This seminar is given by Professor Stephan Lewandowsky FAcSS, a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol, and organised by students of the Science and Solutions for a Changing Planet DTP.
Please register for your ticket here.
Imagine a dystopian world in which it is not medical knowledge but a free-for-all opinion market on Twitter that determines whether a newly emergent strain of avian flu is really contagious to humans. There are signs that public discourse is evolving in this direction: Terms such as “post-truth” and “fake news”, largely unknown until 2016, have exploded into the media and into public discourse.
In this seminar, Professor Lewandowsky explores the implications of the growing abundance of misinformation in the public sphere, how it influences people and how to counter it. He argues that misinformation in the post-truth era can no longer be considered a localized “error” that can be corrected with appropriate communication tools. Instead, he suggests that responses to the post-truth era must include technological solutions that incorporate psychological principles, an interdisciplinary approach that we describe as “technocognition”.
Biography
Professor Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. His most recent research interest is in exploring the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of global climate change, which has led him into collaborative research in climate science and climate modeling. He holds an honorary position as a Visiting Scientist at the CSIRO Oceans, Atmosphere laboratory in Hobart, Tasmania.