Your host:
Eric Schurenberg
Award-winning journalist and former CEO of Inc. and Fast Company
We in the media tend to be pretty good at admiring the problem of disinformation, not so good at countering it. So a plan for countering falsehoods in the public sphere is one of the things that makes today’s guest, Sander van der Linden, so intriguing. Van der Linden is a professor of Social Psychology in Society at the University of Cambridge and the author of Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects our Minds and How to Build Immunity. The analogy of infection and its remedy through immunity recurs a lot in his research, and more important, it points a way towards making you and me and audiences resistant to manipulation. Sander and I talk about deconstructing conspiracy thinking; about recognizing the tools of information manipulation; about the power of pre-bunking vs. debunking; about how to talk with people of different political beliefs, and much more.
In this episode we discuss:
- Analogy of Infection of the Mind
- Resisting manipulation
- Pre-bunking vs. debunking
- Adapting to people with different beliefs