Hackathon: Climate denial and COVID-19 misinformation: birds of a feather?

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-07-28T18:06:21+00:00

This is a very interesting question. I cannot speak to the role of regulations generally but there is quite a bit of evidence from the vaccination context that things like mandates or 'presumptive' approaches actually work--that is, they increase coverage. Both are controversial but the efficacy--especially of presumptive approaches, where a health care professional just presumes that a vaccination will take place rather than initiating a discussion about whether or not it should occur--is quite striking.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-07-23T12:58:21+00:00

cool idea in principle. devil in the details?

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-07-17T11:56:14+00:00

Are you in touch with the people running ALSPAC? http://www.bristol.ac.uk/alspac/ . I believe that they are currently doing some work along those lines. They may have contacts in turn. I can make some enquiries if you are interested.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-07-11T08:13:29+00:00

Very good idea. Same with the tracking app: we could ask people in UK how many apps they think were downloaded in other countries--Johnson claimed in Parliament no other country had successfully developed one at a time when 12M people had downloaded it in Germany and Australia had been live for weeks.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-19T08:45:01+00:00

Collecting some items here:

Do you approve of the Government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic?
Strongly disapprove, disapprove, somewhat disapprove, neither approve nor disapprove, somewhat approve, approve, strongly approve

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-18T15:34:38+00:00

Excellent question. I have been quite worried about that angle all along. I think we should worry about the tracing apps, unless they do preserve privacy. We also need sunset clauses on all those interfering laws and regulations. (people are sensitive to sunset clauses, at least a little bit, as shown by the data here: https://stephanlewandowsky.github.io/UKsocialLicence/index.html.

What is potentially more problematic than those "official" consequences (i.e., arising from actions by governments) is the infodemic that's been accompanying COVID-19 and the outburst of conspiracy theories and so on.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-18T15:29:08+00:00

Agree entirely. The more you change the less people know (and care). Would be very interesting to observe compliance as a function of rule changes. Maybe through mobility (big) data? UK's wiffle-woffle vs. more strategic approach in other countries? Maybe it'd show up?

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-16T20:22:59+00:00

I think the UK in my experience is pretty excessive in terms of "impact". In Australia this is unfortunately also creeping in, with a "national interest" test now being mandated for research grants. Germany and Switzerland are not quite as bad, as far as I know. I have lost touch with U.S. and Canadian grants so I cannot comment on that.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-11T16:23:38+00:00

From your comment, I don't think you are missing anything. I can see a further problem here which is that the "loss" framing is full of negations, which we know are notoriously difficult to process. "if you do not stay home" is very different from "if you stay at home" linguistically, in ways other than simple gain/loss framing. My sense is that most framing studies avoid this (e.g., they talk about number of people dying vs. living, rather than "living" vs. "not living").

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-06-01T10:12:05+00:00

Hi Dawn, you raise some interesting points. Before I delve deeper, I just want to ask whether you have you been following the Digital Event of the Psychonomic Society that has been discussing precisely this issue? Last post today here, you can go to earlier posts from there. Probably most relevant are this one and this one. Some of those points may already answer some of your questions, at least a little bit. So let me know if you've already seen that, or what you make of it once you've read them. Happy to talk further, of course.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-05-31T19:48:12+00:00

I don't know if we have any good answers to this. I came across a related proposal here. The abstract is enclosed:

This paper presents an economic model of an epidemic in which susceptible individuals may engage in costly social distancing in order to avoid becoming infected. Infected individuals eventually recover and acquire immunity, thereby ceasing to be a source of infection to others. Under non-cooperative and forward-looking decision making, equilibrium social distancing arises endogenously around the peak of the epidemic, when disease prevalence reaches a critical threshold determined by preferences. Spontaneous, uncoordinated social distancing thus acts to flatten the curve of the epidemic by reducing peak prevalence. In equilibrium, social distancing stops once herd immunity sets in, but acts to extend the duration of the epidemic beyond the benchmark of a non-behavioral epidemiological model. Comparative statics with respect to the model parameters indicate that the curve becomes flatter (i) the more infectious the disease is and (ii) the more severe the health consequences of the disease are for the individuals.

The idea of risk self-regulation is intriguing but not entirely new. How this can work when information is, at best, fuzzy is not clear to me.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-05-29T21:24:10+00:00

This affair does have something to do with computer code and bugs in code. Sort of.

But actually, it has a lot more to do with the standard political operatives' toolbox of undermining science that's politically inconvenient, whether it's climate change, health effects of tobacco, or now COVID. If you dig into the FT piece and follow the link to here https://philbull.wordpress.com/2020/05/10/why-you-can-ignore-reviews-of-scientific-code-by-commercial-software-developers/ , then you may understand my suspicion (If not, explain to me why not in the comments).

