Brandolini’s law (also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle) holds that the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it. Given there’s a whole industry for producing climate denial, debunking it takes a lot of energy, so it’s good to know how to do it best.
For the latest on that, we turn to a novel study that tests debunking on Instagram to compare fact-focused rebuttals to logic-based ones, and debunkings that come after a person sees misinformation compared to seeing the pre-bunking first.
An unpaywalled version is available courtesy of study co-author and lead cartoonist John Cook, who laid out the findings in a twitter thread and CrankyUncle post, where you can see the misinformation and debunking images for yourself.
The study, led by Emily Vraga of the University of Minnesota, is novel in a few ways, the first of which is the use of Instagram as the medium. While other studies have looked at rebuttals in tweet or Facebook post format, the primarily visual nature of Instagram makes it a unique venue for debunkings, in that they are generally text-based. So the use of Cook’s cartoons as a key component of the debunking (which do also include brief text), combined with the humor that other studies have shown is persuasive, makes this quite different from studies in the existing literature.
Beyond showing that cartoons can be vehicles for combating misinformation, the study’s findings show that while science-based fact checks are effective after a person sees something misleading, they’re not effective as a prebuttal. Logic-based rebuttals, though, that focus not on the specific details of a claim, but instead the logical fallacy it uses to mislead, are effective at reducing the credibility of misinformation both before and after someone is exposed to it.
To test all this, the researchers designed a simple experiment with a simulated series of Instagram posts, including a commonly shared denier image showing a plant’s growth at various levels of CO2, and the claim that CO2 is good for plants. Then, they created contradicting posts to test whether facts or logic are more effective in debunking the claim, and whether a pre-bunking shown to subjects before the denier meme was as effective in correcting it than a debunking shown afterwards.
The fact-based debunking explained that “plants are fussy” and their food is water and nutrients as well s CO2, accompanied by a poolside cactus making demands to a waiter (“He’s so prickly!” the waiter complains.)
The logic-focused post instead kept it simple with a statement that CO2 is causing climate change, which hurts plants, and the explanation that the plant food myth “is an oversimplification- it’s like saying humans need calcium so all we need to eat is ice cream.”
The researchers found the logic-based pre- and de-bunking were effective in reducing the credibility of the misinformation, and the fact-based debunking was as well. But the fact-based prebunking didn’t seem to make a difference, which makes some sense as you’re not necessarily going to remember details about a myth if you have no context for it.
But there’s more to it than that. Because they asked subjects to rate the credibility of the misinformation and rebuttals, and found that while logic-based corrections were most effective in reducing the credibility of misinformation, people actually considered the fact-based rebuttal to be more credible than the logical one. And the fact-based prebuttals, which had the weakest effect of reducing misinformation, were seen to be particularly credible.
So overall, this tells us that logic-based debunkings are your best bet, because they work whether or not the audience has seen the myth. And since logic is relatively universal, educating the public about cherry-picking, fake experts or other logical fallacies prepares them for a range of misinformation, as opposed to the facts that are specific to each myth.
Granted, the differences between the effects of logic vs fact were fairly small, which given that there was only a single exposure to the debunking isn’t surprising. It’s safe to say that no one’s going to be mad if you present facts, and in fact, debunkings should generally include both.
But if you want the energy spent on debunking some bullshit to work on other bullshit, logic is the way to go!
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