337. The Role of Critical Thinking in Resisting Misinformation - Sander van der Linden

Welcome to episode 337 of the Brainy Business Understanding the Psychology of why People Buy. In today's episode, I'm excited to introduce you to Sander van der Linden, author of Foolproof. Ready? Let's get started. You are listening to the Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here's your host, Melina Palmer. Hello. Hello everyone. My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to the Brainy Business Podcast. In today's conversation, I am joined by Dr. Sander van der Linden. Sander is professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. His research looks at how people process misinformation, how it spreads in online networks, and how we can most effectively inoculate people against false information. He led a national consensus report on the psychology of misinformation for the American Psychological association and served on the World Health Organization's Infodemic Working Group. He's won numerous awards for his research on human judgment, communication and decision making, including the Rising Star Award from the association for Psychological Science. He co developed the award winning fake news game Bad News which has been played by millions of people around the world. And he regularly advises governments, public health authorities and social media companies on how to combat the spread of misinformation. He is ranked among the top 1% of highly cited social scientists worldwide and and has published over 150 research papers. He frequently appears on international TV and radio and his work is regularly featured in outlets such as the New York Times, Rolling Stone, NPR and BBC. Sander has been described by Wired Magazine as one of 15 top thinkers and by Fast Company Design as one of four heroes who are defending digital democracy online. Before joining Cambridge, he held academic positions at Princeton, Yale and the London School of Economics. He's the author of why We Fall for Misinformation and how to Build Immunity, which we will definitely be talking about today. Really quickly, before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for everything, including related past episodes, links to articles and books like Foolproof, and so much more. It's all within the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 3:37 now let's jump right in. Dr. Sander Vanderlinden, welcome to the Brainy Business Podcast.

Thanks for having me on the show.

Absolutely. I'm so excited to talk with you about your book. And before we jump into that, if you can just let everyone who's not familiar with you yet to tell a little bit about your backstory, you know, who you are and the work that you do.

Yeah. So I'm a professor of psychology, social psychology at the University of Cambridge, and I study, you know, broadly construed influence and persuasion, but particularly how to help people resist more nefarious influence and forms of persuasion. Things like misinformation, propaganda, conspiracy theories, and how we can build interventions that help people discern, you know, what's fact and what's fiction, both online and offline. And we do that with various organizations as well as governments, public health authorities, schools. And that's also been the focus of my recent book.

Yeah. And so I really enjoyed, in reading your book, the mix of stories. So, you know, we're talking about Caesar and then we're talking about, you know, something that happened yesterday, you know, and it's like, you know, social media and then it's, you know, ancient history and all these different aspects. So it's kind of a fun aspect. I always like when I'm learning vast, you know, aspects when I'm reading a book. I think that that's just an interesting approach. So I'm curious, you know, kind of how easy or difficult or how long did it take us sort of like organizing all of the information into the book obviously is stuff you've been working on for a really long time. But, you know, have you always known that the Julius Caesar story is leading into to WhatsApp or that just sort of.

