 When I started Skeptical Science in 2007, my approach was simple, debunk climate myths with research from scientific journals. I'd been doing that for several years when I got an email from a psychology professor, Stefan Lewandowski. He said, I might be interested in some research by Norbert Schwartz on the psychology of debunking. I have vivid memories of reading that study with a growing feeling of horror. That research found if you debunk myths in the wrong way, you risk reinforcing the misconception rather than removing it. I compared this incorrect method to what I was doing at Skeptical Science. They were the same. That email turned out to be a life-changing moment. I resolved to read every piece of research that focused on the psychology of debunking. What I learnt was that debunking myths is not as simple as you might think. To understand what happens when you correct the misconception, you need to understand how people think. As we learn new information, we build mental models of how the world works. That's because we think inside our heads, and the world is mostly outside of our heads. Having a complete working mental model means we understand something. In such a model, all the different parts of the model fit together like cogs. However, you can think you understand something, but your understanding is actually wrong. In that case, a misconception that a person believes to be true gets integrated into their mental model. When you debunk a myth, it's like reaching into someone's mind and plucking out that dodgy part of their mental model. You create a gap in their model. However, people feel uncomfortable when their mental models are incomplete. They want to feel as if they know what's going on. They'll even prefer a complete but false model to an incomplete but more accurate model. For that reason, after you tell someone that a myth is wrong, the myth can come back to fill the gap again. People continue to be influenced by the myth because they want to avoid gaps in their mental models. This is known as a continued influence effect of misinformation. So when you debunk a myth, you also need to fill the gap you just created. You need to replace the myth with a fact to complete the model again. For example, if there's a suspect in a murder trial, it's not enough to provide evidence that the suspect is innocent. To prove the suspect innocent, at least in people's minds, you need to provide an alternative suspect. How does this translate to practical action? Well, your alternative fact needs to be plausible. It needs to fit into the person's mental model as well or better than the myth did. What do I mean by that? A myth is like a cog in a person's mental model interlocking with all the other cogs. Your alternative fact needs to fit in with all the other cogs. In fact, it should fit even better than the myth. The person should feel as if they understand the world better after the debunking. Also, to help people let go of the myth, it's generally a good idea to put the emphasis on the facts, not the myth. You don't want to make your debunking all about the myth, which helps keep it alive. Using the myth as a headline makes people more familiar with the myth. When people read one of these myths versus facts flyers that state something like, the side effects of the flu vaccine are worse than the flu, that's a myth. As time passes, the details fade, and all they remember is the myth, yeah, something about the side effects of the flu vaccine. That's because the intended correction repeated and emphasized the myth, making it more familiar. And the more familiar people are with a piece of information, the more likely they will believe it's true. So really, you want people to become more familiar with the facts rather than the myth. Use the facts as your headline. Start by talking about the facts. There's a wonderfully concise summary of all this research in a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heade. The book explores what makes a message sticky and memorable. Finally, they address the question, how do you unstick an idea? How do you debunk a sticky myth? Their answer is a sticky piece of advice that can be summarized like this. Fight sticky myths with stickier facts. I call this the golden rule of debunking. It's a challenging idea. This means that it's not enough to communicate the science. We need to communicate the science in a compelling, sticky manner. How do we do that? The Heath brothers have advice on that front as well. They even have a sticky acronym for it, success. They find that sticky ideas share some of the following six characteristics. Sticky science needs to be simple. This can be difficult when the science is complex. But to paraphrase a quote from Nobel Prize winner Ernest Rutherford, if you can't explain your physics simply, it's probably not very good physics. Science is stickier when it's unexpected. If your science is counter-intuitive, embrace it. Use the unexpectedness of the science to take people by surprise. Science needs to be credible. That's why it's a good idea to source your information from the most credible source of information available, peer-reviewed scientific journals. To be sticky, your science needs to be concrete. How do you do this when science is often abstract or statistical by nature? Simple clear visuals are one way to make scientific data more concrete. But one of the most powerful tools for communicators to make your science concrete is to use analogies or metaphors. For example, a common way to explain how carbon moves through the climate system is to use the metaphor of water flowing into a bath with the plug pulled out. Rather than build a new concept from scratch, work with concepts already existing in people's minds. Emotional messages are sticky and more persuasive. They're easier to remember and more likely to be shared. But how do you do that when scientists are trained to remove the motion from their science? Well, even scientists are still human. It can be quite powerful expressing our passion for science or communicating how our results affect us personally. Lastly, stories are much stickier in memory than numbers and abstract concepts. Try to shape your science into a compelling narrative. So after I read the psychological research into debugging, I changed how myths were debunked on the Skeptical Science website. With our headlines that repeated the myth, we replaced the myth with a sticky fact. In the text, we made the facts more prominent than the myths. The way we do this at Skeptical Science is to start each debugging with a green box containing the key fact. And in that box, we express the fact in a single sticky sentence. Making your science sticky is a crucial part of debunking a myth, but your job isn't done yet. Half of the debunking is explaining why the science is right. The other half is explaining why the myth is wrong.