Sander van der Linden

Sander L. van der Linden (born 1986) is a Dutch social psychologist and author who is Professor of Social Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He studies the psychology of social influence, risk, human judgment, and decision-making. He is known for his research on the psychology of social issues, such as fake news,^[1] COVID-19 conspiracy theories,^[2] and climate change denial.^[3]

Sander van der Linden
Van der Linden in 2019
Born	1986
Alma mater	London School of Economics and Political Science
Known for	Gateway belief model, Bad News
Scientific career
Fields	Social psychology Behavioral science Decision-making
Institutions	University of Cambridge Yale University Princeton University
Thesis	The social-psychological determinants of climate change risk perceptions, intentions and behaviours: a national study (2014)

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.

Education

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.^[7]

Career

Van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University 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 at Churchill College, and sits on the management board of the Winton Centre for Risk and Evidence Communication. He is also affiliated with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University.^[5]

Van der Linden serves on the editorial board of several academic journals, including Psychology, Public Policy, and Law;^[9] Personality and Individual Differences;^[10] Current Research in Social and Ecological Psychology;^[11] and the Journal of Risk Research.^[12] From 2018-2021, he was editor-in-chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology.^[13]

Research contributions

Misinformation

Van der Linden is best known for his research on how to protect people from fake news, misinformation, and disinformation.^[14][15] 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.^{[16][17][18][19]} In a 2021 Science 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 game Bad 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 called GoViral!^[24] sought to inoculate people specifically against misinformation about COVID-19.

Gateway belief model

Van der Linden is known for the Gateway 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., that global warming is human-caused). In turn, these central cognitive and affective 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 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.^[27] The model has been applied in a variety of contexts, including climate change,^[28][29] vaccination,^[30] the Brexit debate,^[31] and GMOs.^[32] One analysis from Skeptical Science of 37 published papers notes that about 86% of them support the broad tenets of the GBM.^[33]

Conspiracy theories

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]

Bibliography

Books

• Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (HarperCollins), 2023. ISBN 978-0008466718
• Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society (Earthscan Risk in Society), 2019. ISBN 978-0367235437