No, no, not at all. No. I appreciate this question. I've come to appreciate actually how difficult it is to step into the shoes of a historian for a moment. So I'm, you know, by training, I'm an empirical experimental scientist. And so one of the things I noticed about this topic is that people kept sort of asking the question, okay, but what's new? Like, hasn't propaganda always been around? Aren't, you know, conspiracy theories, you know, weren't there there in, you know, World War II and medieval times? And so what's really different? And so I think in order to address that question, I kind of have to start at the beginning and give some examples of historical propaganda and disinformation and set the scene. And that's. That's kind of what motivated me to start researching this. But, you know, unlike describing your own research and your own experiments, doing a bit of research on history actually turn out into a Period of months, really, perhaps even longer, where I was just drowning in competing historical accounts. And I started getting really paranoid about this because it's a book about misinformation, right? And so I don't want to print some story about, you know, Caesar or Augustus that was actually, you know, the view of just one historian. And most actually disagree. And so I think I came to appreciate how difficult this actually is. So, you know, I went through all the historical records and read all of the accounts and translations of the original material and all the disputes among historians and all the way down to this question of how long did it take for fake news to spread in the Roman Empire, right? You had a horse and maybe carriage, and there was the Roman sort of postal service that they had. And there are historians who calculated how long it would take for a message to arrive. And there is varying estimates. And so taking the variance into account and fact checking all of this. And so I came up with some, some estimates in the book of how long that would take. And then I Compare it to WhatsApp, for example, to get some concrete data on what's going on. But with a lot of these things, it's contested. You know, there was some fake news that I described in a book where, you know, Agristus, who discovered, you know, the. The last will of Mark Anthony, and they were at war at the time, you know, the last. The last great Roman war. And he discovered this testament that speaks about how Mark Antony was actually bewitched by Cleopatra, the queen of Egypt then. Right? And that he had become consumed by foreign powers and, you know, he was no longer himself. He wasn't a Roman anymore. He was now an immigrant and we shouldn't take him seriously. And that was all based on this document that he found that said that the last will of Mark Antony was to leave everything to Cleopatra and not his Roman sort of descendants. And the veracity of this document is disputed. Some people think Augustus made it up as propaganda to sort of win the propaganda war. And others say, well, you know, Marc Anthony never really disputed the existence of this will publicly, so maybe it was real. And so that's where you get into the nitty gritty of historical facts. And I really have to spend a few weeks thinking about how am I going to. You know, I have a long number of notes at the end of the book, trying to hedge all of my bets, you know, before people, because I had people on Twitter say, hey, you say this. And I was like, nope, didn't announce. I was like, oh, I have Read this account. Yeah, that's in the notes. So, yeah, really, this was painful for me to try to actually do the historical stuff. So some stories that are personal and fun to tell. Right. Whereas others, you just have to take, you know, you have to become sort of an expert on a whole different. Different topic to. So I think what was a worthwhile question is what was different then from, you know, how are things now? So, yeah, that's. No, I did not know that before. I did have to figure out the structure of the book more generally. So what do I want to say and how can I best say that? And that's how I came up with the three parts of, you know, how does misinformation affect the brain, how does it spread and what we can do about it using the vaccination analogy. But yeah, the specifics of it kind of came together as I was writing the book.

Yeah, I always love to ask. So for one, I know we have lots of listeners who do write books or have thought about writing books or question if they should or even if you're looking to come up with a framework, would you have a great. I like the conspire, you know, sort of. Then we have to come up with, of course, our, you know, the way that we can have it fit within its letters, like conspire. You know, there's a whole process to make all fit. So anyway, I think insights from people who have been there and as you look to kind of massage so much information and find, like, what's that perfect story? And like, what did you start with? How did you approach. I think is just helpful for people that are, you know, deciding if they want to go on a similar journey or not.

Yeah, yeah. I will say that I had this idea for this book. I mean, we've been doing this research for over a decade and I've always wanted to write this book. I wanted to wait until we had enough data, enough, enough, you know, interesting case studies and. But also, I was just postponing it for years because I didn't know where to start. And so for me, once I had the general structure of the book, the outline and the concept, which, you know, I got some help with from good agents and others who have written books. That's where I really felt like, now I have a place to start. I can start filling in the individual chapters and you have a theme, I have an outline. So that was for my own process. That was the most important kind of. I need some people, I guess, just start writing and figure out the structure and the parts later, but I kind of have to know where this is going. And so that, yeah, that was, that was partly my, my process. But then I also had to revise the book. I mean, talking about misinformation, you know, I wrote this before the pandemic. So then the pandemic hit and I had to completely revise parts of it. Then there was the war in Ukraine. And and so, you know, after a while I thought, I think I have enough examples of misinformation now across a whole lot of different situations that I'm not going to keep updating, you know, the, the list because it's never going to end that way. And so that's, Yeah, I think that's part of the, for me also the pain of writing this book that you always, you know, I think many authors feel that way maybe that you always want to keep, keep adding, keep revising. And as you said, you have to condense stuff for, for more popular book into frameworks and, you know, make it accessible. And, you know, sometimes I still go into studies in quite some detail here and there and, you know, parts are, you know, as you mentioned, I mix anecdotes and stories, but I tried to keep it in depth. I mean, I had a lot of conversations with other authors and agents. And some people feel that the popular science culture is changing a bit where they want it to be a little less popular and a little bit more science in terms of how these things are written up. And so that was also an interesting nexus. How accessible do you want to convey it? Because there's always some small cost to accuracy. Right. And so, you know, you know, how do you explain this to a broad audience without losing, you know, all of the, all of the necessary details to sort of understand the science?

Yeah, yeah. I think it is an interesting balance. And I, as a person that reads lots of academic papers and things and recognizing different concepts and I always, I do like when they're called out and I do that in my own books too. Right. To be talking about what a concept is and what it means and lots of citations and all of that. So you do have several concepts in the book that we haven't really talked about a ton on the show. Even like illusory truth and the things that I. There's just too many to have done them all yet. And then now I had made another note of one that. Oh, yeah, Conjunction fallacy and Linda. Right. Like such a good example of things. But so those are a couple that I made notes of. Like, I don't know why, why haven't we talked about this yet? Right, yeah, good examples. So if you want to maybe just share a bit about, you know, how the brain works in regards to this, you know, the misinformation and, and whatnot, and however you like to set up this aspect of your work and the book, I. I leave it open to you there for.

