Black Summer arson: Examining the impact of climate misinformation and corrections on reasoning

Abstract

Climate misinformation has been identified as a barrier to mitigative action. One prominent example occurred when the 2019/2020 “Black Summer” bushfires in Australia were blamed on arson. This claim is cognitively attractive because of its simplicity and was widely publicised at the time, but also thoroughly debunked. In two experiments, we examined the impact of a fictional misleading article implicating arson as the primary cause of the Black Summer fires on Australian (Exp. 1, N = 509) and Canadian (Exp. 2, N = 506) participants' reasoning, associated donation behaviour, and climate change attitudes. The misinformation significantly influenced reasoning about the Black Summer and future f..