Speaking of Psychology - Stopping the spread of misinformation, with Sander van der Linden, PhD

Episode Date: November 29, 2023

Misleading news stories. Propaganda. Conspiracy theories. Misinformation has always been with us, but with the rise of social media it can spread farther and faster than ever. Sander van der Linden, PhD, of Cambridge University, talks about why we’re so vulnerable to misinformation, how much we’re really all exposed to, why misinformation spreads like a virus and how we can “inoculate” people against it, and how AI is changing the landscape of misinformation.   For transcripts, links and more information, please visit the Speaking of Psychology Homepage. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

As the crispy chicken sandwich from 7-Eleven, people always call me loud. And I'm like, yeah, I know. I'm crispy. Did you expect me to whisper? If you want quiet, go eat some soup and reflect. Like, I know I'm a handful. I'm bold, I'm juicy. Throw some pickles and barbecue sauce on me, and baby, I'm a whole meal.

And with seven rewards, I'm just $4. Quiet. No. Krispy, saucy, and $4? Very. Only at 711. Valley 36-2326, participating stores only while supplies lastly out for full terms. Sleading news stories, propaganda, conspiracy theories. If you go online, turn on your TV, or even talk to your friends and neighbors, you're eventually going to encounter some type of misinformation.

Misinformation has always been with us, but with the rise of social media, it can now spread farther and faster than ever, threatening people's health and well-being, their trust in institutions, and perhaps even democracy itself. In the face of these threats, psychologists and other researchers are working to develop new ways to help people better separate truth from falsehood, arm themselves against misinformation, and understand when they're being manipulated. So what is misinformation and why does it spread so fast? How much misinformation are people exposed to on a regular basis? Does misinformation spread faster than truth? What can people do to show up their psychological defenses against it? What is the role of schools in educating students about misinformation? How is AI changing the landscape of misinformation and what role should social media platforms play in combating it?

Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Sander Vanderlinden, a professor of social psychology and society. at the University of Cambridge in the UK. His research centers around human judgment and decision making, in particular how people are influenced by misinformation and how they can learn to resist it. He's published more than 150 scientific papers

and his work is regularly featured in the popular media, including the New York Times, the BBC, CNN, and Time magazine to name just a few. Dr. van der Linden also consults about his research for the public, industry, and government organizations, including with institutions such as the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Sciences, and Google. His book, Full Proof, Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, was published in April.

Finally, Dr. Vanderlinden led the team that produced a report released this month by APA called Using Psychological Science to Understand and Fight Health Misinformation, an APA Consensus Statement. Dr. Vanderlinden, thank you for joining me today. Thanks so much for having me on. In the APA report I just mentioned, misinformation is defined as any information that is demonstrably false or otherwise misleading,

regardless of its source or intention. Can you dig into that for us? Why are we being bombarded with misinformation and how is misinformation different from disinformation? Yeah, so we actually spend a lot of time talking about how to define misinformation. And, you know, One of the elements that comes up is that the scope and the problem of misinformation is, in part,

determined by how we define it. So, for example, you know, if we define misinformation as only purely fabricated information, then if you look at the stats on that, that's, you know, not a huge part of most people's media diet. I mean, it comes up, you know, thinking about manipulated images during the recent Israel-Gaza conflict, for example, it comes up. But, you know, it's not every day. But if you change that definition to include half-truths, biased narratives, misleading argumentation, logical fallacies, presenting things out of context. And so that all falls under the category of misleading information, then all of the sudden misinformation becomes a much bigger problem and takes up a much bigger chunk of people's media diet.

And so that's why we tried to arrive at a consensus in terms of what misinformation is. And we decided that it's both. It's both outrightly false information as well as misleading information. And of course, the question you can ask is what's the difference between disinformation and misinformation? Now, disinformation is misinformation coupled with some psychological intention to explicitly deceive or harm other people. And the reason why we defined it as misinformation being independent of intent is because intent is actually, difficult to prove in a legal sense. So they have been documented disinformation campaigns.

For example, from the tobacco industry, who, you know, a court in the United States ruled that they have been deceiving the public intentionally for over 50 years between the link between smoking and disease. So that's an example of disinformation. But it's not always so easy to tell what people's intentions are. And that's why we refer to it as misinformation in the sense of being conservative. about what we know. So how big a problem is the spread of misinformation?