Yeah, yeah. I think, you know, there are some basic cognitive mechanisms that explain why people are susceptible to misinformation. And it's interesting because, you know, there are some people who like to think of humans as, you know, incredibly sophisticated and rational and, you know, not easily persuaded. But, but I think some of these.

Concepts, our audience knows better. They know what's up.

I was going to say sometimes I talk to especially philosophers or something. I was like, well, it's not really how people behave. And so, yeah, I think some of these concepts really show how easy it is to do people in the lab. And illusory truth really is all about. I think it's a really powerful concept. It's all about the idea that repeating a statement makes it feel more true. And I think this has to do with the fact that the brain mistakes what we call fluency for having some sort of truth signal. So we all know that repeated statements are easier to process. That's literally what it's about. So the time it takes people to process a claim is literally faster for things that you've heard before versus things that you haven't heard before. So the brain is literally faster at processing it. And it implicitly assumes that it has some truth value because, you know, it's easy to process. It's feels familiar, so it's. It must be true. And in fact, other interesting research shows that people think misinformation is less immoral to share over time. And it works in the same way because you keep hearing it, you know, there must be something to it if everyone's talking about it. If you keep hearing the same thing, maybe it's not so immoral after all to share this kind of story. Right. Because it's already out there. And so this sort of repetition of false information has some of these, some of these negative effects that not only makes people more likely to believe a claim, but it also seems less immoral to share it. And I think the interesting thing about illusory truth is that it works on such a basic level that the experiments they do here, it's not just crazy misinformation like the earth is flat, that makes people more likely to think that's true when it's repeated. Now, be careful here that it's not that people all of a sudden become convinced that the earth is flat, but they rate it as somewhat more likely if it's repeated versus when a claim is not repeated. But you also see this with just the most basic stuff. So if you ask participants what the Scottish skirt is that men wear, and people say, oh, that's kilt, and then you give it a different name, and you keep repeating that at the end of the experiment, people are more likely to say that it's actually not a kilt. And so prior knowledge doesn't even protect you from illusory truth. And that's because people are not accessing it right in the moment. And so you're not using that declarative knowledge in the moment to counteract the effect of repetition. Another famous example is this sort of question of, you know, how many animals of each kind did Moses take on the ark with him, right? And so people say, oh, 10 or, I don't know how many people, you know, whatever. Whatever number people think is true, but then they don't realize that it was Noah, right, and not Moses. And so people know it's. It's Noah. Most people know this, right? But you're not accessing that. That knowledge in. In the moment. And if you keep repeating the falsehood, people are more likely to. To think that it's true. And, you know, there's even FMRI studies that kind of provide some evidence for. For this. It works with basic statements with more complicated misinformation, and knowledge doesn't necessarily protect you from it. And so that's, I think, at a really basic level, that makes everyone susceptible to misinformation, the sheer repetition of it. And that also works at the level of what they call the big lie, which was a. Well, now we talk about it in a different context, but originally, you know, it was. It was used by Hitler, who kind of had this idea that, you know, the more often you repeat an outrageous lie, the more likely people are to believe it because they can't really fathom that somebody would make this stuff up, right? And the more you hear it, the more true it sounds and the less immoral it is and so on. And so this, this big lie rule is really based on. On the repetition or the illusory truth effect. And so, yeah, that's really powerful. And that makes it also really difficult to correct misinformation because when people repeatedly hear false statements, you now have to then go and tell the brain that something people remember as true is now false. And so you have to. Then somehow our memories are like a social network. You have nodes and connections. So the nodes are concepts and then the nodes are connections between concepts. And so if I keep, you know, if I said, oh, you know, I had a terrible meal, you know, down, down your street, I got terrible food poisoning, or I was so sick I would never go back to that place. And now next week, I tell you, oh, actually it wasn't. It wasn't the place down your street. It was some other place. Every time you're going to pass that restaurant, you're going to think food poisoning. Right. And so that's a related concept called the continued influence of misinformation. And the more often you, you hear it, the more continued it becomes. And you see that with stuff like the autism vaccination link, which is a myth that's been repeated for over a decade. In fact, it took the journal the Lancet over a decade to retract the false claims that childhood vaccines or the MMR vaccine caused autism. It was a completely fraudulent study, but people had heard this for over 10 years. And so it's just brewing and strengthening connections. Then when you try to come in and correct misinformation, that's a really difficult task.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you for all that background. And so everyone knows. And then so you know too, I will be linking to. So when you talk about that, you know, illusory truth room is closely enough related to availability bias. As far as, like, when we've heard something enough, it comes to mind easier. Right. So I do have an episode on that which will be linked in the show notes, as well as episodes on confirmation bias, the focusing illusion, fundamental attribution, error, herding, and social proof, which I.

