Spampatti, T., Većkalov, B., Geiger, S. J., van der Linden, S., Lewandowsky, S., & Hornsey, M. (2026). Six insights from climate psychology for the study of misinformation. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/swdrq_v1
Summary
This Comment article argues that misinformation research, a comparatively young field, can accelerate its maturity and policy relevance by drawing on lessons from the more established field of climate psychology. The authors frame climate change and misinformation as distinct but interconnected global crises that share the same underlying tensions: individual versus collective interests, short- versus long-term incentives, and local versus global coordination. Crucially, both fields operate under organised opposition from vested interests — the fossil fuel lobby for climate, and coordinated attacks on misinformation researchers. From this parallel the authors distill six insights spanning intervention design, behavioural measurement, contextual generalisability, systems thinking, company collaborations, and collective organisation among researchers, each accompanied by actionable recommendations.
Key Contributions
- Builds a cross-disciplinary bridge between climate psychology and misinformation studies, treating the older field as a source of transferable lessons.
- Articulates six concrete insights with a structured recommendation table (Box 1) to guide future work.
- Flags underexplored areas: offline misinformation, non-Western contexts, state-driven disinformation, and system-level interventions such as middleware.
- Frames researcher organisation and resilience-building as integral to studying contested, politically targeted topics.
- Advocates methodological practices including intervention tournaments, ManyLabs-style collaborations, and measurement of real-world behaviours.
Methods
A perspective/comment article that synthesises literature across climate psychology and misinformation research. It proceeds by comparative analysis, tracing parallels between the trajectories of the two fields, and distils six insights each paired with actionable recommendations.
Findings
- Fewer than 1% of misinformation studies measure real-world, high-impact behavioural outcomes; the field overemphasises cognitive proxies.
- Political ideology strongly predicts climate attitudes in the US but is a weaker predictor in non-native-English-speaking countries — a caution against overgeneralising.
- Corrections work for some outcomes (belief) and domains (conservation) but less so for others (sharing, climate change).
- Academic reports funded by fossil fuel interests skew favourable toward hazardous energy over renewables, illustrating risks of company-funded research.
- Misinformation research concentrates on US partisanship and online social media, leaving offline and cross-national contexts understudied.
- Organised efforts such as ManyLabs studies and the IPCC show how coordination strengthens evidence quality and resilience.
Connections
This paper’s call to move beyond information-provision and cognitive proxies toward motivational, emotional, and behavioural drivers speaks directly to work testing message-based and dialogue interventions, including AI-driven correction of conspiracy beliefs Costello2024-bg and psychological inoculation approaches van-der-Linden2026-jt. Its emphasis on the organised, vested-interest environment surrounding misinformation research resonates with studies of coordinated attacks on the field Starbird2025-jj and of platform-scale exposure dynamics Gonzalez-Bailon2024-rq. The critique of the field’s US-centric, online focus aligns with cross-national and information-disorder scholarship such as Humprecht2025-ml and Budak2024-ef.
Podcast
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