A vaccine for disinformation

Social psychologist Sander van der Linden on how to protect people against propaganda, what to do about deepfakes, and how to educate the next generation to protect the truth

How do you know what’s true? Can you really be sure you’re not being manipulated when you’re reading something online?

Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology at the University of Cambridge, has made it his business to equip people with the tools to make those calls, and to defend themselves against threats such as misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. He’s one of a group of like-minded thinkers such as cognitive psychologist Stephan Lewandowsky, psychologist Jon Roozenbeek, and the cognitive scientist John Cook (who Anand interviewed extensively for The Persuaders), who have updated an older psychological concept with Cold War roots — inoculation theory — to deal with today’s most vexing information problems.

Van der Linden’s “prebunking” technique, which he and his team have tested widely with games and media campaigns, and which has even been employed by governments to disrupt propaganda efforts, is modeled after medical vaccinations.

By exposure to a “weakened” version of psychological manipulation — typically, van der Linden does this by walking his research subjects through the steps of manipulating others, and through the experience of being manipulated — people can develop the equivalent of psychological antibodies, and develop resistance to real attacks that might follow.

We talked to van der Linden about the origin of his techniques in the anxieties over “brainwashing” that emerged in the wake of the Korean War, about his experiences applying “prebunking” in the battle against online disinformation, what he thinks can be done about the increasing threat of A.I.-driven disinformation, and what keeps him hopeful about the future of the truth.

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You and your team were the first to demonstrate that online misinformation and disinformation had real effects, and you’ve also come up with an effective technique that can help people resist those efforts. But the first thing I want to ask is, what is misinformation, what is disinformation, and what is propaganda?

There's an important difference that has to do with psychological intent. Misinformation is just any stuff that's false, incorrect, or misleading in some way. Disinformation is misinformation coupled with some psychological intention to harm or deceive other people on purpose. And when you do that in the service of a political or ideological or even commercial agenda, we refer to it as propaganda.

Some people may have gotten their ideas of what propaganda is and how it works from watching The Manchurian Candidate. And interestingly, your work actually has roots in academic research into the notion of brainwashing, correct?

When I was first looking at this problem, I started to think about how we've always had propaganda, we've always had disinformation, so there must have been some effort to do something about this back in the day. And so I came across this fantastic piece that talked about some psychological experiments that were done in the '60s and early '70s that were inspired by the Korean War.

There was this concern following the Korean War after one British national and 19 or 20 U.S. nationals had decided to stay behind in communist China voluntarily after the war. And the U.S. was freaking out about this because they thought that these soldiers had been successfully brainwashed into voluntarily buying into communism. Their response was that these soldiers must have been brainwashed because they didn’t have the facts about how great America is, about how great capitalism is. So we need to give them more facts. 

But the psychologist William McGuire made this crucial observation and said, "I don't think that that's the right idea. I don't think we need more facts. I think what we need is a weakened simulation of the types of attacks that people might be facing on their ideology, and then refute those in advance." And that's where this inoculation idea came from. 

So a lot of the questioning that was going on in these camps was focused on points where the POWs were already a little bit confused: "Why are we here? Is capitalism good?" And that connects to the present-day story you tell about the experience of Caleb Cain, who was adrift, looking for his place in life, ran across right-wing channels on YouTube, and eventually made his way to explicitly white nationalist neo-Nazi stuff. Does propaganda work because there's already a hole for it to fill?