Think all conjunction fallacy.

I know, I know, but I don't, I don't have an episode on it, so. But I will link to all those ones. So we have background on those other aspects, which I do think, obviously, anything you wanted to share about any of those, please do. And we don't have conjunction fallacy. So great to talk a little bit about that if you want.

I think this one is really underestimated in the context of misinformation. So when you think about conspiracy theories in particular, you often have what we call the conspiratorial worldview, which is the fact that, you know, people's favorite thing when they talk to me about this is say, okay, but some conspiracies are true. Yes. Some conspiracy theories have really happened in the world. But people make a fundamental thinking and reasoning error when they believe in. In often multiple conspiracy theories. So it's totally fine if you think people are plotting against you and you have evidence for that. It happens, right? What doesn't happen, though, what's much less likely to happen, is that multiple independent conspiracy theories are all happening at the same time, and that the more you endorse them, the more likely they seem or the more likely it is that there's other conspiracy theories happening. And so what you typically find in the psychological literature, right, is that people who believe in qanon also tend to be members of, let's say, proud boys. And people who believe in lizard people also might believe in alien UFO conspiracy theories. And so it's never that partly the case that somebody has some rational theory about why people are people are conspiring against them. It tends to be the case that people believe in multiple conspiracy theories at the same time. Now, what's the relevance of the conjunction fallacy here, which is something that Danny Kahneman and Amos Tversky investigated using. You mentioned the Linda problem. So for people who are not familiar with this, you basically give people a simple description like, oh, Linda is a bank teller, she works at a bank, but she's also very active in the feminist movement, and in college she was a social justice activist. Now, which statement is more likely, A, Linda is a bank teller, or B, Linda is a bank teller and active in a social justice movement? Most people say B because it sounds descriptive of Linda. But the fallacy here is that obviously social activist bank tellers are a subset of all possible bank tellers, right? So the conjunction, the probability that A, that she's a bank teller and B, that part in the social justice movement are both happening at the same time or true at the same time is always less likely, equal to or less likely than the probability of Linda being a bank teller, because, you know, that is the set and being a social justice movement bank teller is a subset, so that's always less likely. It turns out that people make the same reasoning error in the context of conspiracy theories where mutually independent conspiracies are more likely to be believed than any single conspiracy theory. So if you ask people, you know, let's say A, vaccines are not effective, and B, vaccines are not effective and Bill Gates is making money off of them, people are more likely to say B, even though that Bill Gates doesn't. His foundation doesn't make any money off the vaccines. And that's completely independent from whether or not the vaccines actually work. It sounds more descriptive of a conspiracy theory, right? And that's why people endorse it. And so you see that the probability doesn't actually go down with the amount of conspiracy theories that people endorse, it goes up, right? So if somebody buys into one, they're more likely to believe in multiple, even though the probability that all of these things are happening at the same time, right, in conjunction, is necessarily by pure logic and probability less likely to be true than the probability that any single conspiracy is going to be true. Now, of course, there's one way out of this, which is to say that the events are not independent and that in fact they're all related to each other, which brings it into a super conspiracy where all of the. And that's, you know, that's part of the psychology of why people believe these things. They rationalize it into some super conspiracy, right, that if you challenge the conspiracy theorists with this, they say, well, the specifics don't matter, right, because there's a new world order happening that can explain it all and it's all related. And so they jump sort of level. So it's a self ceiling belief system where, you know, one theory serves as evidence for another. And if you try to challenge the theory, you become part of the theory because, you know, why would you be challenging it if it wasn't true? And so you then become part of the conspiracy. And so that's really the relevance of the conjunction fallacy. And that's why it always amazes me that people who endorse multiple conspiracy theories think that they're more likely to be happening all at the same time. Even some of these theories are completely, you know, independent and some of them are even mutually exclusive. So there have been some experiments with just people. Osama bin Laden was already dead when the raid happened, or whether he's still alive somewhere. And people will endorse both explanations at the same time, which are clearly mutually exclusive. And the thing is, because it doesn't matter whether he's dead or alive, there's something suspicious happening. Somebody's hiding something. And that's the real motivation for wanting to believe it.

