Sander van der Linden | |
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![]() Van der Linden in 2019 | |
Nationality | Dutch |
Alma mater | London School of Economics and Political Science |
Known for | Gateway belief model, Bad News (video game) |
Scientific career | |
Fields | |
Institutions | |
Thesis | The social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions, intentions and behaviours: a national study (2014) |
Sander L. van der Linden is a Dutch social psychologist and author who is a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the psychology of social influence, risk, human judgment, and decision-making. He is particularly known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such as fake news, [1] COVID-19, [2] and climate change. [3]
He has written books for general audiences, including Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity , which is about the psychology of misinformation and fake news.
Van der Linden earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Amsterdam and California State University, Chico. [4] He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science [5] in 2014 with a thesis titled "The social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions, intentions and behaviours: a national study", [6] and completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University.[ citation needed ]
Van der Linden is a professor of social psychology in society in the department of psychology at the University of Cambridge, England where he has directed the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Laboratory since 2016. [7] He is also a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, a research affiliate of the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University and the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication at the University of Cambridge. [5]
He serves on the editorial board of Psychology, Public Policy, and Law , Personality and Individual Differences , Current Research in Social and Ecological Psychology, and the Journal of Risk Research . [8] [9] [10] [11]
He was the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology from 2018 to 2021. [12]
Van der Linden is most well-known for his research program that looks at how to protect people from fake news and misinformation. [13] [14] The research draws on inoculation theory where, following the biomedical analogy, forewarning people and exposing them to a severely weakened dose of fake news can generate psychological resistance against it. [15] [16] [17] [18]
He co-developed the fake news game Bad News , [19] [20] which simulates a social media feed and teaches people about the manipulation techniques used in the production of fake news. A more recent version of the game called GoViral! [21] aims to inoculate against misinformation about COVID-19 specifically.
Van der Linden is known for the Gateway belief model (GBM), [22] a dual-process theory of reasoning. The model postulates a two-step process of attitude change. In the first step, perceptions of agreement among a group of influential referents (e.g. experts) influence key private attitudes that people may hold about an issue (e.g., that global warming is human-caused). In turn, these central cognitive and affective beliefs are hypothesized to shape public attitudes and support for science. [23] In other words, the model suggests that what underpins people's attitudes toward (often contested) science is their perception of a scientific consensus. Correcting people's (mis)perception of scientific agreement on an issue is therefore regarded as a "gateway" cognition [23] to eliciting subsequent changes in related beliefs that people hold about contested social and scientific issues. [24]
With the consensus heuristic as the primary mechanism for initiating the attitude change, the model finds its theoretical roots in other prominent social psychological theories such as the heuristic-systematic model and the Elaboration Likelihood Model. [24] The model has been applied in a variety of contexts, including climate change, [25] [26] vaccination, [27] the Brexit debate, [28] and GMOs. [29] One analysis from Skeptical Science of 37 published papers notes that about 86% of them support the broad tenets of the GBM. [30]
Van der Linden and others have surveyed more than 5,000 Americans online about their political preferences, asking them to respond to questions developed to measure conspiratorial thinking and paranoia. They found that those at the extremes of the political spectrum were more conspiratorial than those in the middle. Researchers also found that conservatives were more prone to conspiracy thinking than liberals. Van der Linden speculates that this may reflect strong identification with conservative groups and values, and attempts to manage uncertainty. [31]
Scientific consensus is the generally held judgment, position, and opinion of the majority or the supermajority of scientists in a particular field of study at any particular time.
In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances". In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
In social psychology, pluralistic ignorance is a phenomenon in which people mistakenly believe that others predominantly hold an opinion different from their own. In this phenomenon, most people in a group may go along with a view they do not hold because they think, incorrectly, that most other people in the group hold it. Pluralistic ignorance encompasses situations in which a minority position on a given topic is wrongly perceived to be the majority position, or the majority position is wrongly perceived to be a minority position.
Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. It differs from disinformation, which is deliberately deceptive and propagated information. Early definitions of misinformation focused on statements that were patently false, incorrect, or not factual. Therefore, a narrow definition of misinformation refers to the information's quality, whether inaccurate, incomplete, or false. However, recent studies define misinformation per deception rather than informational accuracy because misinformation can include falsehoods, selective truths, and half-truths.
The cultural cognition of risk, sometimes called simply cultural cognition, is the hypothesized tendency to perceive risks and related facts in relation to personal values. Research examining this phenomenon draws on a variety of social science disciplines including psychology, anthropology, political science, sociology, and communications. The stated objectives of this research are both to understand how values shape political conflict over facts and to promote effective deliberative strategies for resolving such conflicts consistent with sound empirical data.
