About that "Psychological Science" non-scientific study:
| A Truly Bad Study
August 29, 2012, 3:22 pm
Imagine this study: An academic who is a strong Democrat wants to do a study to discover if Republicans suffer from a psychological tendency to bizarre conspiracy theories. OK, the reasonable mind would already be worried about this. The academic says his methodology will be an online survey of the first 1000 people who reply to him from the comment sections of certain blogs. This is obviously terrible -- a 12-year-old today understands the problems with such online surveys. But the best part is that he advertises the survey only on left-wing sites like the Daily Kos, telling anyone from those heavily Democratic sites that if they self-identify as Republicans, they can take this survey and their survey responses will be published as typical of Republicans. Anyone predict what he would get?
It is hard to believe that even in this post-modern academic world, that such a piece of garbage could get published. But it did. The only difference is that the academic was a strong believer in global warming, he was writing about skeptics, and sought out survey respondents only on strong-believer sites. What makes this story particularly delicious is the juxtaposition of the author's self-appointed role as defender of science with his atrocious scientific methodology. The whole story is simply amazing, and you can read about it at JoNova's site.
In one way, it is appropriate to have this published in a psychology journal, as it is such a great example of the psychological need for confirmation. You can just see those climate alarmists breathing a little easier - "we don't have to listen to those guys, do we?" No need for debate, no need for analysis, no need for thought. Just immediate dismissal of their arguments because they come from, well, bad people. Argumentum ad hominem, indeed.
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2012/08/a-truly-bad-study.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+CoyoteBlog+%28Coyote+Blog%29
Lewandowsky – Shows “skeptics” are nutters by asking alarmists to fill out survey
I‘m putting on a conservative, understated hat. This could be the worst paper I have seen — an ad hom argument taken to its absurd extreme, rebadged as “science”.
Professorial fellow Stephan Lewandowsky thinks that skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate believe any kind of conspiracy theory, including that the moon landings never happened, that AIDS is not due to HIV, and that smoking doesn’t cause cancer. But he didn’t find this out by asking skeptics who are “greatly involved” in the climate debate or by reading their popular sites. He “discovered” this by asking 1,000 visitors to climate blogs. Which blogs? He expertly hunted down skeptics, wait for it… here:
This is the point where the question has to be asked: Did Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac really think they would get away with it? Did none of the reviewers at “ Psychological Science“ think to ask if the “sampling” would affect the results?
The paper is titled:
“NASA faked the moon landing — Therefore (Climate) Science is a Hoax:
An Anatomy of the Motivated Rejection of Science”
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press) Psychological Science
Faked the Moon landing? Not only do skeptics agree that the moon landing was real, two skeptics actually went to the moon and took photos (that’ll be Harrison Schmidt and Buzz Aldrin). Since many guys with years of top NASA service are skeptics too why doesn’t Lewandowsky ask them if they faked it? This is where cumulative nonsense takes us: the golden path to cosmic inanity.
Given that the survey audience was mostly alarmist (see the blog list above), and the survey’s intent was clear to commenters on those sites (see their comments below), its possible the team has “discovered” that some alarmist readers are prepared to fake the answers that they’d really like to see. The survey was so transparently designed to link climate skeptics with “conspiracy nutters” it would hardly be surprising if a percentage of alarmists readers of those blogs understood what was required, and dutifully performed.
Commenters could see what the survey was “getting at”:
pointer | August 30, 2010 at 11:42 am
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If he really wanted to know what skeptics thought, surely he would have asked the main skeptical bloggers? Stephan claims he asked five skeptical sites “who all refused to promote it”, but I hear he has so far refused to reveal which blogs turned him down. He didn’t ask me, nor Jeff at The Air Vent, not Benny Peiser of GWPF, Tom Nelson, not Viv Forbes of CarbonSense and he didn’t ask Anthony Watts.
