IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/plo/pone00/0192025.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

The effect of ad hominem attacks on the evaluation of claims promoted by scientists

Author

Listed:
  • Ralph M Barnes
  • Heather M Johnston
  • Noah MacKenzie
  • Stephanie J Tobin
  • Chelsea M Taglang

Abstract

Two experiments were conducted to determine the relative impact of direct and indirect (ad hominem) attacks on science claims. Four hundred and thirty-nine college students (Experiment 1) and 199 adults (Experiment 2) read a series of science claims and indicated their attitudes towards those claims. Each claim was paired with one of the following: A) a direct attack upon the empirical basis of the science claim B) an ad hominem attack on the scientist who made the claim or C) both. Results indicate that ad hominem attacks may have the same degree of impact as attacks on the empirical basis of the science claims, and that allegations of conflict of interest may be just as influential as allegations of outright fraud.

Suggested Citation

  • Ralph M Barnes & Heather M Johnston & Noah MacKenzie & Stephanie J Tobin & Chelsea M Taglang, 2018. "The effect of ad hominem attacks on the evaluation of claims promoted by scientists," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 13(1), pages 1-15, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0192025
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0192025
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0192025
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0192025&type=printable
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1371/journal.pone.0192025?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0192025. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: plosone (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://journals.plos.org/plosone/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.