Social media are complicated. With some research suggesting they're important spaces for digital community building and other scholars pointing out how social media can serve to actually disconnect people from one another. A growing concern among both academics in the public is the ways in which misinformation and conspiracies move through social media networks. That is the focus of this episode of Stats+Stories with guest Sander van der Linden.

Sander van der Linden is 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 center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making. In particular, he is interested in the influence and persuasion process and how people gain resistance to persuasion (by misinformation) through psychological inoculation. He is also interested in the psychology of fake news, media effects, and belief systems (e.g., conspiracy theories), as well as the emergence of social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. In all of this work, he looks at how these factors shape human cooperation and conflict in real-world collective action problems such as climate change and sustainability, public health, and the spread of misinformation.