Is there any way to quantify how much misinformation people are being exposed to every day? Yeah. So, you know, as I said, it highly depends on your definition. So if you assume that the definition is just purely fabricated information, then, you know, you might actually just be talking about, you know, one or a couple percent of people's overall media diet. If you're talking about misleading information, then maybe we're talking about, you know, up to 20% of people's media diet. It's also incredibly diverse. So for some people, you know, depending on the new sources that they visit, they don't see much misinformation.

But for a smaller group of people, they're embroiled in it. I mean, they're basically stuck in an online echo chamber and are continuously bombarded by misinformation. You know, people who get most of their news from social media, for example, see much more misinformation than people who don't primarily get their news from social media. That's not to say that there's no misinformation on, let's say, cable news. But it, you know, so it depends. And it's difficult to quantify. And, you know, I'll say that we did our best in the report to look at these estimates and say, well, you know, I can range anywhere from one to 20 percent depending on people's circumstances, visual disinformation is a hugely underestimated factor.

So, you know, much of what's misleading online are also manipulated images, which are often not counted, but actually form a large part of what it is that people see. But most importantly, and I think this is the point that, that is my, you know, to some extent, my personal take, but I think also generally relevant is that we don't actually have good ways of integrating all of the different ways in the, which people are exposed to misinformation. So if you read a typical study, and this is what we have to do for the consensus report, you know, it's based on how much misinformation you saw on Twitter during, let's say, an election.

But, you know, is Twitter the only platform that you're on? You're not only on Twitter. You might be on Facebook. You might be on Twitter. You might be on TikTok. You're using WhatsApp. You talk to your neighbors. You watch cable TV.

You read newspapers. How do you quantify for a given individual all of the misinformation that's coming at them through all of these various channels. I mean, we don't have the capacity or the tools to do that efficiently at the moment. So I think we're probably underestimating how much misinformation people are really exposed to. So that's, you know, that's where we're currently at. But the quantified estimates that we do have often coming from single platforms and looking at, let's say, browsing data or things like that, suggests that there is, you know, a lot of variation,

but it's not a holistic picture. I mentioned in the intro that one of the places that you consult to is Google. And I'm just wondering how well are these platforms adapting to what's happening on them with miss and disinformation? Are they really invested in curbing it? I think it, you know, there's a, it ebbs and flows, you know, depending on, A, how much people demanded and how much discussion. there is of it. And so, for example, there were times during an election and during a pandemic that these companies feel some incentive to actually monitor things very closely, to do fact-checking, to maybe even have preemptive measures in place. But then at other times, you know, they seem

quite lax. So, for example, a lot of these companies have been actually backsliding and following Musk's example of actually doing less and less, firing the content moderators, getting rid of trust and safety teams, and not even taking down content anymore. There's a lot of hesitation. So just to contextualize this for people, during a pandemic, there were quite direct with, for example, taking down harmful content on COVID-19 on election fraud. And that is because, yeah, sure, there's free speech, but there are exceptions to free speech. And when the exceptions violate user policy, they can take things down.

And that's usually done when there's direct harm to people. So, for example, if you're spreading harmful medical advice or if you're undermining the democratic process and so on. But for all of the other stuff, it's often just labeled as opinion. People are expressing their opinions, right? There's no direct harm that is easily identifiable. And so they leave it up. And now we're seeing that they're leaving up deepfakes created during political campaigns. I mean, they have expressly said now that they're no longer taking down fraudulent claims about the previous election, right?

Sort of saying, oh, you know, all of the stuff about election fraud, you know, the false conspiracy, we're going to leave that up now and we're going to stop taking that down. So unfortunately, you know, sometimes it's, it's, you know, one step forward, two steps backward. And that's been the rhythm that I've seen over a longer period of time. So, you know, we work with these companies to implement solutions. Some of them, like Google, have been extremely receptive to media literacy education, empowering people to spot misinformation on the platform, funding, research, testing it on their platforms. But then when it comes to the final step of wide implementation and pushing things, you know, to the next level in terms of actually making this an integral part of their policies, that's often where you see the hesitation. And when the political climate is not conducive, this hesitation is amplified. So in the United States, right, there are lawsuits at the moment.

