Scientific Colloquium
October 20,  2021, 4:00 p.m. - PLEASE NOTE SPECIAL TIME
Online Presentation

                JOHN COOK   
                MONASH CLIMATE CHANGE COMMUNICATION RESEARCH HUB

"Using Psychology and Critical Thinking to Build Resilience Against Misinformation " 

The public are overwhelmed with misinformation and conspiracy theories, causing confusion about important issues such as climate change, vaccination, and COVID-19. How do we respond to the firehose of falsehoods? One way to effectively neutralize the influence of misinformation and pseudoscience is inoculation. This applies the idea of vaccination to knowledge - we can build immunity to misinformation by exposing people to a weakened form of misinformation. In other words, explain the misleading techniques used in misinformation. Dr. John Cook will outline his research into inoculation and how he has combined psychology and critical thinking with humor, cartoons, and gamification to overcome some of the psychological hurdles facing scientists and educators.

About the Speaker:

John Cook is a postdoctoral research fellow with the Climate Change Communication Research Hub at Monash University. His research focus is understanding and countering misinformation about climate change, with an emphasis on using critical thinking to build resilience. In 2007, he founded Skeptical Science, a website that won the 2011 Australia Museum Eureka Prize for the Advancement of Climate Change Knowledge. He co-authored the college textbooks Climate Change: Examining the Facts and Climate Change Science: A Modern Synthesis, as well as the book Climate Change Denial: Heads in the Sand. In 2020, he published the book Cranky Uncle vs. Climate Change applying critical thinking, inoculation research, and cartoons to engage and educate readers about climate misinformation. He recently released the Cranky Uncle game with the U.S. creative agency Autonomy, combining critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to build players' resilience against misinformation.

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