Inoculation theory is a social psychological/communication theory that explains how an attitude or belief can be made resistant to persuasion or influence, in analogy to how a body gains resistance to disease. The theory uses medical inoculation as its explanatory analogy but instead of applying it to disease, it is used to discuss attitudes. It has applicability to public campaigns targeting misinformation and fake news.
The extended parallel process model (EPPM) is a fear appeal theory developed by communications scholar Kim Witte that illustrates how individuals react to fear-inducing messages. Witte subsequently published an initial test of the model in Communication Monographs.
Motivated reasoning is a cognitive and social response in which individuals, consciously or unconsciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favor evidence that coincides with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite contrary evidence.
The Yale Program on Climate Change Communication (YPCCC) is a research center within the Yale School of the Environment that conducts scientific research on public climate change knowledge, attitudes, policy preferences, and behavior at the global, national, and local scales. It grew out of a conference held in Aspen, Colorado, in 2005.
Anthony Leiserowitz is a human geographer at Yale University who studies public perceptions of climate change. He has particularly examined perceptions within the United States, where people are considerably less aware of climate change than in other countries. In the U.S., awareness of information about climate change is heavily influenced by emotion, imagery, associations, and values. Their public discourse reflects a lack of understanding of the science involved in climate change and little awareness of the potential for effective responses to it.
Stephan Lewandowsky is an Australian psychologist. He has worked in both the United States and Australia, and is currently based at the University of Bristol, UK, where he is the chair of cognitive psychology at the School of Psychological Science. His research, which originally pertained to computer simulations of people's decision-making processes, recently has focused on the public's understanding of science and why people often embrace beliefs that are sharply at odds with scientific evidence.
Edward Wile Maibach is a professor at George Mason University who works on public health and climate change communication.
The gateway belief model (GBM) suggests that public perception of the degree of expert or scientific consensus on an issue functions as a so-called "gateway" cognition. Perception of scientific agreement is suggested to be a key step towards acceptance of related beliefs. Increasing the perception that there is normative agreement within the scientific community can increase individual support for an issue. A perception of disagreement may decrease support for an issue.
Pro-environmental behaviour is behaviour that a person consciously chooses in order to minimize the negative impact of their actions on the environment. Barriers to pro-environmental behaviour are the numerous factors that hinder individuals when they try to adjust their behaviours toward living more sustainable lifestyles. Generally, these barriers can be separated into larger categories: psychological, social/cultural, financial and structural. Psychological barriers are considered internal, where an individual's knowledge, beliefs and thoughts affect their behaviour. Social and cultural barriers are contextual, where an individual's behaviour is affected by their surroundings. Financial barriers are simply a lack of funds to move toward more sustainable behaviour. Structural barriers are external and often impossible for an individual to control, such as lack of governmental action, or locality of residence that promotes car use as opposed to public transit.
Climate communication or climate change communication is a field of environmental communication and science communication focused on the causes, nature and effects of anthropogenic climate change.
The psychology of climate change denial is the study of why people deny climate change, despite the scientific consensus on climate change. A study assessed public perception and action on climate change on grounds of belief systems, and identified seven psychological barriers affecting behavior that otherwise would facilitate mitigation, adaptation, and environmental stewardship: cognition, ideological worldviews, comparisons to key people, costs and momentum, disbelief in experts and authorities, perceived risks of change, and inadequate behavioral changes. Other factors include distance in time, space, and influence.
Bad News is a free-to-play online browser game in which players take the perspective of a fake news tycoon. It was released on February 19, 2018. The game is classified as a serious game and a newsgame aimed at improving media literacy and social impact. The game was produced by the Dutch media platform "DROG" in collaboration with University of Cambridge scientists. The game has been described by the media as a "fake news vaccine".
Disinformation attacks are strategic deception campaigns involving media manipulation and internet manipulation, to disseminate misleading information, aiming to confuse, paralyze, and polarize an audience. Disinformation can be considered an attack when it occurs as an adversarial narrative campaign that weaponizes multiple rhetorical strategies and forms of knowing—including not only falsehoods but also truths, half-truths, and value-laden judgements—to exploit and amplify identity-driven controversies. Disinformation attacks use media manipulation to target broadcast media like state-sponsored TV channels and radios. Due to the increasing use of internet manipulation on social media, they can be considered a cyber threat Digital tools such as bots, algorithms, and AI technology, along with human agents including influencers, spread and amplify disinformation to micro-target populations on online platforms like Instagram, Twitter, Google, Facebook, and YouTube.
Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity is a 2023 book written by social psychologist Sander van der Linden. In the book, van der Linden makes the case for an epidemiological approach to studying and countering the spread of misinformation, comparing it to how a virus spreads in the population. Although a broader treatise about the psychology of misinformation, Van der Linden focuses on developing his theory of psychological inoculation against misinformation, which he also refers to as 'prebunking'.