Sander van der Linden

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
• Professor (Full) at University of Cambridge

Ideological belief systems arise from epistemic, existential, and relational motives to reduce uncertainty, threat, and social discord. According to system justification theory, however, some ideologies—such as those that are conservative, religious, and legitimizing of the status quo—are especially appealing to people whose epistemic, existential,...

This study investigates the long-term effectiveness of active psychological inoculation as a means to build resistance against misinformation. Using 3 longitudinal experiments (2 preregistered), we tested the effectiveness of Bad News, a real-world intervention in which participants develop resistance against misinformation through exposure to weak...

There has been increasing concern with the growing infusion of misinformation, or “fake news”, into public discourse and politics in many western democracies. Our article first briefly reviews the current state of the literature on conventional countermeasures to misinformation. We then explore proactive measures to prevent misinformation from find...

Social science scholars routinely evaluate the efficacy of diverse climate frames using local convenience or nationally representative samples1–5. For example, previous research has focused on communicating the scientific consensus on climate change, which has been identified as a ‘gateway’ cognition to other key beliefs about the issue6–9. Importa...

The spread of misinformation poses a considerable threat to public health and the successful management of a global pandemic. For example, studies find that exposure to misinformation can undermine vaccination uptake and compliance with public-health guidelines. As research on the science of misinformation is rapidly emerging, this conceptual Revie...

The global spread of misinformation poses a serious threat to the functioning of societies worldwide. But who falls for it? In this study, 66,242 individuals from 24 countries completed the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST) and indicated their self-perceived misinformation discernment ability. Multilevel modelling showed that Generation Z,...

Meta‐analyses have demonstrated how inoculation interventions increase the detection of misinformation, but their scalability has remained elusive. To address this, Study 1 (pre‐registered; N = 1,583) tested the efficacy of three short inoculation videos (prebunks) against three common manipulation tactics used in misinformation: (1) polarization,...

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies crosscountry differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most count...

Misinformation poses a substantial societal challenge, including in the Global South. However, to date, the vast majority of research into understanding and countering misinformation has taken place in the Global North, and the practical, methodological, and financial complications of doing research with underrepresented groups in Global South coun...

An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or inoculate people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effective...

An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or inoculate people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effective...

As large language models (LLMs) enter the mainstream, aligning them to foster constructive dialogue rather than exacerbate societal divisions is critical. Using an individualized and multicultural alignment dataset of over 7,500 conversations of individuals from 74 countries engaging with 21 LLMs, we examined how linguistic attributes linked to con...

This 68-country survey (n = 71,922) examines how people encounter information about science and communicate about it with others, identifies cross-country differences, and tests the extent to which economic and sociopolitical conditions predict such differences. We find that social media are the most used sources of science information in most coun...

An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or inoculate people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effective...

Science is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in scientists can help decision makers act on the basis of the best available evidence, especially during crises. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public trust in scientists. We interrogated these concerns w...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as public health, new technologies or climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science-society nexus acros...

Replications are important for assessing the reliability of published findings. However, they are costly, and it is infeasible to replicate everything. Accurate, fast, lower-cost alternatives such as eliciting predictions could accelerate assessment for rapid policy implementation in a crisis and help guide a more efficient allocation of scarce rep...

Ambitious and legitimate climate action requires extensive public discussion, with social media serving as an important forum. This study analyzes over 6.4 million English tweets on ‘climate action’ from 2021, posted by the general public (1.25 million users; two-thirds of tweets) and over 3,000 climate scientists working on climate change on the t...

Social identity biases, particularly the tendency to favor one’s own group (ingroup solidarity) and derogate other groups (outgroup hostility), are deeply rooted in human psychology and social behavior. However, it is unknown if such biases are also present in artificial intelligence systems. Here we show that large language models (LLMs) exhibit p...

Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of the claim that misinformation is not a significant societal problem. We argue that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut the two main...

Do minds have immune systems? In this article, we remove several obstacles to treating the question in a rigorously scientific way. After giving the hypothesis that minds do have such subsystems a name—we call it mental immune systems theory—we show why it merits serious consideration. The issue hinges on our definition of an immune system, so we e...

There are differing perspectives on the roles that social-perceptual and individual-difference factors play in explaining susceptibility to misinformation. With quota-representative samples from the U.S. ( n = 492), the U.K. ( n = 600), Poland ( n = 558), and Germany ( n = 490), we ran a comprehensive test of four social-perceptual factors (i.e., s...

PurposeThis study examines how educational orientation, actively open-minded thinking (AOT), and democratic ideals relate to misinformation discernment in an era of misleading media content.MethodologyIn an online survey, nationally representative adults (n=3060) and university students (n=1097) completed measures assessing misinformation discernme...

