Lieu, R., Hayes, O. R., & Cook, J. (2025). Testing the impact of fallacies and contrarian claims in climate change misinformation. British Journal of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.70049
Summary
This paper experimentally tests which features of climate misinformation drive its persuasive and polarizing power, distinguishing between what a piece of misinformation claims (its content) and how it argues (its rhetorical logic). Using two complementary taxonomies — the content-based CARDS scheme of contrarian claims and the logic-based FLICC scheme of rhetorical fallacies — the authors exposed a representative US sample to fabricated Facebook posts that systematically crossed five content categories with six fallacy types. The central finding is an asymmetry: the logical fallacy underlying a post had no measurable effect, whereas the content category did, with attacks on climate solutions emerging as the most persuasive and most politically polarizing. The work argues for prioritizing debunking (and automated fact-checking) around solutions denial and attacks on scientists.
Key Contributions
- First experimental comparison of climate misinformation impact across two orthogonal frameworks — content-based CARDS and logic-based FLICC.
- Empirical identification of solutions-denial and attacks-on-scientists as the most polarizing forms of climate misinformation.
- Evidence-based prioritization guidance for fact-checkers, debunkers, and automated AI fact-checking systems.
- A publicly available stimulus set of 30 crossed misinformation examples and open data on OSF for replication.
- Refinement of prior findings on the asymmetric vulnerability of conservative audiences to climate misinformation.
Methods
An online experiment with an approximately representative US adult sample (N=1311) recruited via Walr. The design was a 5 (CARDS content category) × 6 (FLICC fallacy: misrepresentation, oversimplification, red herring, false equivalence, cherry picking, slothful induction) crossed structure plus a control, yielding 31 conditions. Stimuli were 30 fabricated Facebook posts, each cell a unique fallacy/content combination. Outcomes were perceived veracity (5-item scale), user-interaction likelihood (like/comment/share), and climate beliefs (it’s real, it’s us, it’s bad). Analyses used Kruskal–Wallis H tests, linear regression with political ideology as a moderator, and simple-slopes analysis.
Findings
- Perceived veracity varied significantly across the 30 individual stimuli (χ²(29)=60.83, p<.001, η²=.026), but no effect appeared on user interaction or overall climate belief.
- Grouped by FLICC fallacy, no significant differences emerged on any dependent variable.
- Grouped by CARDS category, category 4 (“climate solutions won’t work”) was rated significantly more trustworthy, accurate, and credible than other categories.
- Most veracious individual myths included “No consensus on sea level rise,” “Polar bears are improving,” and “China emits more”; least veracious included “climate change is like religion.”
- Political ideology significantly interacted with CARDS categories 4 and 5, indicating these were the most polarizing.
- Among conservatives, exposure to category 4 produced significantly lower climate belief than control; no such effect appeared among liberals or moderates.
Connections
This paper extends the logic-based inoculation and debunking tradition, connecting closely to work on prebunking and psychological resistance to misinformation such as van-der-Linden2026-jt and to LLM-based correction efforts like Costello2024-bg. Its emphasis on content-specific climate misinformation interventions relates to Spampatti2026-kx, while its finding of asymmetric conservative susceptibility ties into the partisan-polarization literature represented here by Voelkel2026-lc.
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