Friday 10. July 2015

JSPP Article on Conspiratorial Thinking Stimulates Public Debate

PsychOpen's Journal of Social and Political Psychology (JSPP) recently published a paper with a remarkable and controversial publication history:

Lewandowsky, S., Cook, J., Oberauer, K., Brophy, S., Lloyd, E. A., & Marriott, M. (2015). Recurrent fury: Conspiratorial discourse in the blogosphere triggered by research on the role of conspiracist ideation in climate denial. Journal of Social and Political Psychology, 3, 142-178. doi:10.5964/jspp.v3i1.443

Lewandowsky et al. argue that there is a link between denial of scientific evidence (e.g., on climate change) and conspiratorial thinking. Prior publications by Lewandowsky and colleagues along this line received very strong public reactions, culminating in the controversial retraction of one Lewandowsky paper by its publisher in 2014.

There are indications that the new paper, published by the Journal of Social and Political Psychology, again will stimulate debate. Within hours of its appearance in PsychOpen, the British newspaper The Guardian launched a story about this research on its website.

Likewise, the popular blog Retraction Watch reported immediately on the newly published JSPP article.

With the publication of this article, JSPP hopes to support open and transparent scientific debate, which is a core principle of all journals published by the open-access publishing platform PsychOpen, and contribute to the wide dissemination of psychological knowledge on urgent social issues of our times.