So a lot of these companies, right, for people who don't know, you know, there are ongoing lawsuits against the Biden administration for funding research on misinformation, and that somehow it's targeting, you know, one side of the political spectrum and that there's more censoring going on. So it's become politicized, which has a chilling effect on not only what the government is doing, but on what all of these social media companies are doing, which is very little at the moment. Let me ask a really basic question, which is why is it so easy for us to fall prey to misinformation? What are the factors that make us vulnerable to it? Yeah, and so sometimes I think it's easy for people to sort of think of the individual that is susceptible to misinformation.

People tend to think, oh, it's not me. It's some other person, and they have kind of ideas about whom that person might, might be. But in fact, if you look at the research, you know, there's some some good research and very solid research on the cognitive and social elements that really make us all vulnerable to misinformation. And some of these factors include what we call fluency. So fluency is about the speed with which you process information. And so we know that we process repeated claims faster than non-repeated claims. And so misinformation producers can use that to their advantage, right? if they keep lying and keep saying false statements, we process it faster, so more fluently.

It feels more familiar. Research shows that people find it less unethical over time to share false things that they've heard over and over again because you're getting used to it, right? It also feels more true. And so then it's where you get what we call illusory truth effects. And so illusory truth is when people, you know, have the illusion that something is true because simply they've heard it before. We know that once people are exposed to misinformation,

it lingers in our memory. This is what we call the continued influence of misinformation. And so even when people acknowledge having seen a correction, you know, once you're exposed, once it integrates itself in your memory and connects with other things that you know, it kind of makes friends, right, if you think of your memory as a social network, very difficult to then eliminate it completely. And so that's what we call the continued influence of misinformation. And so, you know, those things are general factors about how the brain works that

that makes everyone susceptible. And then, yeah, if you want to craft a more specific profile, you know, people are more politically extreme, people who spend a lot of time on social media, people who engage in less analytic or deliberative thinking, people who are low on trust and high in paranoia, people who've had trauma in their childhood. So those are all factors that are associated with being more, you know, quote-unquote, vulnerable to misinformation. Now, in your work, you've made the analogy that misinformation spreads like a virus.

How literally should we take that analogy? Yeah. I think it's good to, you know, to have discussions about this. I mean, obviously, the infodemic is kind of a play on words, right? It's meant to sort of signal that it's not just a pandemic of a literal virus, but also a pandemic of information, having too much information, especially false information. But for me, and in the book, what I really try to do is say, look, this isn't just a cute sort of analogy to give people a frame of reference for thinking about this.

I mean, it is quite literal in the sense that we use models from epidemiology, such as the susceptible, infected, recovered model, which is called a sur model. So, you know, in a population, you have people who are susceptible to a virus that become infected and at some point they recover, you have models of dynamic social transmission, right? So how do people transmit a virus and you can model that? But it turns out you can use the same models more or less unchanged to study the diffusion of misinformation in social networks. And misinformation behaves much like a virus if you look at these models. And so in a simplistic version of this model, people are the nodes in the network, right?

And so you come in contact through a link with somebody else and they share misinformation with you. So you become infected and activated and then you share it with other people. And then we can actually predict how far the misinformation will travel or how many people are exposed. And you can sort of think about how this diffuses in a network. And it's a very useful framework in a public health sort of sense to think about this idea. Now, critics might say, okay, but it's, you know, the simple contagion model of disease isn't exactly, you know, how it works with people. because people are more complex. And I think that's true, but you can make the model slightly more complex.

You know, sometimes you need to be exposed repeatedly to misinformation before you accept it and spread it to other people. It's kind of like, you know, if somebody sneezes on you, you know, and say you're not going to get COVID 100% right, every time. Right, maybe you need to be sneezed on multiple times. And so, and so, you know, you can develop it in a similar way. And there are some slight differences. So, you know, these public health models and disease, it's often about random variation.