Yeah, it is so interesting. I liked reading through the book, you know, all these different examples and both so liked in the way of where you're like, it's like, like in a way that you go, oh man, I wish that these things were not the case. It's interesting to learn about it. And it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting in, in so Much of everything that you're reading there. I thought it was really interesting. I like the example you gave about the, the, the youths and how we're looking at different pieces of information and what people are more likely to believe and how quickly again, that rate of sharing comes up and becomes a problem and what feels like it's more true. So like seeing something with an image feels like it's more true and things. It's really easy to fake images now. And I remember early in the pandemic and like, might have been into the summer of 2020, but that there were, there was a picture going around and this claim that when you had less tourism and people not going, that the canals in Venice had dolphins for the first time in like a bajillion years.

Right.

And there were pictures of dolphins like swimming through the canals in Venice and was talking about how there was so much other like pollution and problems when you had people traveling, how like the world is coming back to the way it's supposed to be now because of this. And the pictures were fake. Not a thing, but it was being shared. It was everywhere for a while. And similar to, you know, the is this what Mars sounds like story, you know, my husband and I are like, really like, is that they're a dolphin? Like, whoa, that's crazy to think. And you believe it for a minute, but it's hard to then un. Unbelieve, you know, unring the bell, so to speak. So yeah, you, now you go, I feel like I didn't ask a question as much as I'm hoping it prompted thoughts.

Yeah, yeah, no, definitely, I think, you know, visual manipulated images. Well, one is actually turns out if you, if you survey the landscape, most misinformation is actually visual, which has been hugely underestimated. And two, manipulated images enhance fluency. Right? So when people look at pictures, they're more likely to think something is true just because it has a picture next to it. And as an, I can relate to your story because as a, as a quote unquote expert, you know, I'm certainly not immune to some of these stories. I mean, during the pandemic we, and I described this in the book. My, my partner, she pointed me to this story about Mars Rover and there was some tweet about Martian winds. And I was like, whoa, wind on Mars. I want to know what that sounds like. And so I went on Twitter and I found the post and we knew there was some anticipated knowledge here. We knew that there was going to be a landing on Mars. And so I just had forgotten the date. I was listening to this video and I said, wow, that's. That's really cool. You know, went on Mars and it was retweeted by Stephen King. So I thought, you know, you know, Stephen King is a reliable actor. And so. And so I made all of the classic errors. Nothing against Stephen, but it turns out this was a manipulated video. And it was done, in my defense, in somewhat of a. Of a clever way that it was a real video from a Mars rover, just not the current one. It was a real sound from some recording device, just not, you know, the one that. That they're using now. It was all stitched together and it made it seem as if the landing had already happened and there was wind. Well, in fact, it hadn't happened yet. And this was some other Mars footage that wasn't live. And so, yeah, you know, I'm not a NASA engineer, so I was, you know, I was as. As were thousands of other people. I was duped by that. And it can, you know, it can be hard, especially when we have constraints on our cognitive capacity. Right. People are busy, they're stressed, they're looking online, they're browsing. We're not deeply thinking about stuff all the time. So it's easy for actors to take advantage of that and exploit these biases.

Yeah. And so the, you know, one thing in that, right, we see the picture in the thing. It's so easy to retweet, right? Boop. Yeah, done. Right. And then also we see that a gajillion other people have. Have retweeted or shared or like you said, someone who you find to be a credible source that reposted and. And then seems like it's okay for me to do that too, or as you start to see it all over the place, but really no one's fact checking, which is a whole issue there. Right. So we all believe everybody else without doing anything. So I think that's a pretty decent segue into, you know, how we can be, you know, debunking. How do we. You talk about how you have that, like, vaccine metaphor throughout the kind of arc of the book. So how we can, you know, pre vax ourselves against the. The problem.

