To celebrate the Cranky Uncle game's 1st birthday, John Cook started a video series titled "The Science of Cranky Uncle" on December 14, 2021. This blog post contains the first three videos in the series and links to John's corresponding Twitter threads announcing each video. The Cranky Uncle game is free and available to play on these platforms:
| iPhone | https://sks.to/crankyiphone |
| Android | https://sks.to/crankyandroid |
| Browser | https://sks.to/crankybrowser |
This video explores why we can't ignore misinformation, examining research into the different ways misinformation does damage.
First, misinformation erodes accurate beliefs. A recent meta-analysis found misinformation was even more potent in reducing climate literacy than accurate information was in increasing climate literacy.
Second, climate misinformation polarises the public. It has a disproportionate effect on political conservatives which means as misinformation pushes people further apart in their attitudes about climate change, exacerbating polarisation.
Third, misinformation can cancel out accurate information. In other words, even if we communicate our science in clear, accurate ways, all those good efforts can be cancelled out by misinformation. This is why we can't ignore misinformation.
The second video of the Science of Cranky Uncle looks at research into how inoculation theory offers an approach for building public resilience against misinformation. The study "Inoculating the public against misinformation about climate change" (van der Linden et al. 2017), found that explaining the techniques of a specific myth inoculated people against that myth (in this case, the Global Warming Petition Project).
Cook et al. (2017) found that explaining a misinformation technique in one topic (tobacco) neutralized the same type of misinformation in a different topic (climate change) via logic-based inoculation.
Vraga et al. (2020) tested fact-based and logic-based corrections. They found that the factual explanation was cancelled out by the myth if the myth came last. But logic explanations worked regardless of order.
The third video of the Science of Cranky Uncle looks at how to use critical thinking to deconstruct misinformation and identify any misleading reasoning fallacies misleading and rhetorical techniques. The video uses snippets from a hilarious video abstract for research published in Environmental Research Letters (Cook et al. 2018) called Critical Thinking Cafe where Peter Ellerton, David Kinkead and John Cook explain how to use critical thinking to deconstruct misinformation.
In the paper the authors developed a step-by-step methodology for deconstructing and analysing misinformation in order to identify reasoning fallacies. There are three main steps to analysing misinformation.
In addition, John Cook looks at one way to explain fallacies to the general public - through parallel arguments or “logic analogies”. You, for example, take the bad logic in misinformation and transplant it into a concrete, real-world example. Cartoons are a perfect delivery mechanism for this approach.
To not miss additional videos in the series you might want to keep an eye on the Science of Cranky Uncle playlist!
Posted by BaerbelW on Tuesday, 22 February, 2022
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