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
Yes
October 30, 2025 at 5:19 PM
It is! But it doesn't seem to protect against misinfo effects, which is somewhat surprising.
October 30, 2025 at 9:22 AM
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.
October 28, 2025 at 10:35 PM
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
October 28, 2025 at 6:49 PM
We tackle that philosophical question here psycnet.apa.org/fulltext/202...
APA PsycNet
psycnet.apa.org
October 28, 2025 at 4:16 PM
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
October 28, 2025 at 11:49 AM
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
October 28, 2025 at 11:49 AM
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
October 28, 2025 at 11:49 AM
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
October 28, 2025 at 11:49 AM
Thanks to @mitchprinstein.bsky.social at APA!
October 23, 2025 at 3:56 PM