Inoculation vs. misinformation – The daily blog of behavioral and cognitive economics

You won’t believe this

As a young boy growing up in the Netherlands in the 1990s, Sander van der Linden learned that most of his mother’s relatives, who were Jewish, had been killed by the Nazis, in the grip of racist ideology. At school, he was confronted with antisemitic conspiracy theories still circulating in Europe. It all got him wondering about the power of propaganda and how people become convinced of falsehoods. Eventually, he would make studying those issues his career. As head of the Social Decision-Making Lab at the University of Cambridge, Van der Linden is studying the power of lies and how to keep people from believing them. ….[READ]