Sander van der Linden

University of Cambridge | Cam · Department of Psychology

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...

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...

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...

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...

Please note that this is an unpublished pre-print. The manuscript has not yet been subject to peer review.

The extent to which belief in (mis)information reflects lack of knowledge versus a lack of motivation to be accurate is unclear. Here, across four experiments (n = 3,364), we motivated US participants to be accurate by providing financial incentives for correct responses about the veracity of true and false political news headlines. Financial incen...

Although the spread of misinformation is a pervasive and disruptive global problem, extant research is skewed towards “WEIRD” countries leaving questions about how to tackle misinformation in the developing world with different media and consumption patterns unanswered. We report the results of a game-based intervention against misinformation in In...

Measurement is at the heart of scientific research. As many-perhaps most-psychological constructs cannot be directly observed, there is a steady demand for reliable self-report scales to assess latent constructs. However, scale development is a tedious process that requires researchers to produce good items in large quantities. In this tutorial, we...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of ethnic minorities again. Health inequity within ethnic minorities has been explained by factors such as higher prevalence of underlying disease, restricted access to care, and lower vaccination rates. In this study, we investigated the effect of cultural tailoring of communicators and media out...

Replication is an important “credibility control” mechanism for clarifying the reliability of published findings. However, replication is costly, and it is infeasible to replicate everything. Accurate, fast, lower cost alternatives such as eliciting predictions from experts or novices could accelerate credibility assessment and improve allocation o...

Recently, a Comment in Nature Human Behaviour recommended the collection of large-scale behavioural datasets through public data observatories to enable system-level climate action. Computational social science (CSS) approaches offer important tools to use these large-scale datasets to facilitate climate action.

Large-scale societal issues such as public health crises highlight the need to communicate scientific information, which is often uncertain, accurately to the public and policy makers. The challenge is to communicate the inherent scientific uncertainty — especially about the underlying quality of the evidence — whilst supporting informed decision m...

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)...

Does clear and transparent communication of risks, benefits, and uncertainties increase or undermine public trust in scientific information that people use to guide their decision-making? We examined the impact of reframing messages written in traditional persuasive style to align instead with recent “evidence communication” principles, aiming to i...

Psychological inoculation has proven effective at reducing susceptibility to misinformation. We present a novel storytelling approach to inoculation against susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy (dmeta‐analysis = 0.82), a known cognitive predictor of conspiracy beliefs. In Study 1 (Pilot; N = 161), a narrative inoculation (vs. control) reduced...

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an excess of information of varying quality, including false or misleading information and/or ambiguous 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 benefi...

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 su...

Prior research has demonstrated that communicating the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening is an effective way to increase public understanding and engagement with the issue. However, less is known about (1) how persuasive this message is to oppositional audiences, (2) how long message effects last over time, and (3)...

Social and behavioral science research proliferated during the COVID-19 pandemic, reflecting the substantial increase in influence of behavioral science in public health and public policy more broadly. This review presents a comprehensive assessment of 742 scientific articles on human behavior during COVID-19. Two independent teams evaluated 19 sub...

Prior research has demonstrated that communicating the scientific consensus that human-caused climate change is happening is an effective way to increase public understanding and engagement with the issue. However, less is known about (1) how persuasive this message is to oppositional audiences, (2) how long message effects last over time, and (3)...

Understanding how vaccine hesitancy relates to online behavior is crucial for addressing current and future disease outbreaks. We combined survey data measuring attitudes toward the COVID-19 vaccine with Twitter data in two studies (N1 = 464 Twitter users, N2 = 1,600 Twitter users) with pre-registered hypotheses to examine how real-world social med...

Online misinformation continues to have adverse consequences for society. Inoculation theory has been put forward as a way to reduce susceptibility to misinformation by informing people about how they might be misinformed , but its scalability has been elusive both at a theoretical level and a practical level. We developed five short videos that in...

The unchecked spread of misinformation is recognised as an increasing threat to public, scientific, and democratic health. Online networks are a contributing cause of this spread, with echo chambers and polarization indicative of the interplay between the selective search behaviours of users, and the reinforcement processes within the system those...

Young people are the leaders of the future. Many young people are concerned and overwhelmed about the impacts of climate and ocean change and are emerging as advocates for action. However, challenges including social injustice, climate anxiety, nature disconnectedness, and fake news limit their ability to protect their future from the impacts of cl...

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerability of ethnic minorities, secondary to lower vaccination rates, higher prevalence of underlying disease and restricted access to care. We investigated the effect of cultural tailoring of communicators and media outlets, respectively, in an influenza vaccination campaign in the Netherlands. A total of...

Despite widespread scientific consensus on climate change, conspiracy theories about its causes and consequences are flourishing. In response, psychological research has started to investigate the consequences of espousing conspiracy beliefs about climate change. Although some scholars maintain that the evidence for a causal link between belief in...

An emerging strategy in climate movements is to build solidarity with other social movements to mobilize climate action—but can this backfire? In a pre-registered experiment (N=541 Indian adults), we investigated the effect of Greta Thunberg's tweets expressing solidarity with the Indian farmers’ protest on Indians’ receptivity to her climate advoc...

In recent years, numerous psychological interventions have been developed to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. Inoculation theory has become an increasingly common framework for reducing susceptibility to both individual examples of misinformation (issue-based inoculation) and to the techniques and strategies that are commonly used to mislea...

Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one individual to another. Inoculation theory offers a logical basis for developing a psychological "vaccine" against misinformation. We discuss the origins of inoculation theory, starting with its roots in the 1960s as a "vaccine for brainwash," and detail the major theoretical an...