Extreme weather events are becoming more frequent and intense due to climate change. This might affect support for climate policies, especially if more people attribute these events to climate change. Yet little is known about whether actual impacts of extreme events and subjective attribution of these events to climate change influence climate pol...

There is considerable debate over whether and how social media contributes to polarization. In a correlational study (n1 = 1,447) and two digital field experiments (n2 = 494, n3 = 1,133), we examined whether (un)following hyperpartisan social media influencers contributes to polarization and misinformation sharing. We found that incentivizing Twitt...

Despite the global presence of social media platforms, the reasons why people like and share content are still poorly understood. We investigate how group identity mentions and expressions of ingroup solidarity and outgroup hostility in posts correlate with engagement on Ukrainian social media (i.e., shares, likes, and other reactions) before and a...

The spread of misinformation has become a global problem. But who falls for it? In this study, 66,242 individuals from 24 countries completed the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST) and indicated their self-perceived misinformation discernment ability. Multilevel modelling showed that Generation Z, non-male, less educated, and more conservati...

Given the profound societal impact of conspiracy theories, probing the psychological factors associated with their spread is paramount. Most research lacks large-scale behavioral outcomes, leaving factors related to actual online support for conspiracy theories uncertain. We bridge this gap by combining the psychological self-reports of 2506 Twitte...

Communicating the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is real increases climate change beliefs, worry and support for public action in the United States. In this preregistered experiment, we tested two scientific consensus messages, a classic message on the reality of human-caused climate change and an updated message additionally...

Gamification is a promising approach to reducing misinformation susceptibility. Previous research has found that “inoculation” games such as Bad News and Harmony Square help build cognitive resistance against misinformation. However, recent research has offered two important nuances: a potentially inadvertent impact of such games on people’s evalua...

Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some...

In recent years, many kinds of interventions have been developed that seek to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. In two preregistered longitudinal studies (N1 = 503, N2 = 673), we leverage two previously validated "inoculation" interventions (a video and a game) to address two important questions in misinformation interventions research: (1)...

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the potential impacts of generative AI on (mis)information and three information-intensive domains: work, education, and healthcare. Our goal is...

In today’s polarized political climate, researchers who combat mistruths have come under attack and been labelled as unelected arbiters of truth. But the fight against misinformation is valid, warranted and urgently required.

Misleading claims from credible sources can be more damaging than blatant falsehoods

This JAMA Insights in the Communicating Medicine series explores the concept of “prebunking,” a psychological inoculation technique that could help prevent the spread of misinformation.

The spread of misinformation through media and social networks threatens many aspects of society, including public health and the state of democracies. One approach to mitigating the effect of misinformation focuses on individual-level interventions, equipping policymakers and the public with essential tools to curb the spread and influence of fals...

Psychological inoculation interventions, which seek to pre-emptively build resistance against unwanted persuasion attempts, have shown promise in reducing susceptibility to misinformation. However, as many people receive news from popular, mainstream ingroup sources (e.g., a left-wing person consuming left-wing media) which may host misleading or f...

Extremist organisations often use psychological manipulation techniques to persuade new members to join. Previous research has found that people can be made more aware of such techniques through psychological “inoculation” interventions, which seek to foster resistance against unwanted persuasion attempts. We conducted a field experiment (N = 191)...

Although the serious game Bad News has been used to inoculate citizens against misinformation, it has not been formally evaluated in traditional classrooms. We therefore evaluated its impact on 516 upper-secondary Swedish students playing individually, paired, or with the whole class. Results show that students improved their ability to discern man...

The spread of misinformation poses a substantial challenge, including in countries in the Global South. However, to date, the vast majority of research into understanding and countering misinformation has taken place in the Global North, and the practical, methodological, and financial complications of doing research with underrepresented groups in...

Misinformation poses a substantial societal challenge, including in the Global South. However, to date, the vast majority of research into understanding and countering misinformation has taken place in the Global North, and the practical, methodological, and financial complications of doing research with underrepresented groups in Global South coun...

The spread of misinformation is a pressing societal challenge. Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news-sharing decisions. However, researchers disagree on whether accuracy-prompt interventions work for U.S. Republicans/conservatives and whether partisanship moderates the effect. In this preregiste...

We conducted a large-scale online experiment to examine whether climate change messaging can induce emotions and motivate pro-environmental action. We study how exposure to explicit positive (‘warm glow’) and negative (‘cold prickle’) emotional appeals as well as a traditional social norm communication affects pro-environmental action. We find that...

Recent academic debate has seen the emergence of a position that misinformation is not a significant current problem. We believe that the arguments used to support this minimizing position are flawed, particularly if interpreted (e.g., by policymakers or the public) as evidence suggesting that misinformation can be safely ignored. Here, we rebut th...

