چکیده (انگلیسی):

A growing body of evidence has implicated conspiracist ideation in the rejection of scientific propositions. Internet blogs in
particular have become the staging ground for conspiracy theories that challenge the link between HIV and AIDS, the benefits
of vaccinations, or the reality of climate change. A recent study involving visitors to climate blogs found that conspiracist ideation
was associated with the rejection of climate science and other scientific propositions such as the link between lung cancer
and smoking, and between HIV and AIDS. That article stimulated considerable discursive activity in the climate blogosphere—i.e.,
the numerous blogs dedicated to climate “skepticism”—that was critical of the study . The blogosphere discourse was ideally
suited for analysis because its focus was clearly circumscribed, it had a well-defined onset, and it largely discontinued after
several months. We identify and classify the hypotheses that questioned the validity of the paper’s conclusions using
well-established criteria for conspiracist ideation. In two behavioral studies involving naive participants we show that those
criteria and classifications were reconstructed in a blind test. Our findings extend a growing body of literature that has examined
the important, but not always constructive, role of the blogosphere in public and scientific discourse.