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Thinking to Fight Misinformation  \nDENYING  \nREALITY  \nILLUSTRATIONS COURTESY OF JOHN COOK  \nBy John Cook  \nM  \nisinformation damages society in a multitude of ways, and we ignore its negative impact at our peril—especially regarding climate change. While studying how misinformation does damage, scientists have also  \nresearched and developed approaches to help build the public’s resilience against misinformation. Teachers are in a powerful position to implement these evidence-based strategies—not only playing a pivotal role in building students’ resilience but also providing deeper, more engaging science education that equips students with sorely needed critical-thinking skills. Much  \nJohn Cook is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Monash Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University in Australia; he researches how to use critical thinking to build resilience against misinformation. In 2020, he published the book Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change and the Cranky Uncle game; both combine critical thinking and cartoons to build resilience against misinformation (visit crankyuncle. com). Cook also founded Skeptical Science, an award-winning website that debunks climate myths. Among his many papers and books are two coauthored college textbooks, Climate Change: Examining the Facts and Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, and two books to address climate misinformation, The Debunking Handbook 2020 and The Conspiracy Theory Handbook.  \nof this article is devoted to sharing those strategies so that teachers and students can effectively counter misinformation, but first, let’s explore how misinformation does damage.  \nHow Misinformation Damages Society  \nThe most obvious way that misinformation does damage is by causing people to believe misconceptions or reducing belief inaccurate facts. One experiment found that just a handful of cherrypicked statistics about climate change confused people and reduced their acceptance that climate change was happening.1 After being shown the misinformation, they also become less supportive of action to reduce climate change. Other, more subtle impacts of misinformation are also dangerous, such as eroding trust in scientific institutions and scientists. As we’ve seen throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, distrust of health experts has led to less adoption of safe behaviors like mask wearing and vaccination, which endangers both individuals and public health.  \nThe effect of misinformation is not identical across different segments of the public. In research my colleagues and I conducted, we found that misinformation about climate change was strongly persuasive with political conservatives but had little impact on political liberals.2 This means that as misinformation washes over society, it splits the public further apart, exacerbating an already partisan populace. Misinformation polarizes.  \n12 AMERICAN EDUCATOR | WINTER 2021–22  \nArguably, one of the most insidious aspects of misinformation is its capacity to cancel out accurate information. In an experiment testing the impact of misinformation that cast doubt on the scientific consensus on climate change, participants were shown conflicting pieces of information.3 One group was shown accurate information about the 97 percent agreement among climate scientists that humans are causing climate change. This consensus message had a strong positive effect, increasing public perceptions of consensus and acceptance of global warming. Another group of participants was shown an excerpt from a prominent example of climate misinformation: the Global Warming Petition Project. This misinformation lists over 31,000 signatories of a petition stating that humans aren’t disrupting our climate, arguing that there is no scientific consensus on climate change. As you’d expect, it had a negative impact—reducing people’s climate change perceptions. A third ","cbCail92QQzCIx1s","https://ap.wps.com/l/cbCail92QQzCIx1s","pdf",1928935,"English","# How Misinformation Damages Society\n## Inoculating the Public Against Misinformation","[{\"question\":\"How does misinformation damage society in the context of climate change?\",\"answer\":\"It confuses people with misconceptions, reduces acceptance of accurate climate facts, erodes trust in scientific institutions, and can polarize the public, making collective action harder.\"},{\"question\":\"Why can accurate climate information be cancelled out by misinformation?\",\"answer\":\"When people are shown conflicting messages, fact and myth can counteract each other’s influence, reducing the impact of well-tested explanations.\"},{\"question\":\"What approach does the article propose to counter misinformation?\",\"answer\":\"It proposes inoculation theory, using weakened forms of misinformation to help people develop “cognitive antibodies” and better resolve the fact-versus-myth conflict.\"}]","SCIENCE AND CITIZENSHIP - Teaching About Our Climate Crisis - Combining Games and Critical Thinking to Fight Misinformation | PDF",1792071036,23]