 People tend to believe some pretty weird things from NASA faking the moon landing to pharmaceutical companies conspiring with government departments to keep people sick and climate change, obviously. I mean, why does that happen? Why do people believe strange things like that? Well, again, what happens is that people tend to focus selectively on what they consider to be the evidence. So they may focus on one data point in the case of climate change, one thermometer somewhere that has been showing cooling for the last 10 years, let's say. That's certainly true, but it is only one of about a billion different measurements that tell us that the climate is changing. And yet by focusing on just this one convenient piece of evidence that is protecting people's worldview, they can be absolutely convinced that they're right. Look here, there's one thermometer, it's cooling, and they're ignoring absolutely everything else. And it is extremely difficult to get people to go beyond that one piece of evidence because doing so would imply that they have to perhaps change their opinion, and that's a very difficult thing for people to do. One of the major drivers, I think, in the maintenance of people's beliefs and the formation of their beliefs is the role of the media. Now, the media clearly plays a large role. You've encountered that yourself? Absolutely. Yes. Could you tell us a bit about that? Well, that's a very mixed bag and not always a nice story because there's an abundance of evidence to suggest that certain segments of the media have done a very poor job informing the public about a number of different issues from the mythical weapons of mass destruction in Iraq to climate change. So the media are culpable to some extent in providing an informational landscape that isn't always reliable to put it mildly. And that is a serious problem, especially now that we have the ability for people to choose their own media in a sense by focusing on certain sources on the internet. Information has become far more fragmented. People have become more immersed in their own sort of bubble of information they like, and that is what they're consuming to the exclusion of everything else. And there's a lot of research done on that, that people have become more encapsulated, more polarized in general for that reason because people follow their own instincts and they want to hear things that they like. And so they're drifting further apart depending on their initial preferences. That's a serious problem. So climate change deniers probably don't read left, Green Left Weekly or the scientific literature. You don't have to reheat Green Left Weekly. A few people do, but they wouldn't read the scientific literature and the scientific literature isn't being reported accurately by certain media organs. Unfortunately, we do have a lot of evidence about that, that there is just a complete disjoint between the scientific literature and the media coverage. And yeah, and that is a serious problem, it's a serious political problem. So people seem to have a, I think we've called it an anti-establishment bias in that sense that the government, the scientists, people are trying to conspire or are trying to further their own interests at the expense of the general public. You've encountered that before, I assume? Well, that's a common element of conspiracy theories is that it's the official version is always wrong, whether the official version is something that a government is putting out or a scientific body, or in the case of vaccinations, the pharmaceutical industry. Conspiracy theories always involve a rejection of an official account. And they always presume nefarious intent behind the official position. The government or the pharmaceutical industry or scientists, they're out to screw you, basically. That is always the case. And so it's just one way for people to reject a fact is by making up a conspiracy surrounding it, because that's one way out. If you cannot believe or do not want to believe that tobacco is bad for you because you're a chain smoker, well then what are you going to do? How are you going to justify that? Well, one answer is to say that all the medical scientists are conspiring because they want to deny you this fund, so they're making up all this stuff. So that is the purpose of conspiracy theories. That is why people believe in conspiracies. And getting back to your previous point, citing their grandfather who smoked it every day of his life. Exactly. Exactly. They're cherry picking one piece of supporting evidence while they're ignoring absolutely everything else. That's also a characteristic of conspiratorial thinking. My name is Stephen. I think about misinformation.