 It's very challenging to correct misinformation and it is challenging for a number of reasons and one of them are fundamentally cognitive. Many people believe that it might just be as easy as telling people, look this is not true, so you tell them the truth and then they just go on and behave more rationally but unfortunately it doesn't work that way. The very act of trying to change your mind and update your memory is very difficult, it is cognitively challenging and complex. Simple retractions of misinformation are notoriously ineffective, they just don't work. Once a person has processed information and believed it, it's not possible just take it back, it will still stay in memory, it will still influence your reasoning, influence your decision making. We can do experiments in the laboratory where we give people a story about some fictitious event and halfway through the story we say, oh by the way what you just heard was false. And then a little while later we ask people some questions about what they made of this story and it turns out that even though we tell people something, hang on, that was false, they still rely on that information later on to draw inferences from the story. But our research shows that people continue to rely on information even if they demonstrably remember the retraction. So we ask them, was any information retracted in what you received? And even if they say, yep, this and this was retracted and that was found not to be true, the misinformation will still continue to influence the way they reason about the event that they encoded. Why is that? Well it's because as you're listening to a story you're building an event model, a mental model of the event as it is unfolding. Now if you retract a critical piece of information in that mental model then people are left with a gap and they don't like gaps. People prefer complete models because they want to know what's going on, right? They don't want to have a gap in the model not knowing what's going on. So they prefer complete model even if it's incorrect sometimes over an incomplete model. So when you retract a piece of misinformation without offering an alternative explanation you leave people with a gap in the model and they will continue to rely on the only piece of information they have to fill that gap which is the misinformation. Now if you tell people, not only is this false but this is the alternative that is actually true, then they can update their event model. So to give an example, if there's a crime and there's a suspect but then the suspect is found not to be guilty, has an alibi or something, as long as there's no alternative suspect people might still have suspicion and still rely on the misinformation that this person committed the crime. But if you can present an alternative suspect, in particular if it kind of makes sense, if it's plausible, a plausible case, there's a motive why that person was involved in the crime, those kind of things, if it's a plausible alternative that you can present then people no longer will refer to the initial suspect. And that is why it is so crucial when you're dealing with climate change and climate change disinformation. That is why when you rebut something you also have to explain to people why it is that they shouldn't believe this misinformation and what is true instead. Particularly in teaching of physics, it has become clear that to teach someone physics, you often have to get rid of their pre-existing incorrect notions before the better ideas will really take hold. So a typical example is we're so used to dealing with things that are damped by friction that students have really hard time understanding the physics of a planet orbiting a sun where the force is actually perpendicular to the motion. And you can explain to them and say, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then you give them a test question a month later and they go right back to the dumb answer they would have given before they took the course. So what you really have to do is show how their reasoning is wrong first. So if people repeat, you know, deny our arguments as a counter to some simple thing that you say in a discussion about an aspect of climate change, then that's an opportunity to try to set the record straight in terms of what the scientific evidence actually says based on what appears in peer-reviewed scientific journals. When you're designing, you know, a debunking, trying to give people alternative explanations, there's a certain structure that that helps you understand how people process this kind of information. So to use an example, if you want to debunk the myth that global warming is caused by solar activity, so you have the myth that the sun is causing global warming on the one hand. Now the alternative to that is, you know, so sun causes global warming, x causes y, so we want to understand what causes y, what causes global warming. So the alternative explanation is that, hang on, it's not the sun that causes global warming, it's human emissions, carbon dioxide. That's the alternative to the myth, that's what you should provide people. So if you want to convince people that, you know, the sun's causing global warming is the myth and carbon dioxide is causing global warming is the fact, you can use two sets of supporting arguments. One being arguments that the true explanation is in fact true, so you can bring all the arguments why carbon dioxide is actually causing global warming, explain the greenhouse effect and all that. But you can also add supporting evidence why the myth is incorrect, for example, that the sun has been cooling while earth has been warming. So you can use two sets of supporting explanations, one telling people why the fact is true and one telling people, one set telling people why the myth is incorrect. If you present the myth first, then people process it as if it's true and then you tell them it's not true, so they have to undo that in their mind. And that's not a good way of doing things, that's error prone. So it's a lot better to give people the facts first and then warn them, okay, there's also this myth and as soon as you say that people will be cognitively on guard and say, okay, what's following now is misinformation. I'm not going to believe it, because they've already told me that what's going to follow is a myth. So providing an alternative is crucial and making people skeptical of the source of misinformation is crucial, which is why it is so important to explain to the public why people are denying the science and what's behind that and what's driving that. Doing with the jazz hands. No, the jazz hands are great. So people who use their hands are more convincing, did you know that? Oh, I seem to recall hearing that somewhere. I don't know where the people who use jazz hands are.