. To understand this, we examine psychological and structural reasons why climate change misinformation is prevalent. First, we review research on motivated reasoning: how interpretations of climate science are shaped by vested interests and ideologies. Second, we examine climate scepticism as a form of political followership. Third, we examine infrastructures of disinformation: the funding, lobbying and political operatives that lend climate scepticism its power. Guiding this Review are two principles: (1) to understand scepticism, one must account for the interplay between individual psychologies and structural forces; and (2) global data are required to understand this global problem. In the spirit of optimism, we finish by describing six strategies for reducing the destructive influence of climate scepticism.",

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A toolkit for understanding and addressing climate scepticism

Abstract

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