Celebrity physicist and science communicator Brian Cox recently found himself on a political talk show panel debating climate science with Malcolm Roberts, a Senator-elect from the right-wing One Nation party. And… Read more »
Don’t like something on Facebook? You can shut down the page. That unfair option is apparently now open to anyone with a large Facebook following. This week a pro-science Facebook… Read more »
Remember when watching just one screen was enough? In 2014 more than fifty per cent of Australians aged between 18 and 49 used the internet while watching TV. This is… Read more »
What causes someone to suddenly embrace conspiracy theories? A new study suggests that people who express distrust in governments on social media are much more likely to embrace irrational beliefs… Read more »
Even when subjects are given numerical information about the proportion of experts on either side of an issue, false balance has a distorting effect on message recipients. Kohler (2016) conducted two experiments… Read more »
Sometimes the easiest way to persuade people is the simplest. Just including a graph as a peripheral cue convinced almost all (96 per cent) subjects of a recent study compared to just… Read more »
What can social media platforms do to limit the amount of damaging information being shared on their sites? The increasing rise of social media has no doubt helped families and… Read more »
Many people are impressed by profound-sounding ‘bullshit’. That’s the finding of a study released this week with the impressive title On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit, published in Judgement and… Read more »
People who are repeatedly exposed to a biased message often quickly disbelieve it according to new research published by the Journal of Communication Research this week. A study of 351… Read more »
Humans are lazy. We do what we can to protect our daily allotment of thinking resources – and that means trying not to invest too much energy into thinking if… Read more »