Most people who regularly use the Internet will be familiar with words like “misinformation,” “fake news,” “disinformation,” and maybe even “malinformation.” It can appear as though these terms are used interchangeably, and they often are. However, they don’t always refer to the same types of content, and just because a news story or social media p...

This chapter discusses the individual-level and societal-level factors that underlie why people believe and share misinformation, including analytical and open-minded thinking, political partisanship, trust, political and affective polarization, psychological appeal, repetition, emotion, and intergroup sentiment. We look at misinformation belief an...

This chapter discusses how governments and supernational institutions have tried to tackle misinformation through laws and regulations. Some countries have adopted new legislation making the spread or creation of misinformation illegal; this has often been met with criticism by human rights organizations, for instance, because governments cannot ac...

Examples of misinformation having real-world consequences aren’t hard to find, and misinformation has been a hugely important topic of discussion in popular media, among politicians, and in scientific research. This chapter discusses whether misinformation poses a problem for society: for example, by damaging the democratic process or fostering pot...

This chapter looks at if and how the consumption and sharing of (mis)information are shaped by the environments that we use to communicate. Most people have heard of terms such as “echo chambers” and “filter bubbles,” but what are they exactly? And how prevalent and problematic are they in our internet-addled times? The question of whether echo cha...

This chapter reviews the evidence behind the anti-misinformation interventions that have been designed and tested since misinformation research exploded in popularity around 2016. It focuses on four types of intervention: boosting skills or competences (media/digital literacy, critical thinking, and prebunking); nudging people by making changes to...

Misinformation has only recently seen a surge in research interest and public attention, but the concept itself is much older. Not only have humans manipulated and lied to each other since the dawn of language, but animals are also known to use manipulation to achieve certain goals. This chapter provides a historical overview of misinformation. It...

This chapter discusses the ups and downs of the authors’ program of research on misinformation, which has involved creating “fake news” games and videos to reduce susceptibility to various common types of manipulation. Despite some successes, there are also substantial nuances to their work: limited cross-cultural generalizability, in some cases an...

Although misinformation exposure takes place within a social context, significant conclusions have been drawn about misinformation susceptibility through studies that largely examine judgements in a social vacuum. Bridging the gap between social influence research and the cognitive science of misinformation, we examine the mechanisms through which...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic 1,2. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low pub...

Effectively reducing climate change requires marked, global behavior change. However, it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and a...

Science is integral to society because it can inform individual, government, corporate, and civil society decision-making on issues such as climate change. Yet, public distrust and populist sentiment may challenge the relationship between science and society. To help researchers analyse the science society nexus across different cultural contexts,...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Scientific information is crucial for evidence-based decision-making. Public trust in science can help decision-makers act based on the best available evidence, especially during crises such as climate change or the COVID-19 pandemic. However, in recent years the epistemic authority of science has been challenged, causing concerns about low public...

Mis- and disinformation pose substantial societal challenges, and have thus become the focus of a substantive field of research. However, the field of misinformation research has recently come under scrutiny on two fronts. First, a political response has emerged, claiming that misinformation research aims to censor conservative voices. Second, some...

The book begins by overviewing the timeline of the pandemic and how it affected life, followed by a discussion of the ethics and legal aspects of the pandemic. It then discusses behaviors during the pandemic (e.g., social distancing, protesting) before discussing experiences during the pandemic (e.g., prejudice, well-being, stress, joblessness, fam...

Vaccine misinformation endangers public health by contributing to reduced vaccine uptake. We developed a 10-minute online game to increase people's resilience to vaccine misinformation. Building on inoculation theory, the Bad Vaxx game exposes people to weakened doses of four different manipulation techniques commonly used in vaccine misinformation...

Generative artificial intelligence, including chatbots like ChatGPT, has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the probable impacts of generative AI on four critical domains: work, education, health, and information. Our goal...

This study (N = 755) explores the efficacy of an emotion-fallacy inoculation in reducing susceptibility to emotionally misleading news and investigates the impact of persuasive social cues on its effectiveness. Results show that inoculation significantly reduces the perceived reliability of misinformation (d = 0.23), enhances participants’ confiden...

Recent research has demonstrated that actively open-minded thinking (AOT)—a cognitive thinking style characterized by the active avoidance of myside bias and overconfidence in one’s conclusions—is related to lower misinformation susceptibility. Furthermore, logic-based inoculation has proven effective at conferring resistance against misinformation...

Generative artificial intelligence, including chatbots like ChatGPT, has the potential to both exacerbate and ameliorate existing socioeconomic inequalities. In this article, we provide a state-of-the-art interdisciplinary overview of the probable impacts of generative AI on four critical domains: work, education, health, and information. Our goal...

