Explanatory Refutation Texts Increase Epistemic Trust in Climate Scientists and Anthropogenic Global Warming Acceptance

Abstract

Trust is fundamental to the non-experiential learning of complex scientific knowledge that informs societal decision-making (e.g., about climate change). Global warming (GW) beliefs and attitudes often reflect one’s trust in climate scientists as reliable information sources, so fostering GW knowledge includes addressing misconceptions that can inhibit such trust. Using a pretest-posttest control group design (with an extra posttest-only treatment group that eliminated experimenter-demand concerns), we herein showed that two (long/short) brief explanatory, persuasive, refutation texts addressing climatologists’ research practices increased learners’ (a) trust in climate scientists (and scientists overall) and (b) acceptance that anthropogenic GW is occurring and concerning. Our experiment’s results support prior findings that people revise their GW beliefs––without polarization––upon encountering crucial, valid, and germane, information. These findings expand empirical evidence demonstrating the utility of directly confronting epistemic misconceptions (e.g., about scientists’––especially climatologists’—reward structures) using explanatory, persuasive, refutation texts.