Sander van der Linden | |
|---|---|
 Van der Linden in 2019 | |
| Born | 1986 (age 38–39) |
| Alma mater | London School of Economics and Political Science |
| Known for | Gateway belief model,Bad News |
| 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 (born 1986) is a Dutchsocial psychologist and author who isProfessor of Social Psychology at theUniversity of Cambridge. He studies the psychology ofsocial influence, risk, human judgment, anddecision-making. He is known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such asfake news,[1]COVID-19 conspiracy theories,[2] andclimate change denial.[3]
He has written books for general audiences, includingFoolproof: 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 theUniversity of Amsterdam andCalifornia State University, Chico.[4] He received his Ph.D. from theLondon 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 atPrinceton University.[7]
Van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society at theUniversity of Cambridge, England.[5] He joined Cambridge's Department of Psychology in 2016 after directing Princeton's Social and Environmental Decision-Making Laboratory.[8] At Cambridge, he is Director of the Social Decision-Making Laboratory, a Professorial Fellow atChurchill College, and sits on the management board of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. He is also affiliated with theYale Program on Climate Change Communication atYale University.[5]
Van der Linden serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, includingPsychology, Public Policy, and Law;[9]Personality and Individual Differences;[10]Current Research in Social and Ecological Psychology;[11] and theJournal of Risk Research.[12] From 2018-2021, he waseditor-in-chief of theJournal of Environmental Psychology.[13]
Van der Linden has conducted research on how to protect people fromfake news,misinformation, anddisinformation.[14][15] The research draws oninoculation 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.[16][17][18][19] In a 2021Science News interview, he referred to his notion of inoculation as "prebunking":
Fact-checking and debunking is useful if you do it right. But there's the issue of ideology, of resistance to fact-checking when it's not in line with ideology. Wouldn't life be so much easier if we could prevent [disinformation] in the first place? That's the whole point of prebunking or inoculation. It's a multilayer defense system. If you can get there first, that's great. But that won't always be possible, so you still have real-time fact-checking. This multilayer firewall is going to be the most useful thing.[20]
He co-developed the fake news gameBad News,[21][22] which simulates a social media feed and teaches people about the manipulation techniques used in the production of fake news.[23] A 2020 version of the game calledGoViral![24] sought to inoculate people specifically against misinformation aboutCOVID-19.
Van der Linden is known for theGateway belief model (GBM),[25] 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., thatglobal warming is human-caused). In turn, these centralcognitive andaffective beliefs are hypothesized to shape public attitudes and support for science.[26] 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[26] to eliciting subsequent changes in related beliefs that people hold about contested social and scientific issues.[27]
With the consensusheuristic as the primary mechanism for initiating the attitude change, the model finds its theoretical roots in other prominent social psychological theories such as theheuristic-systematic model and theElaboration Likelihood Model.[27] The model has been applied in a variety of contexts, including climate change,[28][29] vaccination,[30] theBrexit debate,[31] andGMOs.[32] One analysis fromSkeptical Science of 37 published papers notes that about 86% of them support the broad tenets of the GBM.[33]
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 their attempts to manage uncertainty.[34]
