A few weeks ago, VICE Canada came to George Mason University to film the Cranky Uncle game being used to teach critical thinking. They’re producing a documentary about climate change and learnt of how the Cranky Uncle project is combining critical thinking, cartoons, and gamification to build resilience against fake news. Due to a happy coincidence, I was giving a guest lecture for CLIM 102, an undergrad climate course taught by Professors Natalie Burls and Kathleen Pegion. They generously agreed to let the film crew come in and film the guest lecture.
The guest lecture was divided into three sections. First, I gave a short lecture about the research informing the design of the game. I talked about the psychological research into how misinformation does damage, and how inoculating messages can prevent that damage. I then discussed the important role of critical thinking in inoculation, and introduced my ever expanding taxonomy of denialist techniques.
Next, the students played a prototype of the Cranky Uncle game for around 25 minutes on their phones or laptops. This wasn’t the fully developed native app version – which we are now in the process of developing (to get updates on the progress of our game development, you can sign up for weekly updates via the right margin). But the prototype contains the essential elements of the Cranky Uncle game: explanations of the techniques of science denial and quiz questions to get the players practicing spotting fallacies.
I was worried that a hovering camera crew would disrupt the class. On the contrary, the students seemed more focused than usual – the accountability of a camera hovering over your shoulder inspired an extra level of attentiveness!
We ended with a role playing exercise, simulating a conversation between a climate denying cranky uncle and someone trying to convince the uncle of the reality of climate change. The idea was that the cranky uncle would use the fallacies explained in the game, and the other person would respond by pointing out where the argument went wrong. To demonstrate for the class, I played a cranky uncle and Professor Burls responded to my cranky arguments, explaining the science and politely pointing out the fallacies in my arguments. Confession time: this is actually my favorite part of doing guest lectures with climate classes and I had to control my competitive urge to go all out to win the argument!
Then the students broke into small groups and did their own role playing. Afterwards, I had the students reflect on what they took from the conversations. One student commented that he found it much easier to be a cranky uncle than the person concerned about climate change. I could relate to this sentiment – when I wrote a denialist blog post for research into the impact of comment threads, I was struck by how easy it was to throw together a 1000-word blog post when there was no constraint to be accurate or coherent (I tapped out the whole thing on an iPad on a train commute home).
Overall, it was a fun and hopefully instructive class – the combination of lecture, gameplay and role playing is an engaging way to introduce critical thinking to students. Special thanks to Professor Burls and Pegion for inviting me to me guest lecture and graciously allowing the VICE film crew to capture the whole experience. The students also seemed quite chuffed to filmed for a documentary, and we’re eagerly looking forward to when the film comes out.
Julie Brigham-Grette
I will definitely order the book! But I want a poster too….I will frame it! I know so many people on it ! It must go on the wall of my office at UMass Amherst Geosciences.
crankyuncle
Sorry, the posters are not for sale. All the Cranky Uncle merch was created specifically for the crowd-funding campaign for the Cranky Uncle game – we have some leftovers of each merch – the intent was to give them away at book events. Unfortunately all upcoming book events have been cancelled! š But the merch isn’t going anywhere and we’ll resume our plan of giving away the posters and other merch down the track when it’s safe to do live events. If there’s interest in me giving a talk at UMass later in the year, happy to discuss the possibility – email me via the contact form if you’d like to discuss further.
Siesel Maibach
great teaching tool. Thanks for sharing.
Muriel Strand
permit me to share my argument for deniers, which i confess has yet to change any minds in the moment.
I have yet to meet a climate change denier who is thinking rationally.
It seems that those who think that increasing CO2 concentrations from fossil fuel combustion and deforestation are not causing most of the climate changes we are beginning to experience are also denying physics and chemistry.
All of the meteorological instrumentation and ice core analysis, and the data they generate which are the basis and calibration of climate models, and all of the theory that informs the climate models, are based on the laws of physics and chemistry. These same scientific principles of physics and chemistry and modeling are also the basis for the weather reports we depend on, reports that have become far more accurate and further into the future than a few decades ago.
Now it may be that the variation in the future scenarios predicted by the models may lead to wishful thinking that the science is uncertain. However, while the future cannot be predicted with complete precision, the measured data and the modeled predictions, based on the laws of physics and chemistry, are nonetheless accurate in supporting the hypothesis that climate disruption is real and caused by human use of fossil fuels.
Also based on these same scientific principles of physics and chemistry are the logic and design of engines, motors, cars and trucks, refrigerators, air conditioners, turbines that generate electricity, etc.
So people who believe that all this evidence fails to demonstrate that human combustion of fossil fuels is the real culprit in the warming of the planet and the melting of the glaciers should be feeling very nervous and fearful whenever they drive, fly, eat food in their fridge, or turn on any electrical appliance, because these could fail catastrophically without warning. The laws of physics and chemistry donāt need no stinking badges.
People who donāt like the laws of physics can go jump off a cliff, and those who donāt like the laws of chemistry can take a bath in chlorine bleach.
crankyuncle
Something I’ve said often (but not in this blog post) is the purpose of my research and the Cranky Uncle project. The primary purpose of the Cranky Uncle game and book is not to change the minds of Cranky Uncles (e.g., the 10% of the population who are dismissive of climate science). There is a lot of research, including my own PhD research, finding that attempting to communicate science to science deniers is invariably unproductive and can even be counter-productive.
Rather, the purpose of my work is to inoculate the other 90% of the population against the misinformation coming from Cranky Uncles. Explaining the techniques of denial, and increasing people’s critical thinking skills, builds public resilience against misinformation.