School of Psychology, University of Western Australia Crawley, WA, Australia.
Front Psychol. 2013 Mar 18;4:73. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2013.00073. eCollection 2013.
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 et al., in press; LOG12 from here on). This article analyses 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.
阴谋论思维已多次被牵涉到对科学命题的拒绝中，尽管迄今为止的经验证据还很缺乏。最近一项涉及气候博客访问者的研究发现，阴谋论思维与对气候科学的拒绝以及对其他科学命题的拒绝有关，如肺癌与吸烟之间、艾滋病毒与艾滋病之间的关系（Lewandowsky 等人，即将出版；下文简称 LOG12）。本文分析了气候博客圈对 LOG12 发表的反应。我们识别并追踪了针对 LOG12 出现的假设，这些假设对该论文结论的有效性提出了质疑。我们使用既定标准来识别阴谋论思维，结果表明，许多假设都表现出了阴谋论内容和反事实思维。例如，最初假设的范围很窄，只集中在 LOG12 上，但有些假设最终扩大了范围，将 LOG12 的作者之外的行为者包括在内，如大学行政人员、一个媒体组织和澳大利亚政府。博客圈对 LOG12 的反应的总体模式说明了阴谋论思维在拒绝科学方面可能发挥的作用，尽管未来可能会提出其他学术解释。
