If critical thinking is the equivalent to daily exercise and eating a good diet, then today’s guest has the vaccine for misinformation viruses. 

Sander van der Linden is a professor of Social Psychology in Society at Cambridge University. His books, Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity and The Psychology of Misinformation delve into his research on how people process misinformation and strategies we should be arming ourselves with to combat it. 

Sander and Greg discuss the historical context and modern-day challenges of misinformation, the concept of “pre-bunking” as a method to immunize people against false beliefs by exposing them to a weakened dose of misinformation beforehand, and the importance of building resilience against manipulative tactics from an early age through education and awareness. 

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

How misinformation spreads like a virus

24:25: A virus wants to replicate, right? It wants to replicate itself. So, misinformation isn't a problem—you know, if it can't spread. But it has to find a susceptible host. So, for me, the viral analogy is that misinformation wouldn't spread unless it can find a susceptible host. There's something about human psychology that makes it susceptible to being infected with misinformation, and then our desire to want to share it with others. And so, that's kind of where it aligns for me.

Misinformation is about more than just obvious falsehoods

02:26: Misinformation is about more than just obvious falsehoods—it's also about misleading information. So, in a way, it's designed either unintentionally or intentionally to dupe people because it uses some kind of manipulation technique, whether that's presenting opinion as facts or presenting things out of context.

What is the antidote for misinformation?

12:20: Ideology correlates with cognitive rigidity, right? The more ideological people are, the more rigid and the more closed off they are. So, in some ways, the antidote to misinformation and conspiracy theories is being open-minded about things—not attaching yourself to a motivated sort of hypothesis—and that does strongly predict lower susceptibility to misinformation.

Why misinformation goes viral while facts don’t

27:15: So, research shows that misinformation explodes moral outrage. Specifically, for example, misinformation tends to be shocking, novel, emotionally manipulative, highly moralized, and polarized; it uses conspiracy, cognition, and paranoia, right? Whereas factual, neutral news uses none of those things. It tends to be boring, neutral, with no loaded words, right? And so, that tends to not go viral. Most people don't engage with fact checks—that's why fact checks don't go viral. So, in the cascades, when you model these things, there are clear differences in the virality of misinformation and the virality of neutral, objective information. And so, the infectiousness of these two things is very different.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Neil deGrasse Tyson
• Pizzagate conspiracy theory 
• Asch conformity experiments 
• Robert Cialdini
• William J. McGuire
• “Wayfair: The false conspiracy about a furniture firm and child trafficking” | BBC News
• South Park
• Cognitive reflection test
• Actively open-minded thinking

Guest Profile:

• Faculty Profile at Cambridge University
• Professional Website
• Professional Profile on LinkedIn

His Work:

• Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity
• The Psychology of Misinformation