Sander van der Linden

Van der Linden is most well-known and widely credited for his research program that looks at how to protect people from fake news and misinformation.[8][9] 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.[10][11][12] He is also known for co-developing the popular fake news game Bad News (video game),[13][14] 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!"[15][16] aims to inoculate against misinformation about COVID-19 specifically and is listed as a resource by the World Health Organization.[17]

Van der Linden is known for the Gateway belief model (GBM),[18] 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. 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 scientifc agreement on an issue is therefore regarded as a "gateway" cognition[19] to eliciting subsequent changes in related beliefs that people hold about contested social and scientific issues. 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.[20] The model has been applied in a variety of contexts, including climate change,[21][22] vaccination,[23] the Brexit debate,[24] and GMOs.[25] One analysis from Skeptical Science of 37 published papers notes that about 86% of them support the broad tenets of the GBM.[26]

He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in the department of psychology and the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton University and was a visiting research scholar (2012-2014) at Yale University.[27] He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science[2] and earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Amsterdam and California State University, Chico.[28]

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, among other professional publications.[29][30][31][32]

He is the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology.[33]

• Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society (Earthscan Risk in Society), 2019. ISBN 978-0367235437

• Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab