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Original Research ARTICLE

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Front. Psychol. | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073

Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation

Stephan Lewandowsky1*, John Cook1, 2, Klaus Oberauer1, 3 and Michael Marriott4
  • 1Psychology, University of Western Australia, Australia
  • 2Global Change Institute, The University of Queensland, Australia
  • 3Psychology, University of Zurich, Switzerland
  • 4 Climate Realities Research, Australia

This article, first published by Frontiers on 18 March 2013, has been the subject of complaints. Given the nature of some of these complaints, Frontiers has provisionally removed the link to the article while these issues are investigated, which is being done as swiftly as possible and which Frontiers management considers the most responsible course of action. The article has not been retracted or withdrawn. Further information will be provided as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience.

Conspiracist ideation has been repeatedly implicated in the rejection of scientific propositions, although empirical evidence to date has been sparse. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation was associated with the rejection of climate science and the rejection of other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS (Lewandowsky, Oberauer, & Gignac, in press; LOG12 from here on). This article analyzes the response of the climate blogosphere to the publication of LOG12. We identify and trace the hypotheses that emerged in response to LOG12 and that questioned the validity of the paper's conclusions. Using established criteria to identify conspiracist ideation, we show that many of the hypotheses exhibited conspiratorial content and counterfactual thinking. For example, whereas hypotheses were initially narrowly focused on LOG12, some ultimately grew in scope to include actors beyond the authors of LOG12, such as university executives, a media organization, and the Australian government. The overall pattern of the blogosphere's response to LOG12 illustrates the possible role of conspiracist ideation in the rejection of science, although alternative scholarly interpretations may be advanced in the future

Keywords: Science denial, Conspiracy theories, conspiracist ideation, Internet blogs, Climate Change

Citation: Lewandowsky S, Cook J, Oberauer K and Marriott M (2013). Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation. Front. Psychol. 4:73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073

Received: 05 Nov 2012; Accepted: 02 Feb 2013.

Edited by:

Viren Swami, University of Westminster, United Kingdom

Reviewed by:

Viren Swami, University of Westminster, United Kingdom
Elaine McKewon, University of Technology, Sydney, Australia  

Copyright: © 2013 Lewandowsky, Cook, Oberauer and Marriott. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in other forums, provided the original authors and source are credited and subject to any copyright notices concerning any third-party graphics etc.

* Correspondence: Dr. Stephan Lewandowsky, University of Western Australia, Psychology, 35 Stirling Hwy, Crawley, 6027, WA, Australia, lewan@psy.uwa.edu.au

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