Sander van der Linden
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profsanderlinden.bsky.social
Sander van der Linden
@profsanderlinden.bsky.social

Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and Author of FOOLPROOF: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (2023) + The Psychology of Misinformation (2024). Bad News Game.

www.sandervanderlinden.com .. more

Sander L. van der Linden is a Dutch social psychologist and author who is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the psychology of social influence, risk, human judgment, and decision-making. He is known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such as fake news, COVID-19 conspiracy theories, and climate change denial. .. more

Sociology 26%
Political science 26%
Pinned
Who is susceptible to misinformation? We looked at >60,000 people from 24 countries who took our MIST test. Key results: Gen Z are more susceptible & those on the extreme right (but they don't know it).

Led by the brill @yarakyrychenko.bsky.social & Fritz Götz

authors.elsevier.com/sd/article/S...

Great work from @walter4c.bsky.social & co!
New study on LLMs shows that while LLMs & humans converge on similar judgments of reliability of news media, they rely on very different underlying processes.

In delegating, are we confusing linguistic plausibility with epistemic reliability?

The age of "epistemia"

www.pnas.org/doi/epdf/10....
new paper by Sean Westwood:

With current technology, it is impossible to tell whether survey respondents are real or bots. Among other things, makes it easy for bad actors to manipulate outcomes. No good news here for the future of online-based survey research

Let’s hope that’s the explanation

Just casually reading in the 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer that nearly a quarter (28-country average) seem to think that intentionally spreading disinformation (!) or committing violence (!!) is OK as a means to bring about societal change.

www.edelman.com/sites/g/file...
🎉 Excited to share that Content Confusion publishes today! It dives into how news orgs & advertisers—including fossil fuels—blur journalism & ads, fueling disinfo & distrust. Available now! Use code MITP30 today for 30% off at MIT Press. Thanks for the support! 🙏
mitpress.mit.edu/978026255360...
Content Confusion
We often blame social media for the rampant problem of disinformation, but mainstream news media is also at fault. Not only do news outlets disguise paid con...
mitpress.mit.edu
🚨Out in PNAS🚨
Examining news on 7 platforms:
1)Right-leaning platforms=lower quality news
2)Echo-platforms: Right-leaning news gets more engagement on right-leaning platforms, vice-versa for left-leaning
3)Low-quality news gets more engagement EVERYWHERE - even BlueSky!
www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Would have been better!
Yes the BBC edit was poor journalistic form but the research indeed shows that Trump's speech predicted riots, violence, and weapons use on January 6th.
Sad day for the folks who staked their reputations on lab leak conspiracy theories.

www.telegraph.co.uk/global-healt...

Here's my top 5 ways to help friends & family falling down the conspiracy hole:

1. Prebunk - prevention is key

2. Validate their worldview first

3. Reiterate social consensus to highlight extremism

4. Involve ex-conspiracy theorists

5. Keep in touch & prevent isolation

shorturl.at/dmldd
How to help friends and family dig out of a conspiracy theory black hole
Some tried and trusted techniques that might help.
www.technologyreview.com

Yes

It is! But it doesn't seem to protect against misinfo effects, which is somewhat surprising.

Reposted by Diane Coyle

I hear a lot about misinformation as a "symptom" of "distrust". Here we test this & find that while trust is important, it doesn't buffer: misinfo isn't mitigated by high trust. Both misinfo & distrust *independently* predict vaccine denial. It's a disease of its own!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
We "Inoculate" the Brain Against #Misinformation www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/soci... by @profsanderlinden.bsky.social

"...helps people better discern reliable from unreliable news without causing cynicism about media."

Needed: "ability to spot & discuss attempts to manipulate public opinion"
Can We "Inoculate" the Brain Against Misinformation?
Can we trust anything in the age of AI? A new study finds that "psychological inoculation" helps people better discern fact from fiction without causing undue distrust of media.
www.psychologytoday.com

But cognitive antibody generation can be measured both physiologically and with fMRI in a way that maps onto behavioral constructs so it's pretty concrete to me.

For sure - we created some fun games that might lure people in by taking on the role of a grifter, e.g. Bad Vaxx www.badvaxx.com
Bad Vaxx
A wild game about a serious subject
www.badvaxx.com

We tackle that philosophical question here psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org

We hope the field will take forward this more flexible approach to evaluate misinformation interventions using Signal Detection Theory. This was a long time coming & made possible because of the brilliant collabs & computational work from @almogsi.bsky.social & team + @lewan.bsky.social

END
5/5

Bottom line: policy-makers, educators, and practitioners can readily scale inoculation interventions without worrying about whether they might make people too vigilant (if there was such a concern in the current political environment!).

✔️We can help people distinguish signal from noise. 4/5

Unlike prior work, we advance a Bayesian ordinal multi-level model that directly estimates discrimination ability & response bias, respecting the ordinal-level nature of reliability ratings, accounting for item-level & participant-level random effects + explicitly modelling latent variance. 3/5

Can people learn to detect signal amidst all the noise?

✅Using Signal Detection Theory (SDT), we find that prebunking/inoculation interventions consistently improve people's ability to discern between reliable and unreliable news without making people unduly skeptical or credulous!

2/5
New Bayesian *Meta-Analysis* of Psychological Inoculation Against Misinformation! Open-access 👇Thread! Buckle up

www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

✅We find that prebunking interventions improve people's ability to discern between reliable & unreliable news without causing undue skepticism!
"The more misinformation is repeated the more likely people are to believe it."

In the latest episode of The We Society podcast, Will Hutton is joined by @profsanderlinden.bsky.social to discuss how we can inoculate ourselves against misinformation.
🎙️ media.leverhulme.ac.uk/podcast/sand...

Submit your work to the 2026 Cambridge Disinformation Summit! We're going strong, back next year and look forward to receiving top submissions from across the world on systemic risks from technology that impact disinformation. 👇

www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/events/cambr...

@jagolinzer.bsky.social
Three weeks remaining: Call for Papers for the Cambridge Disinformation Summit, 8-10 April 2026, at the University of Cambridge.

Research on systemic risks from technology that affects information streams or the amplification or monetization of disinformation.

www.jbs.cam.ac.uk/events/cambr...
Cambridge disinformation summit (2026) - Cambridge Judge Business School
Connect with Cambridge Judge! Explore our full calendar of upcoming events, learn about our programmes and connect with world-class speakers.
www.jbs.cam.ac.uk

Thanks to @mitchprinstein.bsky.social at APA!