Fear not fellow Americans, we'll be cured of the Fake News Blues in no time.
You see it everywhere -- we're turning fossil fuels into planet-killing death gas because climate change isn't real, turning kids into petri dishes for vintage diseases because the immune system isn't real, and even turning unscrupulous businessmen into national superheroes, because morals aren't real!
But finally, some psychologists from Cambridge have developed a mental inoculation that builds your resistance to bad data through small doses of exposure. The way it works is that they give you some real data (climate change; it's real), and then they give you some fake data (climate change; Chinese conspiracy!), and THEN they give you the reasons why the fake stuff is fake and the real stuff is real.
When you see it side by side, and when you see the rebuttal come from the same source as both the real and the fake, you build a little bit of resistance.
Notes:
Mental “vaccine” protects both parties from plague of fake news and lies
Jan 2017, Ars Technica
Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change
Global Challenges, 2017. DOI: 10.1002/gch2.201600008
Here is for those who are trying to reconcile how climate change can be a national security threat and yet not a threat both at the same time:
A brief introduction to climate change and national security
Yale Climate Connections, 2019
See also
