Fig. 3: How participants’ (N = 6,816) tendency for deliberative versus intuitive thinking affected the effects of the inoculations relying on the cognitive or socio-affective pathway in protecting affect towards climate mitigation action against 20 climate disinformation statements.

a,b, Each panel represents one pathway and each level of tendency for deliberative thinking (CRT-2 score of 3 represented light blue, CRT-2 score of 4 represented in dark blue) and intuitive thinking (CRT-2 score of 0 represented in dark red, CRT-2 score of 1 represented in red). The y axis represents the mean difference in affect towards climate mitigation action from baseline (pre-inoculation and pre-disinformation provision) in the interval between −50 and +10, to better visualize the three-way interaction between pathway, trial and CRT-2 scores (multilevel model three-way interaction contrast: t_two-sided(96,787) = −2.101; P = 0.036; β = −0.02; 95% CI, (−0.03, −0.001)). Values increasing from 0 are related to feeling overall more positively towards climate mitigation action, and values decreasing below 0 related to feeling overall more negatively towards climate mitigation action. The dashed line represents no mean difference from baseline. The x axis represents the trial number, with trial = 0 representing affect pre-intervention, and the numbers 1 to 20 representing each climate disinformation statement received. The light grey bands represent the mean-centred standard errors produced by fitting a linear model. Panel a shows the cognitive pathway (scientific consensus inoculation, transparent communication inoculation and accuracy inoculation; N = 2,508); panel b shows the socio-affective pathway (trust inoculation, moralization inoculation and positive emotions inoculation; N = 2,587). Colour palette by the MetBrewer package¹⁶⁹.