Despite the bad behavior of the Trump administration, it’s clear climate denial and conservative viewpoints are not necessarily one and the same. After all, we don’t want to discount the majority of young conservatives who think human activity plays a “significant role” in climate change, or the many smart climate arguments and solutions the right has brought forward. (See, for example, the recent carbon tax proposal from George Shultz, or former NJ governor Christine Todd Whitman’s criticism of the red team idea, or conservative state support for clean energy solutions.) With that in mind, let the record show that the following analysis mostly applies to the Koch/Mercer-sponsored, Fox News-far right edge.
Something we noticed this week: a new working paper by Yale’s Gordon Pennycook and David Rand finds that Facebook’s new effort to tag fake news isn’t living up to expectations. Putting a “disputed” tag on fake news posts, the study says, results in only a slight decrease in how many people judged the headline as false. But perhaps offsetting this marginal benefit is the fact that, particularly for a younger demographic, the existence of tags on some but not all fake news makes people more likely to trust everything that’s not tagged.
What’s more, according to the study, Trump supporters (and perhaps his own employees) were notably worse at spotting unflagged fake news than Clinton supporters. (We’re not totally surprised, given Russia’s use of Facebook to spread fake news, and deniers’ use of those tactics, and the right’s embrace of the term for its own purposes.)
Now why might this be? For a possible explanation, we can look at other research from an apparently very busy Pennycook, including a new study based in part on his work on pseudo-profound bullshit. As this August study shows, turns out Trump supporters score more poorly than Clinton fans on tests designed to evaluate critical thinking skills, and as such are less able to use those skills to distinguish real news from fake. So, as real world conditions confirm, Trump supporters are particularly susceptible to fake news, and more apt to share it, due in part to a more intuitive and less analytical thought process. Per Pennycook, this then becomes a vicious cycle, as another study finds seeing a fake news story makes a reader more likely to believe the next one that carries a similar meaning. Given how prolific climate denial stories get shared on conservative media, this should come as no surprise that one primes the pump for the next.
All this leads us to perhaps one of the greatest study title in history, “Misperceiving Bullshit as Profound Is Associated with Favorable Views of Cruz, Rubio, Trump and Conservatism.” Using statements that combine random profound-sounding words into grammatically correct but totally devoid of meaning, the study’s authors tested whether conservatives are more likely than liberals to see meaning in a nonsensical sentence (defined as “bullshit” in the academic jargon). Their examples, assembled out of buzzwords plucked at random and put into a sentence, sound something like Buddhist koans of one hand clapping: “Wholeness quiets infinite phenomena” or “Hidden meaning transforms unparalleled abstract beauty.”
It’s easy to see how this study can apply to the deniersphere: while some can call bullshit on see statements like “the climate has always changed” or “clean, beautiful coal” or basically any of the fact-free idiocy written about climate by that Dilbert guy, conservatives--and Trump voters specifically--are more apt than liberals to divine signal from the noise.
The only question we’re left with is what we can call this creative and informative line of inquiry? We suggest this new field of bullshit study be called Pennycook’s Poppycock Theory.
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