School of Psychological Science, University of Bristol, 12a Priory Road, Bristol, BS8 1TU, UK.
University of Western Australia, Perth, Australia.
Mem Cognit. 2019 Nov;47(8):1445-1456. doi: 10.3758/s13421-019-00948-y.
Internet blogs have become an important platform for the discussion of many scientific issues, including climate change. Blogs, and in particular the comment sections of blogs, also play a major role in the dissemination of contrarian positions that question mainstream climate science. The effect of this content on people's attitudes is not fully understood. In particular, it is unknown how the interaction between the content of blog posts and blog comments affects readers' attitudes. We report an experiment that orthogonally varied those two variables using blog posts and comments that either did, or did not, support the scientific consensus on climate change. We find that beliefs are partially shaped by readers' perception of how widely an opinion expressed in a blog post appears to be shared by other readers. The perceived social consensus among readers, in turn, is determined by whether blog comments endorse or reject the contents of a post. When comments reject the content, perceived reader consensus is lower than when comments endorse the content. The results underscore the importance of perceived social consensus on opinion formation.
互联网博客已成为讨论许多科学问题的重要平台，包括气候变化。博客，特别是博客的评论部分，在传播质疑主流气候科学的对立观点方面也发挥了重要作用。这种内容对人们态度的影响尚未完全了解。特别是，博客文章的内容和博客评论之间的相互作用如何影响读者的态度还不清楚。我们报告了一项实验，该实验使用了支持或不支持气候变化科学共识的博客文章和评论，分别对这两个变量进行了正交变化。我们发现，读者对博客文章中表达的观点被其他读者广泛认同的看法的看法会部分影响他们的信念。读者的感知社会共识反过来又取决于博客评论是否认可或拒绝帖子的内容。当评论拒绝内容时，感知到的读者共识低于评论认可内容时。研究结果强调了感知到的社会共识在观点形成中的重要性。
