24 research outputs found
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The language of conspiracy: A psychological analysis of speech used by conspiracy theorists and their followers on Twitter
This paper analyzes key psychological themes in language used by prominent conspiracy theorists and science advocates on Twitter, as well as those of a random sample of their follower base. We conducted a variety of psycholinguistic analyses over a corpus of 16,290 influencer tweets and 160,949 follower tweets in order to evaluate stable intergroup differences in language use among those who subscribe or are exposed to conspiratorial content and those who are focused on scientific content. Our results indicate significant differences in the use of negative emotion (e.g., anger) between the two groups, as well as a focus, especially among conspiracy theorists, on topics such as death, religion, and power. Surprisingly, we found less pronounced differences in cognitive processes (e.g., certainty) and outgroup language. Our results add to a growing literature on the psychological characteristics underlying a “conspiracist worldview.” </jats:p
Addressing climate change with behavioral science: a global intervention tournament in 63 countries
Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an effortful tree-planting behavioral task. Across 59,440 participants from 63 countries, the interventions’ effectiveness was small, largely limited to nonclimate skeptics, and differed across outcomes: Beliefs were strengthened mostly by decreasing psychological distance (by 2.3%), policy support by writing a letter to a future-generation member (2.6%), information sharing by negative emotion induction (12.1%), and no intervention increased the more effortful behavior—several interventions even reduced tree planting. Last, the effects of each intervention differed depending on people’s initial climate beliefs. These findings suggest that the impact of behavioral climate interventions varies across audiences and target behaviors