But the way people spread information isn't always random. It can be intentional. And that's where you get into some interesting deviations. So when people deliberately spread misinformation for, let's say, political purposes, that's where you have some interesting exceptions. But overall, I think it's quite literal and kind of a useful framework. And that, of course, also leads to the idea that, well, if it spreads like a virus, maybe we can vaccinate people. Right. And so let's talk about that. How do you inoculate people against fake news, misinformation, disinformation? What do you do? Yeah. So again, it's premised on the vaccination metaphor, more or less exactly. So just as vaccines introduce a weakened or inactivated strain of a virus into the body to try to trigger the production of antibodies, right, to help confer resistance against future infection, it turns out you can do the same with a human brain.

amtively exposing people to a weak dose of misinformation or the strategies used to produce misinformation. And by refuting and deconstructing those in advance, people can build up cognitive or mental antibodies and become more resistant to it in the future. And it should be specific. Sometimes people misinterpret this as exposing people to a weak dose of misinformation. That's only part of it, right? You also need to actually pre-bunk it and deconstruct it. And we use the term pre-bunking because it's easier for people to understand than inoculation sometimes and sort of to signal that it's the opposite of debunking. Because debunking information, even though it's important and effective in partially reducing how much people rely on information,

you know, there's a consensus that obviously it's much harder to unring a bell, right? And so if you can, there is value in this idea of pre-bunking. We're just to sort of build preemptive resilience through exposure to weakens. doses of misinformation and showing people the tricks of disinformation and how it's produced in advance. And it's quite different from fact checking, right? So instead of giving people facts, you give them a weakened dose of the disinformation or misinformation, but then you also show people why and how it works so that they have

the tools to resist it in the future. Right. So to carry the metaphor even further with a physical vaccine, the goal is usually to reach herd immunity where so many people are protected that the virus is no longer able to spread. Is it possible to reach herd immunity against misinformation? I think so. And just to give people some context, right, that I think we have to be realistic about the psychological vaccine analogy. So if we, people ask me a couple of questions, like, okay, what's the level of immunity? And, you know, to what extent, like give me a

a practical example of how this actually works, right? And so just to start with the second one, so Twitter before Musk, right, way before Musk, Twitter implemented some of this research and was pre-bunking during the election. And what they did was they forewarned people. So they send a message to the top of people's feed saying, be warned, you might see some misinformation about the election on the platform. This is to stimulate the psychological immune system. So make sure it's not sleeping, right?

Wake people up into a more deliberative mode of processing. And then comes to pre-bunk and they said, look, you might see some, you know, funny stories or some false information that would suggest that voting by mail increases election fraud. However, you should know that all election experts basically agree that voting by mail is safe. And here are some authoritative resources if you want to arm yourself and learn more. And that's kind of what the pre-bunk is. Now, the question is, you know, what does that to people in terms of resilience?

So, you know, if you come into my lab and I give you a 20-minute simulation in one of our special social media simulations. And, you know, I might boost your immunity by 60%, right? So that's quite good. That's like a flu job. But now if we transition from lab research and psychology to the real world, you know, typically we find, for example, with videos on YouTube, you know, and those annoying ads that you can't skip, that's where the pre-bunk could go.

Yeah. If you have 30 seconds with people, maybe we're boosting you by 10% now. Right? So that's, you know, people have limited attention. they're in the world, they're distracted. It's a short message. So now we go from 60 to 10%. So skeptical colleagues would say, I don't know,

would people buy a vaccine at 10% efficacy? But I think that's where the herd immunity comes in, right? And so also for social media companies, right? The gist is actually that, you know, when companies play ads, you know, it's all about small effects, right? Brand recognition, they pay millions for 1% increase in recognition of a brand. So if we can do that for science and say, look, we run a 30, second video ad campaign and we can boost people by their immunity by 10% and then scale that

across billions of people, now you could really have something. And so when you talk about herd immunity, that's really the idea, right, that enough people are vaccinated so that misinformation no longer has a chance to spread. And we've done computer simulations of this. And what we find is that it's possible, but there are some caveats. So if you trickle this down into the system where if you have a realistic system where people eventually end up in echo chambers and there's polarization, then springing a little inoculation, you know, at the sort of 10% level, sure, it's beneficial, but it's not going

to move the needle. However, if you front load with a heavy campaign, then actually it can be quite impactful in stopping the flow of information. So acting fast, preemptive, and prophylactic is really key. And so because social media companies control much of the information flow in society, if they were to make this video mandatory in the ad space, so you can't skip it, right? And scale that across billions of people all at once, I think you could really have something in terms of, you know, potential herd immunity. But I will add to that because many people will be skeptical of social media companies and their intentions.

