As CA readers are aware, the Lewandowsky survey was conducted at stridently anti-skeptic blogs (Deltoid, Tamino etc.) and numerous responses purporting to be from “skeptics” were actually from anti-skeptics fraudulently pretending to be skeptics. To date, most of the focus has been on the fake responses in which respondents, pretending to be “skeptics”, deceptively pretended to believe in conspiracies that they did not really believe in. In today’s post, I’ll discuss another style of (almost certain) deception in which Lewandowsky respondents gave fake/deceptive responses to the Free Market questions.

In today’s post, I’m going to compare answers from the Lewandowsky survey to answers from the WUWT survey carried out by A. Scott. For the purposes of today’s post, I’m using the version that I downloaded (1554 responses); more responses came in later. I’m not convinced that the additional responses would ensure more reliability. At some point, I’ll take a look at the tranche of additional responses, but there are enough responses for the purposes of today’s comparison to the Lewandowsky survey (1145 retained responses).

Unfortunately, the WUWT survey added a “Don’t Know” category, complicating direct comparisons. In today’s post on Free Market questions, I’ve therefore examined the Strong Agreement and Strong Disagreement answers, which appear least likely to be affected by the addition of a Don’t Know category.

The Lewandowsky survey (at anti-skeptic sites) predictably showed greater incidence of “zealous” anti-free market sentiment, but, much less predictably, it also showed significantly greater incidence of super-zealous pro-free market sentiment. My diagnosis is that these super-zealots are fake responses by warmists acting out their caricature of skeptics, much along the lines of the Bat Cave villain caricature in Gleick’s forged strategy memo.

First of all, the incidence of multiple strong disagreement with the six free market propositions is noticeably more prevalent in the Lewandowsky sample of anti-skeptic blogs than in the WUWT survey: this can be see in the graphic below (normalized to counts per 1000 respondents) where the stronger right hand tail in the Lewandowsky survey counts respondents with multiple strong disagreements with the FM propositions. This result is unsurprising, since the Lewandowsky survey is primarily of anti-skeptics; I suspect that all parties would probably hypothesize that anti-skeptics are likely to be more pro-big government and more pro-public sector unions (another formulation of Lewandowsky’s “free market”.)

The next graphic shows something against this “expected” pattern. It shows the count (per 1000) of strong agreements with the FM propositions in the two surveys. Unsurprisingly, the count of respondents who did not strongly agree with any of the FM propositions (the zero count on the left) was larger in the survey at the anti-skeptic blogs than at WUWT. However, take a look at the right hand tail: this is the important feature. Zero WUWT respondents strongly agreed with 5 or more FM propositions, whereas 35 Lewandowsky respondents purported to strongly agree with 5 or more (with a further disproportionate Lewandowsky respondents purporting to believe in 4 or more.) In my opinion, all these 48 Lewandowsky responses are fake.

The discrepancy becomes even more pronounced when expressed in terms of the “skeptic” population in each survey as shown below. The incidence of ‘skeptics’ purporting to strongly agree with 5 or more FM propositions is 133 per 1000 in the Lewandowsky population, but zero in the WUWT population.

The sample sizes are large enough that the differences are statistically significant. (With a little thought, this could be expressed relative to a statistical test, but the statistical test is merely putting a number on the stark difference in normalized counts.)

Which is more plausible? That the Lewandowsky survey attracted 48 free-market superzealots, none of whom showed up in the WUWT survey? Or that these 48 responses were fake responses by anti-skeptics holding a Bat Cave caricature of skeptics? In my opinion, the latter is vastly more likely. Unfortunately for Lewandowsky, his failure to ensure data integrity renders him unable to give any assurance on the matter.

This pattern of deceptive response does not overlap with the high-conspiracy count responses (very incompletely analysed in Lewandowsky’s blog post.) Only 5 of the 48 free market superzealots were also conspiracy superzealots, so the impact of the two classes of (almost certainly) fake responses are additive.

In Lewandowsky’s criticism of the Bray-von Storch survey, Lewandowsky told his fellow SkS insiders that its results were worthless because Bray and von Storch had been unable to ensure data integrity. A criticism that applies even more forcefully to the Lewandowsky survey, which is clearly contaminated with fake/fraudulent responses for the free market questions as well as the conspiracy questions.

As I’ve said before, I do not believe that Lewandowsky was personally complicit in the initial submission of fake/fraudulent responses, though his decision to survey skeptics at anti-skeptic blogs was unwise, if not reckless. however, in my opinion, once the problem with fake/fraudulent responses was forcefully drawn to Lewandowsky’s attention (by Tom Curtis as well as me), Lewandowsky himself should have notified the journal and asked that the article be re-reviewed with particular emphasis on whether he had adequately ensured data integrity. Had he done so, Lewandowsky would have an answer to criticism that he had failed to act properly once he was aware of potential problems. I think that Lewandowsky’s decision to sneer at criticism will prove unwise.