Yeah. So, you know, in the. In the first part to sort of talk about how misinformation can. Can infect our. And distort our memories and our perceptions. And we've talked a little about that. And the second part was about, you know, how it spreads and how models from epidemiology are used to really model how misinformation spreads on social media just as a way that viruses spread. You can literally take the same models. And the third part, I sort of developed this vaccination analogy based on the theory of psychological inoculation, or for people who are not so keen on the needle analogy, pre bunking, which is kind of the opposite of debunking. And, you know, we talked about memory and why it's so difficult to unring a bell. And so that's why I invest a lot in this preemptive metaphor. And inoculation is all about, you know, in a, in a slightly counterintuitive way. It's not necessarily about giving people more facts about an issue. It's actually about exposing people to a weakened dose of the misinformation or the techniques used to spread misinformation and refuting that in advance. I mean, that's really the crucial part. Sometimes people, you know, forget that part. It's like you don't want to, you don't want to just give people weakened doses of misinformation, right? You also want to refute it or deconstruct it in advance. And just like viruses enter the body and we need an immune response, right? And so vaccines are helpful there because they trigger, you know, when you insert a weakened or inactivated strain of a virus, they try to trigger the production of antibodies to help confer resistance against future infection. But it turns out you can do the same with the mind by injecting people with a weakened dose of misinformation or the general tactics are used to manipulate people. And by refuting that in advance, people can build up cognitive or mental antibodies over time and become more resistant to the full dose of the manipulation later on. And just as the body needs lots of examples of potential invaders so you can differentiate, you know, the healthy proteins from the invader cells. It kind of works the same with, with the brain. I mean, our brains need a lot of micro doses of deception and manipulation to try to understand the general structure behind it so we can be more resistant and neutralize it when we see it in the wild. And that's all of the research that, that we've been doing over the last decade or so. And there are lots of different ways to do that. You can do that, you know, on a, on a single myth basis. You can take a single falsehood and synthesize a weakened dose and pre bunk it in advance. We've tried to build games that are a bit more edgy and, you know, are a simulated social media environment that allow people to experiment with some of these weekend techniques that are used to manipulate people. You can do videos which can be scaled on social media. So there are lots of quote unquote virtual needles to deliver the vaccine. But that's, yeah, that's kind of the basics of it. And then there's lots of different ways to do it. Something we call technique based pre bunking, which is a bit more scalable and what we call fact based inoculation, which is a narrow spectrum vaccine that's meant to inoculate against a specific falsehood versus, you know, broadening it out and giving people broader immunity against a whole range of tactics. Because, you know, when we first started doing this in the lab, people would come in and we'd give them some misinformation about climate change at the end of the experiment and at the beginning we'd give them a weekend dose just to make it concrete for people so maybe that the audience can understand. So there's this petition that says that, oh, thousands of scientists have signed it saying climate change isn't real, it's a hoax, and so on. And you know, this has been fact checked as pants on fire because lots of problems, right? It's an unverified petition. There are lots of bogus signatories. And so. So what's the weakened dose? Right, so we don't expose people to the petition itself, but we create a weakened dose. So we tell people, look, you know, there's, there's this thing called the fake expert technique, and they borrow templates from maybe the National Academy of Science to make something seem scientific. And then they will say it has a lot of signatures. And you know, but you should know this is typically, you know, unverified people. You know, you might see Dr. Jerry Halliwell from the Spice Girls, you know, Charles Darwin, you know, long deceased, total bogus. And this is how it works. And, you know, use a little bit of humor. I mean, these people were really on this petition. I mean, they've been removed by now, but that's kind of how you create the weekend dose. And then you let people browse this petition website later on and see how people get on in terms of their attitudes about climate change. And what we find is that, you know, it helps protect people against the misinformation technique. So in this case, you know, when you expose people to this website, they start getting confused about the science around climate change. But when they've been inoculated, they can see through the tactics and they resist more. And it Helps protect their perceptions of the scientific consensus. But then, you know, people said, well this is great, but how would you scale this? I mean, how are you going to pre bunk every single myth or fallacy that's out there, right? And we said, well, that's a good question. And so we started thinking about how could we turn this into something bigger that could be scaled. Especially social media companies and organizations started getting calls from companies and other entities, including governments and public health authorities. And they said, well, how will we scale this? And so we started experimenting with what we call the sort of technique based vaccine, which is that you, you inoculate people against the underlying tactic that's often repeated throughout history on a given, in a given domain or topic. So for example, casting doubt on scientific consensus, that's often a tactic by, you know, casting doubt on the science or using fake experts or the building blocks of what goes into a conspiracy theory, or polarizing people in society, using emotions like fear mongering and outrage to get people riled up, or scapegoating groups in society or posing false dilemmas. There's all of these techniques that we uncovered. And then we thought, well, what if we expose people to weakened doses of some of these techniques? And initially we started doing that in a simulated gamified environment. We have an intervention called Bad News, which is kind of edgy. And the idea is that you step into the shoes of a manipulator and you start creating these weakened doses. And you know, that's supposed to trigger the sort of resistance process and help people identify, you know, how the sausage is made more or less so that people are more likely perhaps to become vegetarian after they know how they're being misled online. Because it's not, you know, it's not very comfortable in a way to learn how bad actors use these techniques. But you know, it's a controlled environment all weekend doses. And so it's all fictional to make sure that, you know, people don't spread any actual misinformation. And yeah, you know, people engage with like polarizing headlines, you know, how bad actors use emotions to get people riled up about, you know, science and other topics that might be scary. And we find that it helps people, you know, across a whole range of misinformation examples that use this tactic, we find that people become more resistant. And again, to give a practical example, and I'll end it there, one of the things that we've done with Google, who became interested in this approach and you know, they said, well, this is a fun science project, right. A 15, 20 minute game of fight simulation. And you know, it's gone kind of viral and you know, you've had some success with that. But if we're gonna really implement this as an organization, it needs to be shorter, right? Be it social media, people have limited attention spans. Let's talk about YouTube. Let's think about YouTube and you know, how about short videos, they said. And so we could, you know, potentially insert that in the ad space. You know, there's annoying ads that you get on YouTube that you can't skip. Right. The pre bunk could go there, you know, talking about nudging and we could scale that across billions of people all at once. Right. And so, you know, as you know, with psychological interventions, the shifts that you produce are generally modest with people. And so you need to find a way to scale these smaller effects. And so that seemed like a great idea. Now YouTube didn't initially, I mean, they haven't made this mandatory in the ad space. And you know, but in the early stages they'd allowed us to experiment with this. This was unprecedented in a way. They allowed us to do an experiment on the YouTube platform after we had gained some, some lab evidence and we started producing these videos that appear in the ad space. And then within 24 hours people would be prompted with some test or quiz that contains some misinformation, making use of the techniques. And then we found that against the control group actually live on social media, this had positive effects and they could potentially scale that across millions of users. And they have been doing that in steps. And you know, companies are different from universities, obviously, and a lot goes into it. And there's a lot of risk assessment about, you know, misinformation and politics and how to, you know, roll this out in a way that's going to benefit everyone. But to give the audience an example of what this actually looks like. So the weakened dose here would be this is a false dilemma technique. The example that I'm about to give, which is used by politicians a lot, also by extremists and political gurus on YouTube, which is also a big problem. And that's not just about headlines being true or false. In fact, I should clarify that our approach has never been to try to tell people what they need to believe in terms of what's true or false, because I don't think that's very helpful in the sense that most misinformation isn't flat earth or, you know, stuff that's obviously false. A lot of it is manipulative or Misleading in a more subtle way, and it might be partly true. But what we want to do is help people calibrate their judgments in terms of how accurate or reliable a piece of content is based on the presence of these manipulation techniques so that people can empower themselves to make up their own mind. And so what we do is we expose people to a clip from Star Wars. I'm not sure. Are you Star wars fan or not really? Yeah, enough of one.

