Stephan Lewandowsky

Professor of Cognitive Science, University of Bristol

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. He was an Australian Professorial Fellow from 2007 to 2012, and was awarded a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. He received a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society upon moving to the UK in 2013. He was appointed a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science in 2017. In 2016, he was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education.

His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update information in memory. His most recent research interests examine the potential conflict between human cognition and the physics of the global climate, which has led him into research in climate science and climate modeling.

He has published more than 200 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to corrections of misinformation and what variables determine people’s acceptance of scientific findings.

Personal webpage

Publications

• Gordon, A., Quadflieg, S., Brooks, J.C.W., Ecker, U.K.H., Lewandowsky, S. (2019). Keeping track of ‘alternative facts’: The neural correlates of processing misinformation corrections. NeuroImage. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2019.03.014.
• Lewandowsky, S., Pilditch, T. D., Madsen, J. K., Oreskes, N., & Risbey, J. S. (2019). Influence and seepage: An evidence-resistant minority can affect public opinion and scientific belief formation. Cognition. DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2019.01.011.
• Wiesner, K., Birdi, A., Eliassi-Rad, T., Farrell, H., Garcia, D., Lewandowsky, S., Palacios, P., Ross, R., Sornette, D., & Thébault, K. (2019). Stability of democracies – A complex systems perspective. European Journal of Physics, 40, 014002. DOI: 10.1088/1361-6404/aaeb4d.
• Aird, M. J., Ecker, U. K. H., Swire, B., Berinsky, A. J., & Lewandowsky, S. (2018). Does truth matter to voters? The effects of correcting political misinformation in an Australian sample. Royal Society Open Science, 5, 180593. DOI: 10.1098/rsos.180593.
• Ecker, U. K. H., Lewandowsky, S., Jayawardana, K., & Mladenovic, A. (2018). Refutations of Equivocal Claims: No Evidence for an Ironic Effect of Counterargument Number. Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition. DOI: 10.1016/j.jarmac.2018.07.005.
• Lewandowsky, S., Cowtan, K., Risbey, J. S., Mann, M. E., Steinman, B. A., Oreskes, N., & Rahmstorf, S. (2018). The ‘pause’ in global warming in historical context: (II). Comparing models to observations. Environmental Research Letters, 13, 123007. DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aaf372.
• Lewandowsky, S., & Whitmarsh, L. (2018) Climate communication for biologists: When a picture can tell a thousand words. PLOS Biology, 16, e2006004.
• Oberauer, K., Lewandowsky, S., Awh, E., Brown, G. D. A., Conway, A., Cowan, N., Donkin, C., Farrell, S., Hitch, G. J., Hurlstone, M., Ma, W. J., Morey, C. C., Nee, D. E., Schweppe, J., Vergauwe, E., & Ward, G. (2018). Benchmarks provide common ground for model development: Reply to Logie (2018) and Vandierendonck (2018). Psychological Bulletin, 144, 972-977.
• Oberauer, K., Lewandowsky, S., Awh, E., Brown, G. D. A., Conway, A., Cowan, N., Donkin, C., Farrell, S., Hitch, G. J., Hurlstone, M., Ma, W. J., Morey, C. C., Nee, D. E., Schweppe, J., Vergauwe, E., & Ward, G. (2018). Benchmarks for Models of Short Term and Working Memory. Psychological Bulletin, 144, 885-958.
• Risbey, J. S., Lewandowsky, S., Cowtan, K., Oreskes, N., Rahmstorf, S., Jokimäki, A., & Foster, G. (2018). A fluctuation in surface temperature in historical context: reassessment and retrospective on the evidence. Environmental Research Letters