insistent quest for the meaning of things. The question is one that faces "everyman" from the child's first awareness of the mystery of life to the adult's apprehension of the mystery of death. As one existential writer put it, "I know only two things?one, that I will be dead someday, two, that I am not dead now. The only question is what shall I do be tween those two points." Does nihilistic literature and philosophy have the answer?wallowing in nothingness? Are the Madison Avenue thought controllers right in their claim that the time for the individual has passed and that we should conform to collectivities because there is safety in numbers? Shall we follow the "beat generation" and the "angry young men" who say we should conform to non-conformity in the name of pure rebelliousness and non-constructive creativity? Or should we just capitu late with the "positive thinkers" who say that all this concern about what things mean is too nerve-wracking, and that the problems of life can best be met by taking existential tranquilizers in the form of sugar coated mottos? The way in which contemporary man is clutching at straws in his search for meaning is symptomatic both of the depth of his concern and of the inadequacy of the answers which are emerging. In the material which follows, I will develop this theme primarily by elaboration of relevant material on the problems of reality and value, and the psy chology of perception and personality. Since the search for meaning ultimately implies an effort to arrive at something irreducible, it seems reasonable to open the inquiry with the question of knowledge and reality.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/27827428.pdf

The search for meaning.

Social media has increasingly enabled “fake news” to circulate widely, most notably during the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. These intentionally false or misleading stories threaten the democratic goal of a well-informed electorate. This study evaluates the effectiveness of strategies that could be used by Facebook and other social media to counter false stories. Results from a pre-registered experiment indicate that false headlines are perceived as less accurate when people receive a general warning about misleading information on social media or when specific headlines are accompanied by a “Disputed” or “Rated false” tag. Though the magnitudes of these effects are relatively modest, they generally do not vary by whether headlines were congenial to respondents’ political views. In addition, we find that adding a “Rated false” tag to an article headline lowers its perceived accuracy more than adding a “Disputed” tag (Facebook’s original approach) relative to a control condition. Finally, though exposure to the “Disputed” or “Rated false” tags did not affect the perceived accuracy of unlabeled false or true headlines, exposure to a general warning decreased belief in the accuracy of true headlines, suggesting the need for further research into how to most effectively counter false news without distorting belief in true information.

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2Fs11109-019-09533-0.pdf

Real Solutions for Fake News? Measuring the Effectiveness of General Warnings and Fact-Check Tags in Reducing Belief in False Stories on Social Media

Energy’s central place in economic, political and social systems—and the broad impacts that energy choices have on the natural world and public health—mean that new technologies often spur public reactions. Understanding these public responses and their drivers is important, as public support can influence new technology adoption and deployment. Here I review the literature on public perceptions of and responses to a wide range of new energy technologies. Unlike previous reviews that tend to focus on particular technologies or types of technologies, this Review covers both large-scale energy infrastructure projects, such as utility-scale wind and solar, fossil fuel extraction and marine renewables, as well as small-scale, ‘consumer-facing’ technologies such as electric vehicles, rooftop solar and smart meters. This approach reveals broad trends that may facilitate communication between policymakers, technologists and the public, and support the transition to a more sustainable energy system. Public responses to new energy technologies can influence adoption and deployment. This Review brings together research on public perceptions of and responses to a wide range of energy technologies around the themes of technology, people, place and process.

https://par.nsf.gov/servlets/purl/10099333

Public perceptions of and responses to new energy technologies

Misinformation has been identified as a major contributor to various contentious contemporary events ranging from elections and referenda to the response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only can belief in misinformation lead to poor judgements and decision-making, it also exerts a lingering influence on people’s reasoning after it has been corrected — an effect known as the continued influence effect. In this Review, we describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that lead people to form or endorse misinformed views, and the psychological barriers to knowledge revision after misinformation has been corrected, including theories of continued influence. We discuss the effectiveness of both pre-emptive (‘prebunking’) and reactive (‘debunking’) interventions to reduce the effects of misinformation, as well as implications for information consumers and practitioners in various areas including journalism, public health, policymaking and education. Misinformation is influential despite unprecedented access to high-quality, factual information. In this Review, Ecker et al. describe the cognitive, social and affective factors that drive sustained belief in misinformation, synthesize the evidence for interventions to reduce its effects and offer recommendations for information consumers and practitioners. 

/pdf/the-psychological-drivers-of-misinformation-belief-and-its-2x2d8re6.pdf

The psychological drivers of misinformation belief and its resistance to correction

This paper provides an analysis of public attitudes toward fracking use and policies with an eye toward factors that help us account for differing levels of support. Using data from a national survey of American adults, we found that women and people residing in urban areas are slightly more inclined to oppose fracking and to favor more regulation in terms of drilling operations and company chemical disclosure requirements than men or people living in rural areas. Our key findings, however, are that opposition to fracking and support for current or increased levels of regulation are strongly related to Democratic Party identification and to pro-environmental policy attitudes. We conclude by suggesting that a tendency for people to view fracking as an environmental rather than an energy issue has potentially important implications for the implementation of locally based regulatory requirements.

Energy Abundance or Environmental Worries? Analyzing Public Support for Fracking in the United States

Public opinion on energy development: the interplay of issue framing, top-of-mind associations, and political ideology

Scholars have recently suggested that communicating levels of scientific consensus (e.g. the percentage of scientists who agree about human-caused climate change) can shift public opinion toward the dominant scientific opinion. Initial research suggested that consensus communication effectively reduces public skepticism. However, other research failed to find a persuasive effect for those with conflicting prior beliefs. This study enters this contested space by experimentally testing how different levels of consensus shape perceptions of scientific certainty. We further examine how perceptions of certainty influence personal agreement and policy support. Findings indicate that communicating higher levels of consensus increases perceptions of scientific certainty, which is associated with greater personal agreement and policy support for non-political issues. We find some suggestive evidence that this mediated effect is moderated by participants' overall trust in science, such that those with low trust in science fail to perceive higher agreement as indicative of greater scientific certainty.

Philip S. Hart

Papers

Public opinion on energy development: the interplay of issue framing, top-of-mind associations, and political ideology

In consensus we trust? Persuasive effects of scientific consensus communication.