I'm not a hater.

Enough. Not a hater. Okay, so I can, I can continue. So we show people clip from Revenge of the Sith, which is where Anakin Skywalker, spoiler alert. Who goes on to become Darth Vader, is talking to Obi Wan Kenobi and says, you know, either you're with me or you're my enemy. And then Obi Wan replies and says, only a Sith deals in absolutes. And the narrator kind of goes like, nobody wants to be a Sith. Right. Don't use false dilemmas and manipulation techniques. And that's the weakened dose. Right. And so that's, that's kind of a weakened dose that we call an inactivated strain in the sense that you don't have to use any actual polarizing misinformation as the weakened dose. Because a lot of these social media companies are concerned about being arbiters of truth. And companies similarly might be concerned about, you know, taking a particular stance on an issue. And so this was a great solution to, they use popular culture as the weekend dose, which is, you know, we can get bipartisan agreement on Star wars, even on things like scapegoating. We use a clip from south park where, you know, it's always the evil Canadians who are to blame. Right. I think most Americans can agree that it's the Canadians that are the problem. And so that's, you know, that's kind of a way to find a non political sort of way to create this weekend dose that's kind of funny and entertaining and then helps people spot this in, in actual context. And so, you know, people see stuff on YouTube like, oh, either you join ISIS or you're not a good Muslim, or you, you know, you have to support AR15 rifles or you're against the Second Amendment. These are very, you know, these are false dilemmas. And the goal is to take away all nuance and get people into a more extreme mode of thinking by pretending there's only two options. And, you know, you want to inoculate people against these type of logical fallacies. Again, not telling people what they need to believe about guns or immigration, but helping them spot the, the correct sort of techniques. And that's, that's what we did and.

