Breaking the Wall of Cognitive Immunity
Breaking the Wall of Cognitive Immunity
Global Call 2026 Finalist Interview: Social Sciences & Humanities
Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., is Professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge. He is ranked among the top 1% of highly cited social scientists worldwide and has published over 200 research papers. He is frequently featured in outlets such as the New York Times, BBC, Time Magazine, and Rolling Stone. He is an elected Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and author of the award-winning book Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity.
Which wall does your research or project break?
My research breaks the wall of cognitive immunity to misinformation. The virulent spread of misinformation across geographical borders is threatening democracy, science, and public health worldwide. Super-powered by advances in artificial intelligence, we are seeing an unprecedented volume of inauthentic and harmful content online. Importantly, misinformation is also a meta-risk: it amplifies other known societal risks such as climate change, polarization, racism, and international geopolitical conflicts. My research addresses both the basic science of how the human mind discerns truth from falsehood, especially in the age of AI, as well as the more translational question of how we can acquire cognitive defenses against misinformation in real-world settings. Unfortunately, humans are not very good at detecting lies and deepfakes, barely performing above chance level. Moreover, once we're exposed to misinformation it sticks in our minds and penetrates our memories, beliefs, and behaviors. It's a bit like the famous saying, 'you can't unring a bell'. For that reason, rather than merely 'debunking' misinformation after it has gone viral (the standard remedy), my research has looked at whether it is possible to 'prebunk' or 'inoculate' people against misinformation so we become more immune to it *before* exposure much like a vaccine. After all, since misinformation spreads like a virus, the natural next step is to develop a cognitive vaccine against misinformation.
What is the main goal of your research or project?
My research program looks at how the brain deals with the onslaught of false and misleading information, how it diffuses in society and especially what types of interventions we can design to protect people from misinformation. To do this, we borrow from the medical analogy; just as vaccines introduce a weakened or inactivated strain of a virus into the body to trigger the production of antibodies to help confer resistance against future infection, it turns out we can do the same with the brain. By preemptively exposing people to weakened doses of misinformation or the techniques used to produce misinformation, along with clear guidelines on how to spot it, we can cultivate cognitive immunity to future exposure to misinformation. We can measure these 'cognitive antibodies' via increases in people's ability discern between manipulative and credible content, higher confidence in one's judgments, lower rates of sharing misinformation, and we're currently looking at physiological measures and functional brain activity. The ultimate goal of this research is to empower people all around the world against the techniques of manipulation so they become more resistant to it. Once we can identify the techniques of deception we are free to form opinions and judgments without interference. We are currently rolling out this approach in schools as well to protect young citizens from future disinformation and manipulation.
What impact does your research or project have on society?
We are lucky to have seen tremendous impact of our approach to prebunking misinformation. We initially designed interactive games that simulate a social media feed, such as Bad News, and GoViral, which let players step into the shoes of an online manipulator. This mental role play is entertaining and insightful for the user and the process simulates weakened dose attacks (using humor and fiction) of what it's like to be duped online by polarizing language, fake experts, conspiratorial language, and emotional manipulation, for example. Players generate resistance by engaging with the scenarios. We were fortunate that these games went viral and attracted millions of users for research. The World Health Organization (WHO) and United Nations adopted some of our games in their "stop the spread" campaign scaling its reach and impact to hundreds of millions of people around the world. Technology companies such as Google, Twitter, and Meta tested the approach and changed the way they approach misinformation via prebunking ads and videos on their platforms which reached hundreds of millions of people. The prebunking strategy was used to delay the invasion of Ukraine by preempting a false narrative start a war, and psychological inoculation has been incorporated into the Digital Services Act (DSA) in Europe in the guidelines for Very Large Online Platforms. Overall, we're extremely humbled to have seen the research inform real-world legislation and shift the conversation from a passive stance to a proactive approach to fight misinformation and empower citizens.
What advice would you give to young scientists or students interested in pursuing a career in research, or to your younger self starting in science?
My career has been most unusual. I didn't come from a science background. I liked school but most of my high school teachers would likely have described me as a bit of a troublemaker. I never thought I would be a scientist. The biggest joke to my younger self is probably that I ended up being a professor at Cambridge. I was in a punk rock band at the time and by complete chance discovered that the lead singer of The Offspring (Dexter Holland) has a PhD in biomedical science. At one point in an interview he was asked whether "school" or "science" is at odds with "rock music" and he said something to the effect that science, you know, challenging assumptions, caring about ideas rather than looks, not having a boss (in the strict sense) is the most punk rock it gets. This idea really resonated with me. So the advice I would give anyone is to not let yourself be determined by other people's expectations of you, pursue the ideas you're interested in, challenge common assumptions, and draw inspiration for science from anywhere, including music!
Who knew that letting people play an evil fake news troll would capture the attention of millions of people and inoculate the player against fake news tricks at the same time. It was unusual. Edgy. Non-normative. But sometimes the best ideas are. Relatedly, there's a strong incentive to keep things disciplinary in science but you can often have impact by connecting what may be known in your discipline to related challenges in other disciplines. For example, the inoculation idea wasn't very well-known in computer science, but has tremendous relevance and application in that field. We work with economists, computer scientists, epidemiologists, legal and humanities scholars, to produce the best educational interventions we can. In all honesty, true interdisciplinarity might not get you the best job but it will generate better science. Being curious about what is going on in other disciplines is probably some of the best advice I can give to future scientists.
