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Abstract:

Reanalysis of the survey data sets of Lewandowsky, Oberauer, and Gignac (2013) and Lewandowsky, Gignac, and Oberauer (2013) indicates that the conclusions of those articles—that conspiracist ideation predicts skepticism regarding the reality of anthropogenic climate change—are not supported by the data. Nonlinear relationships were overlooked in both analyses, and this resulted in model misspecification. The authors used structural equation modeling (SEM) assuming linear relationships between the variables, and it is essential to test this assumption (Bentler and Chou, 1987, p. 86; Ullman, 2007, p. 683). In this Commentary, we show, using nonparametric local regression, that this assumption does not hold for the relationship between conspiracist ideation and views on climate science, the relationship that produced one of the central claims of both articles and the majority of the press interest (e.g., Corner, 2012; Pearlman, 2012).