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Climate Progress

The Debunking Handbook Part 5: Filling the Gap With an Alternative Explanation

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 30, 2011 at 12:11 pm

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky.

This is part five of a five-part series originally published at Skeptical Science.

Assuming you successfully negotiate the various backfire effects, what is the most effective way to debunk a myth? The challenge is that once misinformation gets into a person’s mind, it’s very difficult to remove. This is the case even when people remember and accept a correction.

This was demonstrated in an experiment in which people read a fictitious account of a warehouse fire.1,2,3 Mention was made of paint and gas cans along with explosions. Later in the story, it was clarified that paint and cans were not present at the fire. Even when people remembered and accepted this correction, they still cited the paint or cans when asked questions about the fire. When asked, “Why do you think there was so much smoke?”, people routinely invoked the oil paint despite having just acknowledged it as not being present.

When people hear misinformation, they build a mental model, with the myth providing an explanation. When the myth is debunked, a gap is left in their mental model. To deal with this dilemma, people prefer an incorrect model over an incomplete model. In the absence of a better explanation, they opt for the wrong explanation.4

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Climate Progress

The Debunking Handbook Part 3: The Overkill Backfire Effect

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 28, 2011 at 10:09 am

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, unfortunately there is no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation. This Handbook boils down the research into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation.

This is part three in a five-part series cross-posted from Skeptical Science.

One principle that science communicators often fail to follow is making their content easy to process. That means easy to read, easy to understand and succinct. Information that is easy to process is more likely to be accepted as true.1 Merely enhancing the colour contrast of a printed font so it is easier to read, for example, can increase people’s acceptance of the truth of a statement.2

Common wisdom is that the more counter-arguments you provide, the more successful you’ll be in debunking a myth. It turns out that the opposite can be true. When it comes to refuting misinformation, less can be more. Debunks that offered three arguments, for example, are more successful in reducing the influence of misinformation, compared to debunks that offered twelve arguments which ended up reinforcing the myth.1

The Overkill Backfire Effect occurs because processing many arguments takes more effort than just considering a few. A simple myth is more cognitively attractive than an over-complicated correction.

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Climate Progress

The Debunking Handbook Part 1: The First Myth About Debunking

By Climate Guest Blogger on Dec 26, 2011 at 12:00 pm

The Debunking Handbook is a guide to debunking myths, by John Cook and Stephan Lewandowsky. Although there is a great deal of psychological research on misinformation, unfortunately there is no summary of the literature that offers practical guidelines on the most effective ways of reducing the influence of misinformation. This Handbook boils down the research into a short, simple summary, intended as a guide for communicators in all areas (not just climate) who encounter misinformation

This is part one in a five-part series by John Cook originally published at Skeptical Science.

Introduction

Debunking myths is problematic. Unless great care is taken, any effort to debunk misinformation can inadvertently reinforce the very myths one seeks to correct. To avoid these “backfire effects”, an effective debunking requires three major elements. First, the refutation must focus on core facts rather than the myth to avoid the misinformation becoming more familiar. Second, any mention of a myth should be preceded by explicit warnings to notify the reader that the upcoming information is false. Finally, the refutation should include an alternative explanation that accounts for important qualities in the original misinformation.

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Alyssa

Five Non-Western Myths And Fairy Tales That Would Make Great Movies

By Alyssa Rosenberg on Nov 15, 2011 at 5:22 pm

In yesterday’s conversation about how to make retellings of Snow White more interesting, some commenters suggested, entirely correctly, that we not just transpose Western fairy tales into new settings, but that we try to tell stories from new mythologies. I agree with that suggestion, though I don’t think we’re going to stop telling Western fairy tales to Western audiences and so it’s important to see them as vehicles for more creative and multicultural storytelling as well. Instead, we need to both reform and refresh what we’ve got and look for new materials. So here are five awesome non-Western fairy tales that deserve movies of their own.

1. The Seven Chinese Brothers: The number of brothers vary in retellings of this story, but the principal remains generally the same: a group of super-powered brothers stand up to the Emperor (in some retellings, they do so because he’s mistreating workers building the Great Wall of China). When he tries to execute them in succession, they prove impervious to his punishments. It’s a nice inversion of superhero stories: these are extraordinary people who have chosen essentially ordinary lives, but bring their powers to bear against injustice, using both strength and cleverness to discredit a corrupt and powerful ruler. Grant Morrison and some of his coworkers created a superhero team with a little resemblance to the Brothers, but it would be nice to have a modern interpretation that challenges the Chinese government, rather than working for it.

2. Tokoyo: I have a particular weakness for stories about fathers and daughters, so this Japanese folk tale, about a girl who vows to return to her father after the Emperor banishes him is right up my alley. She visits forbidden islands, spies on imperial gossip, and offers herself up as a sacrifice to save a young girl — though instead of dying, she frees the Emperor from a powerful underseas curse. And I appreciate that it’s a story that’s about both social justice and filial love, rather than yet another story about a princess whose greatest accomplishment is getting successfully married. It’s a role that could produce a Japanese or Japanese-American Jennifer Lawrence, and how fantastic would that be?

3. Anansi, and Trickster and Culture Hero Tales More Generally: Speaking of being mired in marriages, getting away from an overreliance on the Western folk traditions would let us escape the omnipresence of marriage plots, and give us stories that up the stakes a bit. Anansi’s all about keeping — and sometimes upsetting — the balance of natural and intellectual resources in the universe. Culture hero stories are harder to sustain in an era of scientific reasoning — we don’t really need the invention of the wheel or other seemingly-inexplicable advances explained to us—but they can still be powerful statements about identity, divinity, and progress.

4. Nanabozho — and Paul Bunyan: I know Bunyan’s Western, specifically American. But Nanabozho, an Ojibwa spirit, threw down with one of the founding American culture heroes and in some versions of the story, killed him. A grand story of the frontier that’s told equally from the perspective of American Indian and American Gods, done right, could be an astonishing American epic. And it would certainly be more interesting than, say, Hell on Wheels.

5. Rama, Sita, Hanuman, Ravana, et.al.: If you want a team-up, it’s hard to get cooler than the Ramayana. You’ve got exiles! Kidnappings! Monkey deities! Demon kings who could be interpreted sympathetically (If we can have Magneto Was Right shirts, we can so have Ravana Was Right Ts)! The gender politics are kind of retrograde, but maybe Sita can organize a rebellion while in Ravana’s captivity, and an update could give Surpanakha motives other than being sexually rejected, though having your nose cut off is decent motivation for revenge.

Bonus: Mufaro’s Beautiful Daughters. John Steptoe’s retelling of Cinderella in Zimbabwe is one of the most stunningly beautiful picture books I’ve ever read. A movie that captured its gorgeous vision of African civilization would both be a treat, and a fantastic starting point for a conversation about alternatives to medieval-influenced High Fantasy. And maybe it could get us to a point where we could have a Black Panther movie, too.

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