Research Comms Podcast: Dr Sander van der Linden
‘People worry that when they admit uncertainty it seems like they’re incompetent but it’s actually the opposite.’ Dr Sander van der Linden on the importance of transparent and honest communication.
Until COVID-19 came along the biggest threat faced by humanity was climate change. Since the pandemic hit, people’s lives have been turned upside down and the global economy has been put on pause. Many have been wondering what impact it will have on public attitudes to that other major crisis, global warming.
In this episode of the Research Comms podcast Cambridge University psychologist, Dr Sander van der Linden, discusses the latest surveys exploring this question that he and his colleagues at the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication have conducted. He also talks about his popular and innovative Fake News Game, which he created as a way to inoculate people against misinformation.
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The below is a short excerpt. For the full interview download the podcast.
You voiced concern in the early days of COVID-19 pandemic about the government’s decision to delay lockdown because of fears of ‘behavioural fatigue.’ How do you feel now about how people have responded to the restrictions?
I think I was a little bit strong at the beginning around this notion of behavioural fatigue. Mainly because the references that were provided for that phenomenon were not actually pointing to evidence towards the fact that people would be tired of being in lockdown. The references were more about the effect of lockdown on psychological well-being. There is some evidence to suggest that command and control types of regulation are perceived much less favourably, and reactance is higher than when the lockdown is voluntary.
Have you listened to these other episodes of the Research Comms podcast?
My view was that the evidence for behavioural fatigue was very weak. I think it is a real concept, people could get tired of isolating, no one is questioning that. The question was how long can people be expected to keep doing this? I think the answer is that we do not know, but there are a lot of tools we can use to try and motivate people to keep protecting themselves and others that would be a lot more fruitful for the government to pursue.
In the UK the person who floated this particular idea was advised by the behavioural insights team that the evidence behind behavioural fatigue is quite questionable. So even when the government claims its decisions are evidence based, it's not always clear which line of evidence they are actually following. But every country's timeline is different.
I have been impressed by the duration of the lockdown in the UK, and the extent to which people can stay at home. Clearly the evidence is that people can in fact do this.
You’ve done a great deal of research into public attitudes towards climate change. What do you think the impact of the pandemic is going to be on the way in which people perceive the risks of climate change?
We have a little bit of data on this. I would say there are three key questions that people have been asking. One is: has Covid-19 displaced concern about climate change? Two: are emissions down globally, and if so is that a good or a bad thing? And three: what can we learn from this pandemic for climate change action?
So, has Covid-19 displaced concern about climate change?
There is a very good hypothesis called the ‘finite pool of worry’, in psychology, which very simply states that people can only worry about so many things at any given time. Climate change has not traditionally been at the top of people's minds. But if you look at the survey data that we have in ten different countries, we looked at how concerned people are about various things, everyone is most concerned about the pandemic at the moment, but climate change is very much up there.
Almost half of the participants in all of the countries we surveyed are very concerned about climate change. The top three are the pandemic, unemployment and climate change. Things like immigration and terrorism are much lower down the list. Ten years ago that was not the case.
Today, the Yale Program came out with a new survey showing that belief and acceptance in climate change in America is peaking at the moment. So there are multiple signals that the pandemic has not displaced people's worries about climate change. At least that's a positive thing.
Are emissions down globally, and if so is that a good or a bad thing?
Yes, emissions are down globally. I think some people are worried though, that there may be something that we call a rebound effect. As soon as the economy kicks back up again, producers and consumers will start producing and consuming more than before, as if to make up for something, and actually emissions will shoot up again, not only back to baseline, but even further than that.
What can we learn from this pandemic for climate change action?
I think there are a few very interesting lessons. One is that people can make very difficult changes to their lifestyle. This time it was about social distancing and washing your hands frequently. Fundamentally, that is altering your lifestyle in light of a serious risk. This shows that people can in fact do this.
Also, government's around the world have been coordinating and implementing regulations and investing in infrastructure to tackle this risk, with large-scale testing and hospitals and equipment. So we see that it is possible for governments to respond quickly, and to co-ordinate their behaviour on an international scale. Even though some governments have decidedly not followed the evidence, and have been rather reluctant to implement some measures. But perhaps, from a scientific point of view, this is interesting because that variation can tell us how effective different responses have been to the pandemic, even if there isn't a control.
