Can you spot fake news? Here are the headlines of three recent stories that received wide coverage: “Putin issues international arrest warrant for George Soros”; “A baby born in California was named heart eyes emoji”; “Criminal farts so loudly he gives away his hiding place”. Did you recognise that only one of these stories was true – the third one?
This is the type of test that Sander van der Linden, a professor of social psychology in society at Cambridge University, likes to use in experiments, as outlined in his fascinating, if slightly terrifying, new book.
Van der Linden has found that only about 4% of participants in these tests can correctly identify all the bogus stories presented to them. You are probably thinking that, as the reader of a serious national newspaper, you would not be fooled so easily, but Van der Linden explains clearly why we are all vulnerable. We all have a tendency to accept information that is consistent with our prior beliefs, and reject that which is not, resulting in confirmation bias.
Some of us are also more likely to believe in wild conspiracy stories – from secret microchips in vaccines to stolen elections – but most of us are unaware of how often we are duped by the things we read and hear. And Van der Linden warns that there is growing evidence that our inability to filter out misinformation is putting many lives at risk and undermining democracy across the world.
He cites a 2021 YouGov survey that found shocking levels of delusion across 21 countries. For instance, 42% of people in Spain and Greece think there is a secret group of individuals who are running the world, compared with 31% in the US and a still astonishing 18% in the UK. And while only 8% of people in the UK share Donald Trump’s view that global warming is a hoax, one in five of Americans do.
However, all is not lost. Van der Linden and his colleagues have found a way that might make us all more resistant to fake news and other falsehoods. Foolproof’s key insight, based on years of painstaking scientific studies, is that misinformation acts like a virus that can infect and spread between individuals, particularly when they confine themselves to “echo chambers” where deceptions and lies are shared and amplified without challenge. Fortunately, he also shows that the misinformation virus can be counteracted through psychological inoculation.
Van der Linden has identified “six degrees of manipulation” – strategies that are used to fool people into believing the unbelievable. These include discrediting factual information using deflection and denial, and making emotional appeals to generate responses based on feelings instead of rational thoughts – for instance by exaggerating the risks of rare side effects from the Covid-19 vaccines.
Polarisation strategies are employed to deepen divisions between groups of people on issues, such as abortion, that strongly align with liberal and conservative viewpoints. Conspiracy theories are seeded to cast doubt on mainstream explanations for events. Trolling seeks to exploit and provoke people about controversial issues, such as baiting high-profile individuals on social media about their views on Brexit.
The sixth strategy is the impersonation of expert individuals and organisations to lend spurious credibility to outright falsehoods. The book highlights the example of the Oregon Petition, which has been circulated periodically over the past 25 years with more than 31,000 signatures of supposed scientists who reject the scientific consensus on climate change.
But Van der Linden found that individuals who deny global warming are more sceptical of the validity of the petition – which includes very few climate scientists – when they are warned in advance that conservative lobby groups are seeking to manipulate views by hiding the extent of consensus among experts in order to create opposition to policies to phase out fossil fuels. This is an example of “prebunking” – making people more alert in advance to specific attempts to deceive them – and often provides a more effective defence than debunking misinformation after it has appeared.
However, Van der Linden and his colleagues have shown that it is even better to inoculate people by warning them of how they might be manipulated, and to give them a chance to explore for themselves how easy it is to create and spread misinformation. They even created an online game, Bad News, through which thousands of people could try their hand at writing deceptive social media posts and headlines. Subsequent testing revealed that participants had, in the process, become more immune to false claims.
Foolproof ends with a chapter offering advice to readers about how they can inoculate friends and family to make them less susceptible to propaganda, by challenging and discussing fake news that is encountered, for instance, on a WhatsApp group. So, even as a reader of a serious national newspaper, this book could help you to play your part in creating “herd immunity” against the growing scourge of fake facts and nonsense narratives.
• Bob Ward is policy and communications director at Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics
• Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity by Sander van der Linden is published by HarperCollins (£22). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
