The Human Risk Podcast14 Jan 2023

Professor Sander van der Linden on Misinformation

Why do people fall for misinformation, and what can we do to prevent it? On this episode, I’m speaking to Professor Sander van der Linden of Cambridge University. He’s the author of a new book called ‘Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity’.

Sander is often referred to as Cambridge University’s Teacher against the Dark Arts. More formally, he’s the 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. His research interests centre around the psychology of human judgment and decision-making. In particular, he is interested in the social influence and persuasion process and how people are influenced by (mis)information and gain resistance to persuasion through psychological inoculation.

In our discussion, we explore the nature of misinformation, why it is so prevalent and why we’re all prone to falling for it. We also discuss how social media networks propagate it and why our natural instinct that de-bunking things that aren’t true is actually ineffective in combating it. Rather than this, Sander proposes a solution of pre-bunking, and during our conversation, he explains what it is, how it works and why it is an effective vaccine against the virus of misinformation.

As you'll hear on the show, Sander has a fabulous way of explaining complex science in very easy-to-understand ways, and his book comes highly recommended.

To find out more about Sander and how you can pre-order ‘Foolproof’ visit his personal website: https://www.sandervanderlinden.com/

His faculty webpage is: https://www.psychol.cam.ac.uk/people/sander-van-der-linden

You’ll find him on Twitter here: https://twitter.com/sander_vdlinden

Finally, to pre-order my new book ‘Humanizing Rules: Bringing Behavioural Science to Ethics & Compliance’ visit www.linktr.ee/humanizingrules

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