And I completely agree. So another route is not to rely on government, not to rely on tech companies, but integrate this into our education, to have a mandate for, you know, to make sure we teach media literacy and even pre-bunking specifically from a very early age to all of our kids in all schools in America and at every year of education to make sure we're boosting, right, to make sure it stays at the design level. And then you can really, you know, by the time we become adults and engage with the stuff, I think you could potentially have a more serious consideration of the concept of herd immunity.

And again, you know, when you do this, I wouldn't say. We need to tell people what they need to believe. I mean, that's not what education is about, but we want to empower people to discern the general techniques of this information, right? Polarizing, you're creating polarizing headlines or false dichotomies, you know, think about if you're pro-Israel, you're anti-Palestine. If you're pro-Palestine, you're anti-Israel. These are misinformation techniques because they take away all nuance and promote extremism, right?

So there's a lot of these fallacies out there that are not political. everyone agrees that they're bad, emotional manipulation, that we can teach our kids so that they can build immunity. I want to talk for a minute about generative AI technology, things like chat, GPT. What are the implications of these technologies for the future of misinformation, in your opinion? Do you worry that generative AI is going to accelerate the spread of misinformation by making it so much easier to produce? Yeah. Yeah, so people have divided opinions on this, but I do think that there's both really reasons to be quite concerned, legitimate concern, and also reasons to be optimistic. So I should first preface by saying, you know, I don't, I'm not as alarmed as the people who are panicking about killer robots.

I think we're a ways away from, you know, starting an army of robots that is going to suppress us. I mean, it's good people think about low probability events in the far future, right? We have to do something as academics. But I'm more concerned about the immediate impact, which is the use of AI in the generation of disinformation. And you see that play out in some really, I think, problematic context. And so one is during elections. Politicians have already used it. We've seen, you know, there was the recent example of Nancy.

There was a deep fake of her on Facebook that there were. use to take down. Oh, Nancy Pelosi? Yeah, Nancy Pelosi. Yeah. So that's an example. But there was the deep fake of Trump getting arrested before he was actually charged because it plays into people's psychological motivations, right?

So they were expecting this. And so it's easier to manipulate people when they're in a receptive state. But the use of deep fakes in political campaigns is hugely concerning, especially without proper regulation, without social media companies taking this stuff down. I mean, you're really getting into a post. post-truth reality where you can just, you know, create fake images of political opponents and say whatever you will. I mean, this is, I mean, this is concerning. The other part is the microtargeting process. So before, so micro-targeting rights the idea that we can target

people with messages, fake or real, based on their personality trades or other characteristics that you can scrape online through people's digital footprint, right? So we all have a digital footprint online. We click on website. We like things on social media. of that is data we can gather. And from that data, we can predict what people might want to click on. And so that tremendously enhances the efficiency of targeting and messaging. Also, when that messaging contains propaganda disinformation, but before people had to manually craft these things, right? So you would have to be like, okay, so this person is extroverted or introverted. I'm going to make this fake message appeal to introverts and have a picture of a library with it or something, right?

Whereas the extrovert was just partying and so on. It takes a lot of effort. An AI, chat GPT can do this for you at scale. It can create thousands and thousands of variations of the same message, slightly adapted to different personalities, for example. It can do this very fast. So you don't need people anymore. You could just link the automated generation of accounts with ChadDPT, and you can scale this up. And it empowers really, it democratizes the production of this information.

And it really allows anyone to now partake in this information war. And so that, you know, even the CEOs of these companies of, you know, Open AI, for example, recognize the threat of AI to the production of this information. On the flip side, it's not all doom and gloom. You can use AI to automate fact-checking. You can use AI to generate prebunks. We've done that. It actually understands prebunking very well.

And so I was very surprised. It can generate really good inoculations. It can maybe automatically classify the manipulation techniques that are taking place in online discourse. So we know what the misleading techniques are and how to tackle them. We've even created a test called the Misinformation Susceptibility Test, which is an individual difference sort of test where everyone can take this quick. and get their score back and how kind of naive versus distressful you are and how good you are discerning. But, you know, that test was created by an AI. You know, we had a generate, we trained it on conspiracies and misinformation and it spit out thousands and thousands of fake sounding, but plausible sounding headlines.

