The spread of ‘fake news,’ information that mimics credible reporting in format but not in content or intent, poses potential threats to public health and democracy by misinforming citizens. Understanding whether and how fake news influences individuals’ policy-relevant beliefs and decisions is needed to inform policies and practices to address it. In a preregistered experiment, we ask how exposure to fake climate news casting doubt on the existence of climate change influences individuals’ expressed belief in climate change, their estimate of the scientific consensus regarding it, and their overall trust in scientists. We find little effect of exposure to fake climate news on any of our three dependent variables. Effect sizes associated with exposure were very small, and demographics and political ideology were stronger predictors of beliefs. Our findings suggest exposure to fake climate news is unlikely to strongly influence climate skepticism.
Although climate change is arguably the most urgent issue of our time, the general public knows little about climate science. Here, we investigate how often five basic climate facts are conveyed in
- PAR ID:
- 10305348
- Publisher / Repository:
- IOP Publishing
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Environmental Research Communications
- Volume:
- 1
- Issue:
- 8
- ISSN:
- 2515-7620
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- Article No. 081002
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract Pluralistic ignorance—a shared misperception of how others think or behave—poses a challenge to collective action on problems like climate change. Using a representative sample of Americans (
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Abstract Climate change is increasingly recognized as not only a biophysical and technological problem but also a social one. Nonetheless, sociologists have expressed concern that sociology has paid relatively little attention to climate change. This deficit threatens to limit the frames available to understand and imagine solutions to the climate crisis. In this paper I report the most up-to-date and expansive empirical assessment of attention to climate change in sociology in the United States (U.S.). I find little to no mention of climate change across leading sociology journal articles (0.89%), conference sessions (1.5%), and faculty biographies (2.8%) and course listings (0.2%) in the 20 top-ranked departments in the U.S. Two leading journals, the
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Significance Statement As part of an NSF-funded project to support local climate change news reporting, we conducted a series of eight journalist workshops. Here we evaluate their impacts. Participants gave the workshops strong positive ratings and experienced significant increases in climate-reporting self-efficacy. There was only limited evidence, however, that the workshops led to more frequent reporting on climate change—a conclusion muddied by the impacts of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) on the news industry. These findings suggest that local climate-reporting workshops may be a useful strategy but that additional research is needed to strengthen the approach.
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