Amid pressure, journal retracts paper on conspiracy theorists

Ars Technica : Because of complaints, the journal Frontiers in Psychology has pulled an article from its website. The article was written in response to an earlier article, which had linked climate deniers and conspiracy theorists, and the responses that original article engendered. In the paper, titled “Recursive fury: Conspiracist ideation in the blogosphere in response to research on conspiracist ideation,” the researchers discuss the subset of people who tend to doubt all scientific findings and ascribe them to conspiracies. Apparently, the article provoked such a backlash from the contrarian community that Frontiers has now permanently retracted it, even though an investigation found no academic or ethical problems with it. The article remains available, however, on the website of the University of Western Australia, where lead author Stephan Lewandowsky was based at the time of the research.