Misinformation presents a significant societal problem. To measure individuals’ susceptibility to misinformation and study its predictors, researchers have used a broad variety of ad-hoc item sets, scales, question framings, and response modes. Because of this variety, it remains unknown whether results from different studies can be compared (e.g.,...

According to recent work, subtly nudging people to think about accuracy can reduce the sharing of COVID-19 misinformation online (Pennycook et al., 2020). The authors argue that inattention to accuracy is a key factor behind the sharing of misinformation. They further argue that “partisanship is not, apparently, the key factor distracting people fr...

Background Vaccination coverage needs to reach more than 80% to resolve the COVID-19 pandemic, but vaccine hesitancy, fuelled by misinformation, may jeopardize this goal. Unvaccinated older adults are not only at risk of COVID-19 complications but may also be misled by false information. Prebunking, based on inoculation theory, involves ‘forewarnin...

Misinformation can present a significant threat to public health. Given the scope of the problem, researchers have proposed and developed a variety of approaches to reduce the spread of and susceptibility to health-related misinformation. We review 3 high-profile psychological solutions used to combat the spread of health misinformation: post-hoc c...

The meat industry is a leading cause of climate change in the Western world, and while reducing meat consumption has often been studied as a health behavior, it is equally important to understand its significance as a pro-environmental behavior. In a national sample of the United Kingdom (N = 737, Time 1, N = 468, Time 2) we sought to evaluate to w...

The viral spread of misinformation poses a threat to societies around the world. Recently, researchers have started to study how motivated reasoning about news content influences misinformation susceptibility. However, because the importance of source credibility in the persuasion process is well-documented, and given that source similarity contrib...

This work surveys over 14,000 respondents in seven countries to assess support for government action to protect the environment, and for different policies at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Baseline results reveal overwhelming support for action. At least nine out of ten respondents in six countries, and 79% in the USA, a...

Liberals and conservatives are divided in their judgements about the accuracy of true and false news. Yet it is unclear whether this partisan divide reflects genuine differences in knowledge, or whether it can be overcome if people are motivated to be accurate. Across three experiments (n = 2,381), we motivated participants to be accurate by giving...

Conservationists have long sought to reduce consumer demand for products from overexploited wildlife species. Health practitioners have also begun calling for reductions in the wildlife trade to reduce pandemic risk. Most wildlife‐focused demand reduction campaigns have lacked rigorous evaluations and thus their impacts remain unknown. There is thu...

Liberals and conservatives are divided in their judgements about the accuracy of true and false news. Yet it is unclear whether this partisan divide reflects genuine differences in knowledge, or whether it can be overcome if people are motivated to be accurate. Across three experiments ( n = 2,381), we motivated participants to be accurate by givin...

According to recent work, subtly nudging people to think about accuracy can reduce the sharing of COVID-19 misinformation online (Pennycook et al., 2020). The authors argue that inattention to accuracy is a key factor behind the sharing of misinformation. They further argue that “partisanship is not, apparently, the key factor distracting people fr...

This survey study measures how opinions on trusting government and misconceptions about the COVID-19 vaccine are associated with vaccine hesitancy in the Netherlands.

Chinn and Hart (2021) argue that their experiment on the effects of communicating the scientific consensus on climate change revealed “mixed” and “inconsistent findings”. We note that Chinn and Hart (2021) provide clear and consistent evidence that the scientific consensus message has positive indirect effects on climate beliefs, attitudes, and sup...

Background The quality of evidence about the effectiveness of non-pharmaceutical health interventions is often low, but little is known about the effects of communicating indications of evidence quality to the public. Methods In two blinded, randomised, controlled, online experiments, US participants (total n = 2140) were shown one of several vers...

In this report, we explore the role that psychology and behavioral science can play in the mitigation of online misinformation.To do so, we first discuss how to define “misinformation”, and how it relates to various other commonly used terms such as “disinformation” and “fake news”. Next, we examine the psychology of correcting misinformation: what...

Previous research has confirmed the prominent role of group processes in the promotion and endorsement of disinformation. We report three studies on a psychological framework derived from integrated threat theory—a psychological theory which describes how perceived threat leads to group polarization and prejudice—composed of the following construct...

The adoption of sustainable lifestyles plays a key role in mitigating climate change. Previous research has found that social norms—beliefs about what most people do and approve of—profoundly impact individual engagement in pro-environmental behaviour. However, little is known about personal and contextual factors that moderate social norm interven...

A growing body of research indicates that transparent communication of statistical uncertainty around facts and figures does not undermine credibility. However, the extent to which these findings apply in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic--rife with uncertainties--is unclear. In a large international survey experiment, (Study 1; N = 10,519) we r...

This work surveys over 14,000 respondents in seven countries to assess support for government action to protect the environment, and for different policies at the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow. Baseline results reveal overwhelming support for action. At least nine out of ten respondents in six countries, and 79% in the USA, a...

Processing information on the negative consequences of climate change can have unrelated side-effects such as increased outgroup derogation. Previous research suggests differing theoretical explanations for these “generalization” effects such as buffering existential anxiety. Across two pre-registered experiments (N = 1031; USA & UK), we examine wh...

Chinn and Hart (2021) conclude that communicating the scientific consensus on climate change causes psychological reactance. Here we identify several issues that cast doubt on these findings. First and foremost, the authors replicate the finding from van der Linden, Maibach, et al. (2019) that consensus messages do not increase perceptions of manip...