And so we use that in psychological scale development. So I think it's, you know, as a tool, it's neutral. You can use it for bad purposes. You can use it for research purposes. So that's kind of what I'm thinking. But I am concerned about the deployment of it in the context of disinformation. And the political season in the U.S. is already beginning. And I'm just wondering what people can do to recognize that they're being targeted or

micro-targeted, as you said, with false political information. What am I supposed to do as a consumer of news? Yeah. So, you know, one of the things that you can do is to really investigate what information you are disclosing online. So most social media platforms will have some ability for you to look for their sort of transparency statement. Sometimes this can be complex and difficult.

But basically, you can opt out of a lot of things. So you can opt out of, for example, collecting certain types of data from your feed or your profile. Some social media platforms allow you to curate your own feed. You can opt out of the algorithmic selection, for example. So many people don't realize that on X now, you know, what you see by default is the algorithmically recommended content. But if you click on home timeline, for example, you get what your friends and network are sharing

with you. So most people don't know that what they're seeing is actually the stuff that's recommended based on your click behavior. So I think spending a little bit of time in terms of, you know, becoming cognizant of what you're opting into and what data you're... you're sharing. And then also, you know, becoming aware of some of these techniques that have deployed like trolling, which is very common during elections.

A lot of bots do this. Trolling is a way to bait people and getting them to engage. And you see this typically during elections that flame wars erupt on social media. But people don't often realize that these are either disinformation producers, so real humans or automated accounts that will start an issue. And we worked on this with the State Department. We tried to explain it with something innocent like putting pineapple on pizza. So we said, if you were a troll during an election, how would you disrupt and so chaos

as a foreign actor, for example? And so, you know, we said, oh, what if you put pineapple on pizza? I mean, that's going to be really offensive to all the American Italians. Italian, what is this? You know, you don't put pineapple on pizza. That's offensive. But then you have the other people who say, this is America, man.

Freedom. I can put on my pizza, whatever I want. Don't, you know, infringing my rights. And then you buy bots to amplify both sides of the debate. And so discourse. Of course, they don't do that with pineapple and pizza. They do it on race, guns, abortion. And so how do you know, right?

So the idea is that if, you know, if you feel that you're being lured into, you know, into saying something about a controversial topic that is provocative, Don't feed the trolls. That's the advice. Don't engage. And yeah, don't be fooled. So that's another way. Just familiarizing yourself with some of these techniques like trolling and false

economies and scapegoating minority groups. You know, we blame. And we produce materials. People can check out that give easy examples. So, you know, scapegoating typically is where you blame all the problems in society on some group of people. So, you know, during a conflict, it could be Jews, could be Palestinians. But also, you know, so how do you inoculate, for example, against this?

We give people a clip from South Park where, you know, typically it's the Canadians that are responsible for everything bad in America. Right. It's sort of a funny clip with, oh, Canada. And so that, you know, but it has the same structure. And so it helps people understand. And so, you know, what people can do, and it's one of the most powerful things, is actually help other people spot misinformation.

I think for true herd immunity, in fact, what we need is for it to spread from person to person. So that's the beautiful thing. I think about the psychological vaccine that you don't have with the biological vaccine. You can't really share your biological vaccine with people, but you can't share the psychological vaccine. It's what we call post-inoculation discourse or talk. And so you can actually then explain it to other people and pay it forward. And that's how we protect each other. So that's another way of not only paying it forward.

We also find that when you do that, you're kind of rehearsing. and boosting yourself in the process. So it has, it has, you know, various benefits. Now, the mainstream media seem to be one place where you can often get the most reliable information, but I'm just wondering if they're doing a better or a worse job of fact-checking now that this has become so prevalent. I mean, are they really alerting their readers, their listeners, their viewers to false information? Yeah, I think traditional media, I think people often forget. They often say the so different about social media. I think a huge difference is that on social media,

there's no barrier to entry. You can upload any content. There's no editorial process. There are no fact checkers. There's no attention to accuracy at all. People can say whatever they want. With traditional media, you at least have an editor. You have fact checkers in most places. You have journalistic standards. You have regulatory bodies. So there's a lot of steps that prevent traditional media from just saying crazy things. Of course, things get a little bit muddled when you go to cable and streaming and so on. But in the most traditional form, there's actually a big difference in the curation of it. I think most fact checkers are doing their best to keep up with the scale of the problem. I agree with you that traditional media is

