Vaccinating Against Fake News
- Mon 10th Feb 2025
- 19:30-21:00
- Wolfson Lecture Theatre, Churchill College, Storey's Way, Cambridge, CB3 0DS
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Much like a viral contagion, misinformation can spread rapidly from one mind to another. Moreover, once lodged in memory, falsehoods are difficult to correct. Inoculation theory offers a natural basis for developing a psychological ‘vaccine’ against the spread of fake news and misinformation. Specifically, in a series of lab and field studies, I’ll show that it is possible to pre-emptively “immunize” people against disinformation about a wide range of topics by pre-exposing them to severely weakened doses of the techniques that underlie its production. This process of ‘prebunking’ helps people cultivate cognitive antibodies in both simulated and real social media environments. I’ll showcase several interventions we developed and evaluated—with public health authorities and social media companies—to help citizens around the world recognize and resist unwanted attempts to influence and mislead.
Professor Sander L. van der Linden, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge
Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He has won numerous awards for his research on human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS). He co-developed the award-winning fake news game, Bad News and regularly advises governments, public health authorities, and social media companies on how to combat the spread of misinformation. He is ranked among the top 1% of highly cited social scientists worldwide and has published over 175 research papers. His research is regularly covered in outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, NPR, and Rolling Stone. Before joining Cambridge, he held academic positions at Princeton, Yale, and the LSE. His is the author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity which was named of Nature's Top Science Books and the recipient of the Best Book Prize from the American Psychological Association, the British Psychological Society, the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and the Harvard Shorenstein Centre. His latest book, the Psychology of Misinformation was named a Cambridge Press Book of the Year.
Attending lectures
The lecture will be preceded by a short presentation from a CSAR PhD Award Winner.
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Dr. Joe Hutton, Department of Pathology, University of Cambridge