Arguments
The Debunking Handbook 2020: Downloads and Translations
Posted on 14 October 2020 by John Cook, BaerbelW
In November 2011, we published The Debunking Handbook. As the update notice on that page already shows, more research has come in since then and the time had finally come for a complete overhaul of this very popular handbook (it still gets downloaded a couple of thousand times in most months!). The two authors of the original handbook - Stephan Lewandowsky and John Cook - got in touch with other researchers who look into how best to counter misinformation and 20 of them signed up as co-authors. The result of their work can now be downloaded as The Debunking Handbook 2020.
The handbook is a consensus document that was created by an innovative process that involved a series of predefined steps, all of which were followed and documented and are publicly available. The authors were invited based on their scientific status in the field, and they all agreed on all points made in the handbook. We therefore believe that the new Handbook reflects the scientific consensus about how to combat misinformation. Read more about the consensus process.
The Handbook distills the most important research findings and current expert advice about debunking misinformation and contains information about these topics available in four excerpts:
- Misinformation can do damage
- Where does misinformation come from?
- Misinformation can be sticky
- Sticky myths leave other marks
- Prevent misinformation from sticking if you can
- Simple steps to greater media literacy
- The strategic map of debunking
- Who should debunk?
- The elusive backfire effects
- Role of worldview in belief confirmation
- Debunk often and properly
- Collective action: Debunking on social media
Translations
The Debunking Handbook 2020 has been translated into the following languages:
| German Download  |
Italian Download  |
Turkish Download  |
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| Russian Download  |
Czech Download  |
Portuguese Download  |
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| BCMS Download  |
Swedish Download  |
Romanian Download  |
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| Spanish Download  |
Ukranian Download  |
Dutch Download  |
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| Galician Download  |
Bulgarian Download  |
Greek Download  |
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| Slovak Download  |
Albanian Download  |
Macedonian Download  |
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| Polish Download  |
More translations in the works  |
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Note to other translators:
If you'd like to translate The Debunking Handbook 2020 into another language or help with a translation currently in progress, please contact us by selecting "Enquiry about translations" from the contact form's dropdown menu. We'll then get in touch with additional information.
Within the last week, the Spanish and Ukranian translations of The Debunking Handbook 2020 have been published! Since its publication in October 2020, 11(!) translations have been created.
In December, the Dutch translation of The Debunking Handbook 2020 was published, followed by the Galician translation today.
I struggled to download the Debunking Handbook, but after about 4 attempts I was successful
Wonderful information, thank you. I would like to propose that words like "true" and "correct" be avoided (these are not used in any good scientific papers that I have read), and that terms like "most accurate" or "highly accurate" be used instead. All our ideas about the world are models, they are human inventions, and their correspondence with reality seems to never be perfect, even in the case of our most accurate theory, the Standard Model of Quantum Mechanics.
Since mid-November, three more translations of the Debunking Handbook 2020 have been published: Slovak, Albanian and Macedonian.
On October 16, the Polish translation of the Debunking Handbook was published, thanks to the efforts of the Nauka o climacie team, our partner website in Poland!
As of Jan 2023 there are some broken links here and on the wider web to GMU/climatechangecommunication.org. The English 2020 edition is still available via Link and there's a related publication for broadcast meteorologists:Link
[BL] Links activated.
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Cedders @7
Thanks for the heads-up! The "under the hood" PDF is now available on Skeptical Science and the links above are corrected. The best link to use for the handbook is the short URL https://sks.to/debunk2020 which leads to this page on SkS. We had already noticed that the old links to 4C no longer worked and "redirected" the short URLs for them to SkS where we have them all available.