UPDATE: Adept at the game of not asking the right people, Stephan also did not ask Simon at Australian Climate Madness, Jennifer Marohasy, David Stockwell at Niche Modeling, Donna La Framboise, Steve Goreham at ClimateScienceAmerica, Lucia Lilegren — The Blackboard, ’Luboš Motl’ at The Reference Frame, or, and this truly defies belief, how could he not send the link to Marc Morano of Climate Depot, the man who posts every insult aimed at skeptics for all the world to see?
UPDATE #2: The mystery grows. Stephan Lewandowsky could only afford 5 emails to skeptics — but so far we can’t find the sites he must have carefully chosen. Roger Pielke Snr knows nothing of the survey, Bob Ferguson of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) wasn’t asked, Craig Idso of CO2Science and Chris Horner of the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) weren’t either.
UPDATE #3: Roger Pielke Jnr was likewise not given the opportunity to host a link, and Roy Spencer gets a gold star from me for replying in a flash with this. 
“Nope, it doesn’t look like I was contacted. Good thing…as an ex-NASA employee, I’m prohibited from discussing the moon “landings” .  “
UPDATE #4: Andrew Montford of Bishop Hill and Joseph Bast at the Heartland Institute confirm they weren’t asked either.
It’s as if Stephan did not want to know what real skeptics think?
How many posts or articles or links to Lady Di, HIV doubt, and claims that smoking does not cause cancer would be found in a 2 minutes search of the highest traffic web sites above, or any of those sites? Would that be zero or is it less?
But it was aimed at skeptical blogs…
In the press release he tells us who this research was focused on:
Researchers from The University of Western Australia have examined what motivates people who are greatly involved in the climate debate to reject scientific evidence. (my bolding)
Who else is “greatly involved” in the climate debate and “rejects science”? Obviously he means the leading skeptics and those who agree with them. Equally obviously he doesn’t mean science in the same way that Bohr, Newton and Maxwell did. They would turn in their graves at the idea that a consensus of experts was evidence. He means rejecting Lewandowsky-Science, which is his consensus-fallacy-view-of-the-world. (Dear Stephan, please name the evidence that “deniers” deny?)
Lewandowsky et al discuss “bloggers” and their influence and found that:
…”free-market ideology was an overwhelmingly strong determinant of the rejection of climate science. It also predicted the rejection of the link between tobacco and lung cancer and between HIV and AIDS. Conspiratorial thinking was a lesser but still significant determinant of the rejection of all scientific propositions examined, from climate to lung cancer.”
So he’s inferring a link between readers of major skeptical blogs and dubious science, even though he didn’t survey readers of those blogs, and didn’t find articles about those topics on those blogs either. (How big a grant do you need to run a search engine over Watts Up looking for “Princess Diana”?) He’s also trying to badge “free market” thinkers as “deniers” who reject science, though he apparently didn’t survey the major free market blogs either.
Somehow the “professorial fellow” apparently didn’t read the comments, or think of the possibility that what he really surveyed was 1,000 alarmists who pretended to respond as skeptics. Or if he did think of it, I can’t find a mention of that in the paper. He describes the sites listed above as “diverse”. This, below, is the only discussion of “audience” in the paper. He thinks those sites have “diverse” audiences.
Participants
Visitors to climate blogs voluntarily completed an online questionnaire between
August and October 2010 (N = 1377). Links were posted on 8 blogs (with a pro-science
science stance but with a diverse audience); a further 5 \skeptic” (or \skeptic”-leaning)
blogs were approached but none posted the link.
This study has been picked up by journalists who ought to have been asking a few scientific questions about it, instead of lapping it up: The Guardian by Adam Corner last month, and The Telegraph yesterday.
It is noted at Bishop Hill and Lubos Motl even has his own “poll” running.
Ultimately the answer about planetary thermodynamics is not going to be found in “evidence” from internet surveys.
It is time to start asking the ARC questions about what kind of science they are funding.
REFERENCE: (If you could call it that)
Lewandowsky, S., Oberauer, K., & Gignac, C. E. (in press). NASA faked the moon landing—therefore (climate) science is a hoax: An anatomy of the motivated rejection of science.. Psychological Science.
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/08/lewandowsky-shows-skeptics-are-nutters-by-asking-alarmists-to-fill-out-survey/
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