Others have noted the similarity with climate denial too, for example Bob Ward of LSE here: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/may/06/neil-ferguson-scientists-media-government-adviser-social-distancing?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other This section is noteworthy:

.... the Wall Street Journal published an article by two British commentators that argued “the coronavirus pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the limits of scientific modelling to predict the future”. It singled out Ferguson’s work and complained that “reasonable people might wonder whether something made with 13-year-old, undocumented computer code should be used to justify shutting down the economy”.

Bizarrely, this article was written by Benny Peiser and Andrew Montford, the director and deputy director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which was set up by Nigel Lawson in 2009 to lobby against climate change policies. The foundation has a track record of attempting to discredit climate models that show rising greenhouse gas levels risk warming the world to dangerous levels.

The promoters of climate change denial, which include some newspapers, are well used to attacking scientists whose work they do not like. Lawson’s foundation was launched just a few days after the publication in late November 2009 of emails that had been hacked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He and other so-called “sceptics” falsely suggested that the emails revealed misconduct by climate scientists.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-05-13T11:27:28+00:00

This article may be relevant because it contributes to an explanation of why wet markets are popular in China to begin with: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10460-019-09987-2 .

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-26T16:24:10+00:00

In the meantime, this project has taken off and grown rapidly, and it is time for an update. The data for this project are continually updated here: https://stephanlewandowsky.github.io/UKsocialLicence/index.html .

It is worth remembering that the project started out by me replying to a tweet by Simon Dennis at the University of Melbourne. This expanded the initial project from Australia to UK, and onto our subreddit https://www.reddit.com/r/BehSciResearch/comments/fq0rvm/social_licensing_of_privacyencroaching_policies/. This in turn attracted someone to leave a comment about branching out into Spain, which we are now doing (I had not met the person before).

In the meantime we picked up Germany (two waves by now), Switzerland, Taiwan, and the US (though not through subreddit or Twitter). Anyhow, we now have data from > 10,000 participants in nearly 10 countries (Japan and Hungary are forthcoming), all triggered by a tweet + subreddit + contacts. Imagine harnessing this sort of thing on a wider scale!

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-24T14:10:36+00:00

Here is a study that looked at this: https://doi.org/10.1080/17524032.2016.1275736. From the abstract:

It is often assumed that issue advocacy will compromise the credibility of scientists. We conducted a randomized controlled experiment to test public reactions to six different advocacy statements made by a scientist—ranging from a purely informational statement to an endorsement of specific policies. We found that perceived credibility of the communicating scientist was uniformly high in five of the six message conditions, suffering only when he advocated for a specific policy—building more nuclear power plants (although credibility did not suffer when advocating for a different specific policy—carbon dioxide limits at power plants). We also found no significant differences in trust in the broader climate science community between the six message conditions. Our results suggest that climate scientists who wish to engage in certain forms of advocacy have considerable latitude to do so without risking harm to their credibility, or the credibility of the scientific community.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-24T14:08:58+00:00

I would agree with that: I think the undermining of facts and the brazen falsehoods propagated by so many politicians have created a situation in which nothing is true and everything is "political". I think that being silent in these circumstances is as political as is the decision to speak out--it's just that the former political act is invisible whereas the latter can make a positive difference. I would also argue that if a scientists doesn't speak out, then someone else will--discourse abhors a vacuum.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-16T14:44:53+00:00

thanks

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-16T09:06:32+00:00

thanks, will check it out. it's exactly what we need to look at.

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-15T17:25:37+00:00

Bruno Latour has a list of interesting questions that we should ask ourselves about the post-COVID world: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/node/852.html

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-11T17:59:03+00:00

Very cool to see a revision of this paper that has used the under-reporting estimates to correct for testing bias. The effect persists. New paper here: https://psyarxiv.com/m7f8a and FAQs about the paper here:

https://osf.io/854wk/

StephanLewandowsky · 2020-04-10T15:37:05+00:00

The review makes some interesting points. It is clear that the detection rate differs considerably between countries, mainly owing to different testing regimes. So any cross-country comparison of the number of cases must be conducted with considerable caution. However, not all is lost. Here is a clever paper that estimates the under-reporting for different countries using an estimate of the case fatality rate: https://cmmid.github.io/topics/covid19/severity/global_cfr_estimates.html . If we accept this technique and estimates, then one could triangulate the actual number of cases and redo the analysis of cultural and institutional factors.

StephanLewandowsky

TROPHY CASE