That'S what we found fascinating and definitely could continue to talk about this forever. But as we go to close out the show and the conversation, we'll of course have links for everyone to get their copy of Foolproof in the show notes. And I just am hoping if you have a, like a quick short tip for people if we think about this in business. Right. So for those who are in social media type of a space, it's very clear how you would use this and why this matters. For everyone who's in a different type of company or organization, what's, why does it matter for them to have this level of awareness about misinformation that's out there? And what should companies be seeing as their role and maybe opportunity of what they can do to help, you know, their employees and just like preventing that spread of misinformation?

Yeah, absolutely. I actually think it's, it's very relevant to corporations and businesses in the sense that misinformation poses a huge risk to not only reputation of companies, but also share prices, market prices. You know, in the book I talk about Wayfair, for example, who was hit. The furniture company was hit by a satanic pedal following conspiracy that they never saw coming as it comes company. Right. So they, you know, somebody tweeted that the furniture looked too expensive and that quickly devolved into the, into a theory that they were trafficking young girls. And, and you know, if that happens to your company, you know, they're lucky that, that, you know, they survived that. But you can be dosed in terms of the, the, the pr. And so thinking about pre, proactive and preemptive risk management of, you know, what are some of the worst forms of misinformation that could be generated about a product or a company? And how can we pre preemptively inoculate people against those falsehoods? And sometimes you, you might decide, well, we don't, we don't want to, you know, bring people's attention to this kind of misinformation. And so you can wait and monitor until it becomes relevant, but you need to have a proactive management strategy in place and not passively try to debunk stuff among customers when it's already happened because it's so much more difficult. And just as it seems ludicrous that you become part of a pedophile ring, satanic pedophile ring conspiracy, it happened to Wayfarer. It happens to Clinton. You know, it could, it can happen. Procter and Gamble for years were, were plagued by a satanic panic conspiracy about their logo. About their logo. So, so if you look at the logo, there's their old logo. You could see a 666 in there and there were horns. And so, you know, they were the company of the devil and they were, they were pursued by conspiracy theorists for many years. They had to ultimately have to change their logo to get rid of, to get rid of it. And so, you know, what I advise is that pre bunking is really going to be a way to try to protect your company from harmful misinformation now, not after you've been confronted with it.

Fascinating. That last piece there. I'm definitely going to link to some of the episodes we've had about semiotics. So, so we can be thoughtful about symbols and what people might be digging into when it comes to logos and anything else. So those will be in the show notes for everyone. And again, as I said, we're going to link to the book in the show notes and for everyone who's interested in learning more and wants to connect with you, you know, what's their best path to do so.

Yes. I'm on Twitter at Sander underscore VD Lyndon. I'm also on LinkedIn. I'm on TikTok and Instagram profile Professor Sandra Vanderlinden. I'm less active on, on TikTok and Instagram, I have to say. But people, you know, if they're interested in resources, they can go to foolproofbook.com or sander vanderlinden.com where they can find all of the resources. Also Inoculation science, all of our resources are free and public for educational purposes. People can find them on Inoculation science.

Wonderful. Well, we will absolutely link to all of that in the show notes. And again, thank you so much for joining me on the show. It's been fascinating to read all the stories and to chat with you today.

Thanks so much for having me on.

Thank you again to Dr. Sander Vander Linden for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today's conversation? For me, I really enjoyed the insights that Sander shared throughout the book as well as in this conversation. With a mix of academic research and great stories, as well as personal insights and anecdotes. It's a really well thought out book and one we can all relate to because we're all presented with fake news constantly these days. It's cool to know that there's sort of a formula to misinformation and how it's traditionally represented, and that unlocking that formula can make it so you're less likely to be a victim to it. Sander, of course, teaches everyone to spot and unlock that formula in Foolproof, and he gave us a little taste of that today. And no matter what you do coming out of this conversation, hopefully you're inspired to be a little bit less susceptible to any of that misinformation or fake news that's out there. And one of the best things you can do is to just do a little research before you share and try to question what you see whenever possible. Don't just blindly share something, even if a lot of other people have. Take the time to look it up and see what's true. Don't be fooled by pictures or sucked into the social proof, and know that you can't trust your brain's natural instincts. Get more tips and great insights in Sanders book Foolproof. There's a link for you to get your copy in the show notes as well as links to related past episodes, a full timestamp summary of the episode, and more. It's all waiting for you in the app you're listening to and at the brainy business.com 337 and thank you again to Dr. Sander Vanderlinden for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me Tuesday for another Brainy episode of the Brainy Business Podcast. It's going to be a lot of fun. You won't want to miss it. Until then. Thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful. Thank you for listening to the Brainy Business Podcast. Molina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.