Scientific consensus communication

When legitimate scientific consensus exists on an issue (e.g., vaccine safety, climate change, vaccine efficacy), communicating this consensus to the public can shift perception of the expert agreement and downstream beliefs. The "gateway belief model" suggests that reducing the gap between perceived and actual consensus leads to cascading changes in related beliefs. Consensus messaging is a depolarizing strategy: research shows it can shift opinions across the political spectrum, though it is vulnerable to undermining by competing misinformation and can be enhanced through inoculation strategies.

Key papers

• van der Linden et al. (2017) — Inoculating the Public against Misinformation about Climate Change — tests consensus messaging on climate change; consensus message alone increases perceived agreement by 20 percentage points, but is neutralized by competing misinformation; general and detailed inoculation messages preserve one-third to two-thirds of the effect