Presented by John Cook, postdoctoral research fellow with the
Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University.
Feb 9, 2022, 7:00 PM (Note non-standard day and time). This replaces our Saturday talk for February
Link to live stream:
https://youtu.be/KBz0s5cMAbA
The public are overwhelmed with misinformation and conspiracy
theories, causing confusion about important issues such as climate
change, vaccination, and COVID-19. How do we respond to the firehose
of falsehoods? One way to effectively neutralize the influence of
misinformation and pseudoscience is logic-based inoculation. This
applies the idea of vaccination to knowledge—we can build immunity
to misinformation by exposing people to a weakened form of
misinformation. In other words, explain the misleading techniques
used in misinformation. Dr. John Cook will outline his psychological
and critical thinking research into inoculation and how he has used
gamification and cartoons to overcome some of the psychological
hurdles facing scientists and educators.
John Cook is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Climate Change
Communication Research Hub at Monash University. His research focus
is on using critical thinking to build resilience against
misinformation. In 2007, he founded Skeptical Science, a website
that won the 2011 Australia Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement
of Climate Change Knowledge. In 2020, he published the book Cranky
Uncle vs. Climate Change applying critical thinking, inoculation
research, and cartoons to engage and educate readers about climate
misinformation. He recently released the Cranky Uncle game,
combining critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to build
players’ resilience against misinformation. He currently works with
organizations like Facebook and NASA to develop evidence-based
responses to climate misinformation.
Questions from the audience will be entered into Live Chat and then
relayed to the speaker.