We talked with Sander Duivenstein a few weeks ago about fake news, playing with reality in times of AI, deepfakes and the metaverse. Today in the work professor podcast is Sander van der Linden, our guest. Sander is professor of Social Psychology and director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge. His research has been featured in Nature and Science, among others. He has worked with the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and major technology companies such as WhatsApp, Facebook and Google. He speaks in terms of a vaccine against fake news. Sander introduces us to this wonderful phenomenon and approaches the truth problem like a virus.

Vaccinating against fake news
Where did the metaphor vaccinating against fake news come from? Sander explains that he was studying how information spreads long before the pandemic. "Then it actually turned out that if you take models that are used in epidemiology to study viruses and how they spread in populations, then you can use the same models to look at how information and especially misinformation spreads on social media. So you can use those models very well. Then every once in a while you have to tweak them a little bit. So then we were also thinking: if it spreads like a virus, can you also vaccinate people against fake news?

Listen now to the latest episode of the Work Professor podcast and find out the scientific theory behind prebunking and how you can vaccinate yourself against fake news.
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Links

More about Sander van der Linden

Check out the book 'Immune to fake news - An antidote to fake news and conspiracy theories' here

Listen to the episode with Sander Duivestein here

More about the Working Professor

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