Scientific evidence regularly guides policy decisions¹, with behavioural science increasingly part of this process². In April 2020, an influential paper³ proposed 19 policy recommendations (‘claims’) detailing how evidence from behavioural science could contribute to efforts to reduce impacts and end the COVID-19 pandemic. Here we assess 747 pandem...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211719.][This corrects the article DOI: 10.1098/rsos.211719.].

Uncertainty around statistics is inevitable. However, communicators of uncertain statistics, particularly in high-stakes and potentially political circumstances, may be concerned that presenting uncertainties could undermine the perceived trustworthiness of the information or its source. In a large survey experiment (Study 1; N = 10 519), we report...

Climate change is one of the greatest threats to humanity, necessitating immediate action to combat its consequences. While there is a nearly unanimous consensus of scientists that climate change is human-caused, misinformation doubting its causes continue circulating. In this study, we examine whether misinformation has a negative effect on percep...

Effectively reducing climate change requires dramatic, global behavior change. Yet it is unclear which strategies are most likely to motivate people to change their climate beliefs and behaviors. Here, we tested 11 expert-crowdsourced interventions on four climate mitigation outcomes: beliefs, policy support, information sharing intention, and an e...

The spread of misinformation is a pressing societal challenge. Prior work shows that shifting attention to accuracy increases the quality of people’s news sharing decisions. However, researchers disagree whether accuracy prompt interventions work for U.S. Republicans/conservatives and whether partisanship moderates the effect. In this pre-registere...

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. Before coming to Cambridge, he held posts at Princeton and Yale University. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment and decision-mak...

Building misinformation resilience at scale continues to pose a challenge. Gamified “inoculation” interventions have shown promise in improving people’s ability to recognize manipulation techniques commonly used in misinformation, but so far few interventions exist that tackle multimodal misinformation (e.g., videos, images). We developed a game ca...

Research suggests that minority-group members sometimes are more susceptible to misinformation. Two complementary studies examined the influence of perceived minority status on susceptibility to misinformation and conspiracy beliefs. In study 1 (n = 2140), the perception of belonging to a minority group, rather than factually belonging to it, was m...

Gamification is a promising approach to reducing misinformation susceptibility. Previous research has found that “inoculation” games such as Bad News and Harmony Square help build cognitive resistance against misinformation. However, recent research has offered two important nuances: an inadvertent impact of such games on people’s evaluation of non...

Political polarization is a barrier to enacting policy solutions to global issues. Social psychology has a rich history of studying polarization, and there is an important opportunity to define and refine its contributions to the present political realities. We do so in the context of one of the most pressing modern issues: climate change. We synth...

Communicating the scientific consensus that climate change is real increases climate change beliefs, worry, and support for public action in the US. Recent science goes beyond the mere reality of climate change—there is now broad agreement that climate change is a crisis. In this preregistered 27-country experiment (N = 10,527), we tested two scien...

Although emotions play a crucial role in understanding and encouraging sustainable behavior and decision-making, many open questions currently remain unanswered. In this review, we advance three broad areas of particular theoretical and applied importance that affective science and emotion researchers could benefit from engaging with; (1) “ sustain...

In recent years, many kinds of interventions have been developed that seek to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. In this preregistered longitudinal study (N = 503), we leverage a previously validated, video-based “inoculation” intervention to address two important questions in misinformation interventions research: 1) whether displaying addit...

Interest in the psychology of misinformation has exploded in recent years. Despite ample research, to date there is no validated framework to measure misinformation susceptibility. Therefore, we introduce Verification done, a nuanced interpretation schema and assessment tool that simultaneously considers Veracity discernment, and its distinct, meas...

Background: An infodemic is excess information, including false or misleading information, that spreads in digital and physical environments during a public health emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic has been accompanied by an unprecedented global infodemic that has led to confusion about the benefits of medical and public health interventions, with s...

Susceptibility to believing false or misleading information is associated with a range of adverse outcomes. However, it is notoriously difficult to study the link between susceptibility to misinformation and consequential real-world behaviors such as vaccine uptake. In this preregistered study, we devise a large-scale socio-spatial model that combi...

Although the COVID-19 vaccine has the potential to end the pandemic, the simultaneous infodemic has led to people questioning the safety of vaccines, lowered vaccination intentions, and given rise to dangerous health-related beliefs. Unfortunately, misinformation can be highly persuasive and misleading to the extent that even the most critical read...

An increasing number of real-world interventions aim to preemptively protect or “inoculate” people against misinformation. Inoculation research has demonstrated positive effects on misinformation resilience when measured immediately after treatment via messages, games, or videos. However, very little is currently known about their long-term effecti...

Behavioral change is essential to mitigate climate change. To advance current knowledge, we synthesize research on interventions aiming to promote climate change mitigation behaviors in field settings. In a preregistered second-order meta-analysis, we assess the overall effect of 10 meta-analyses, incorporating a total of 430 primary studies. In ad...