We have seen that people do listen to experts like the WHO and the CDC. It has been an interesting exercise in what cues people follow, as it depends on what experts you are listening to. If you are listening to Trump, you are following a different kind of evidence than if you are listening to the WHO. In a lot of research we see that there are significant minorities that spread fake news and are susceptible to misinformation. But overall, the majority of people are listening to experts and science. If they can do that on a politicised risk like Covid-19 then maybe it could be the same for climate change.
Also, we have seen that we can protect vulnerable populations. Like Covid-19, climate change will affect a disproportionate portion of the population. We have seen here that we need to protect the vulnerable, and we could apply those same lessons to climate change. So I do think there are some transferable lessons, but the question is are we going to implement them?
Why are you unsure about that?
People draw these parallels between Covid-19 and climate change about it being an invisible threat but psychologically it is still different. I am slightly sceptical, in the sense that, yes, you can't see the virus either, but it is not just vicarious. We know that people are less sensitive to numbers. If I tell you that three thousand people have died, that is just a statistic to people. But if your neighbour has died, that is very impactful.
With Covid-19 you might see both, and you get amplification through social media and things on the news, so it is very salient. But with climate change, you cannot see it and you cannot feel it. It is a greater danger but the challenge is that people seem to think that it is in the future. But once we get to the stage where we are ready to change our lifestyles because we can see all of the horrible consequences, it is going to be too late. Whereas with the pandemic it is a one-to-one response. It is not delayed in terms of the physics of it.
Your ‘Vaccine Against Fake News’ got quite a lot of attention when it was released. Could you tell me more about that?
Sure. We have known for a long time in psychology that fact-checking and debunking is not very effective. Primarily because once people are exposed to a myth, it takes route in your memory and finds its way into your memory network, and links to all sorts of other things and it is very difficult to correct. Even when you correct it people will continue to retrieve and rely on false information. So there was a really big impetus to try and get there first and prevent that from happening in the first place.
So, as opposed to debunking, we started to think about this idea we now call pre-bunking. It is based on the vaccination metaphor. There was some initial research that was done in the 1960s on this very idea: can you preemptively inoculate people against falsehoods? Because that would be so much more powerful. So if you ’inject’ people with a weakened dose of falsehood and allow them to create mental antibodies against this falsehood over time, people become more resistant when they are actually exposed to the full dose of the misinformation, like a virus.
We have tested it out with tens of thousands of people both before and after they play. We give them a series of fake news articles and we find that the experiment makes people improve their ability to spot and resist not only specific fake news but the underlying techniques that are being used over and over again.
That is a much more durable approach. Rather than telling people what to believe or what is right and what is wrong, which is what the fact-check approach is, what we wanted to do was make people more attuned to these underlying techniques that are used in almost every single one of these cases, whether that is using fake experts, or some conspiratorial narrative, or some techniques to polarize people. If you can spot those techniques and see through them you are going to be less influenced by them, regardless of the specific content.
With other vaccines, taking the measles vaccine as an example, you need around 97% of people to be vaccinated to get herd immunity. So would the ideal for this be that everybody has the opportunity to get inoculated against fake news as part of their education?
When we put this out there our intention was very much for it to be used in real world intervention. The game is very much non-ideological, so sometimes we are making fun of science, sometimes it's big Pharma, sometimes it's politics. You can craft your own scenario in the game so it won't change the way that you view the world, but you will learn about these techniques regardless. We hoped that that would appeal to a large audience so anyone can come in with their preconceptions and their beliefs and learn about these techniques in a non-threatening environment.
About one million people play this intervention game at the moment around the world. The government in the UK has translated it into 15 languages with us. We have done a large cross-cultural study looking at the effects in different cultures. We work with some social media companies, we have built a version for WhatsApp. This game is called Join This Group, which is more about group psychology and getting messages from people in your trusted network. We have one on Bad Vaccines which will come out soon which is based on vaccinations. We have a version for kids called Bad News Junior.
It is being used in universities and schools and we get regular feedback from teachers to try and improve the game. We have some versions that we presented to the United Nations. So we have tried to scale this approach as far as we can because ultimately for me the most important aspect of this metaphor is herd immunity. Because you can cognitively inoculate one individual at a time, but ultimately the real power lies in societal immunity against the techniques that are used.
Research Comms is presented by Peter Barker, director of Orinoco Communications, a digital communications and content creation agency that specialises in helping to communicate research. Find out how we’ve helped research organisations like yours by taking a look at past projects…
LINKS
Read more about the Fake News Vaccine here.
And play the Fake News Game here
Read the latest reports from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication
Read here about the study: Uncertainty about facts can be reported without damaging public trust in news
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