Sander van der Linden - The consequences of fake news

Sander van der Linden, Professor of Social Psychology in Society at Cambridge, explores how fake news damages all aspects of society.

About Sander van der Linden
"I am a Professor of Social Psychology and Director of the Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge.

I study the influence process, so I study how people are persuaded by information, and especially misinformation, and how we can help people resist persuasion when they don’t want to be persuaded. As part of that I’ve written a book, The Truth Vaccine: An Antidote to Fake News, where we break down the influence process."

Misinformation can be murder

We can think about the damaging consequences of misinformation and fake news both in terms of the individual and society at large.

Starting with the individual, we've seen awful things happening in the world. In India, there have been mass mob lynchings going on for years now because of false rumours and misinformation spread on WhatsApp. For example, a community might receive a false message that some kidnappers are in the area and that a child has been kidnapped, with false photos and a specific location data. Mobs will go out and attack people violently in a kind of vigilante retribution. At the end of the day, they're acting on this false information, which appears to come from a trusted source within their social network.

Key Points

• Fake news can have tragic consequences, such as the spate of lynchings in India caused by false rumours spread on WhatsApp.
• Research has shown that people who believe coronavirus conspiracy theories are less likely to get vaccinated.
• People are more likely to mistrust science when they think its findings restrict their personal freedom.