not doing enough to warn people in advance and equipping them with the tools to discern misinformation better. And they could do a lot more. We could do a lot more in in podcasts and movies on news channels. And so, you know, it's all about, you know, when people watch TV, that's an opportunity, you know, in some way, in a lot of ways to learn about, you know, some of the techniques that are used to produce misinformation, how to look out for them. And that's, it's often done online, but people kind of forget about the power of regularly

media. Most people watch TV, right? And so that's, you know, that's a powerful avenue. Podcasts also hugely unexplored. I mean, that's online. But the amount of people who are tuning in the podcasts, you know, think about Andrew Tate, Joe Rogan sort of stuff, you know, it's, again, it's all unverified. There's very little regulation. But podcasts are also a tool to engage with people.

And so, yeah, there's a lot of new ways, I think, to help prepare people. And I would say that traditional media, although they have this sort of base level of protection, they're not being very proactive about educating citizens. I just want to say that this podcast stands by truth when we're not spreading misinformation here. Very good. So what are the next big questions that you're trying to answer? What are you working on right now? Yeah. So, you know, some of the big questions are, you know, how can you sort of test these things in a large population scale RCT?

You know, when you think about the best available evidence for interventions, you want to roll it out kind of like a medical trial, right? And so it's very challenging to get actual behavioral data from people. For example, what websites might people be visiting, right, after they've learned about these things? What videos are they watching? Their privacy concerns, right? But social media companies also often don't share that data. So when we run a campaign and find that, yeah, we've inoculated people and they're now better at spotting these techniques, you know, are they also watching less misinformation online on the platform? They won't share that type of behavioral data.

If we do an experiment, let's say, you know, offline, how do you measure how much misinformation people are spreading interpersonally with other people? You know, these are very difficult things to measure and quantify. So we're trying to think hard about how can we establish, you know, the same level of evidence as you would for a public health type of intervention. And that's kind of also what we talk about a little in the report. about missing links is the link to, you know, the causal impact of misinformation. So the flip side is, you know, I was talking about protecting people, but the flip side is actually the causal

impact of misinformation. We know that misinformation can kill people, but actually it's almost impossible to study the circumstances under which that happens. You know, we don't have access to working with people who are refusing COVID treatment and might even die from COVID because they believe in conspiracy theories, right? We typically, you know, people who believe in conspiracies typically don't want to participate in scientific research. And so, you know, and how do you know for sure that it's one piece of information that is the causal agent in people's behavior?

Behavior is very complex. So how do you isolate it? These are very tough questions that I think we need to do more research on. Obviously, AI, deep fakes, right? How would you, how would you inoculate people against manipulated images? is the next question. But also, who's the right disseminator of this stuff? I mean, some people, you know, we have to think about power relations, right?

So some people perceive the government as a powerful actor that's suppressing certain communities, right? Some people think of public health organizations in the same way. Who should be the arbiter of truth? Who should be the communicator of information? I think increasingly realizing that maybe actually relying on trusted community leaders could be a good way to diffuse accurate information into the population. So people might not listen to the government, but maybe they'll listen to their local rabbi or imam or a religious leader, right? Or maybe an influencer. That can also go sideways when influencers are spreading conspiracy theories.

But sometimes they have what if Taylor Swift was. announcing, you know, highly factual information to the world on a regular basis. What would the world look like with her platform, right? And so we're thinking of new ideas of, you know, who are our good spokespeople for this issue? Is it the APA, right? Maybe APA has a role to play. And so that's, you know, that's currently what we're thinking about testing also, like

who's the right communicator. Well, Dr. Vanderlind, and I want to thank you for joining me today. I think you've given us a lot to think about. My pleasure. Thanks so much for having me on the show on the great questions. Okay. And I want to let our listeners know that this great report that APA did with the great help and leadership of Dr. Vanderlin is available on our website at APA.org.

You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. And if you like what you've heard, please leave us a review. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speaking of psychology at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Wynerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening for the American Psychological Association. I'm Kim Mills.