University Associate Professor in Social Psychology, and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab, Department of Psychology, University of Cambridge

Sander van der Linden, Ph.D., 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 (mis)information, how it spreads in online networks, and how we can most effectively prebunk and inoculate people against false information. He leads national consensus reports on the psychology of misinformation and served on the World Health Organization's (WHO) infodemic working group.

He has won numerous awards for his research on human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including the Rising Star Award from the Association for Psychological Science (APS), the Sage Early Career Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Frank Prize in Public Interest Research from the University of Florida, and the Sir James Cameron Medal for the Public Understanding of Risk from the Royal College of Physicians. He co-developed the award-winning fake news games Bad News and GoViral, which have been played by hundreds of 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 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 the BBC. He has been described by WIRED magazine as one of “15 top thinkers” and by Fast Company Design as one “four heroes who are defending digital democracy online”. His latest book FOOLPROOF: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (HarperCollins, 2023) was featured in the best non-fiction books by BBC, Cosmopolitan, and Nature. Before joining Cambridge, he held academic positions at Princeton, Yale, and the LSE, where he obtained his PhD.