Winner of the SPSP Book Prize for the Promotion of Social and Personality Science • Winner of the 2024 APA William James Book Award • Winner of the 2024 Harvard Goldsmith Book Prize • Winner of the 2024 Nautilus Book Award • A Next Big Idea Club Must-Read • A Financial Times Best Book of the Year • One of Nature’s best science picks • One of Behavioral Scientist’s Notable Books of 2023 Informed by decades of research and on-the-ground experience advising governments and tech companies, Foolproof is the definitive guide to navigating the misinformation age. From fake news to conspiracy theories, from inflammatory memes to misleading headlines, misinformation has swiftly become the defining problem of our era. The crisis threatens the integrity of our democracies, our ability to cultivate trusting relationships, even our physical and psychological well-being—yet most attempts to combat it have proven insufficient. In Foolproof, one of the world’s leading experts on misinformation lays out a crucial new paradigm for understanding and defending ourselves against the worldwide infodemic. With remarkable clarity, Sander van der Linden explains why our brains are so vulnerable to misinformation, how it spreads across social networks, and what we can do to protect ourselves and others. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds, exploiting shortcuts in how we see and process information to alter our beliefs, modify our memories, and replicate at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, it’s very hard to cure. Strategies like fact-checking and debunking can leave a falsehood still festering or, at worst, even strengthen its hold. But we aren’t helpless. As van der Linden shows based on award-winning original research, we can cultivate immunity through the innovative science of “prebunking”: inoculating people against false information by preemptively exposing them to a weakened dose, thus empowering them to identify and fend off its manipulative tactics. Deconstructing the characteristic techniques of conspiracies and misinformation, van der Linden gives readers practical tools to defend themselves and others against nefarious persuasion—whether at scale or around their own dinner table.

“Empowering and thoroughly researched, this book offers useful contemporary analysis and possible solutions to one of the greatest threats to democracy.” —Kirkus Reviews Editors’ choice, The New York Times Book Review Recommended reading, Scientific American Why should we care about having true beliefs? And why do demonstrably false beliefs persist and spread despite bad, even fatal, consequences for the people who hold them? Philosophers of science Cailin O’Connor and James Weatherall argue that social factors, rather than individual psychology, are what’s essential to understanding the spread and persistence of false beliefs. It might seem that there’s an obvious reason that true beliefs matter: false beliefs will hurt you. But if that’s right, then why is it (apparently) irrelevant to many people whether they believe true things or not? The Misinformation Age, written for a political era riven by “fake news,” “alternative facts,” and disputes over the validity of everything from climate change to the size of inauguration crowds, shows convincingly that what you believe depends on who you know. If social forces explain the persistence of false belief, we must understand how those forces work in order to fight misinformation effectively. “[The authors] deftly apply sociological models to examine how misinformation spreads among people and how scientific results get misrepresented in the public sphere.” —Andrea Gawrylewski, Scientific American “A notable new volume . . . The Misinformation Age explains systematically how facts are determined and changed—whether it is concerning the effects of vaccination on children or the Russian attack on the integrity of the electoral process.” —Roger I. Abrams, New York Journal of Books

Using humorous examples and quality research, this book offers the first comprehensive, multidisciplinary analysis of why people believe and share misinformation, and if the internet has changed things. Suitable for students and researchers in psychology, politics, international relations, and sociology, as well as policymakers and changemakers.

The new edition of Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy offers an updated overview and critical discussion of contemporary discourses around truth, misinformation, and democracy, while also mapping cutting-edge scholarship. Through in-depth analyses of news articles, commentaries, academic publications, policy briefs, and political speeches, the book engages with the underlying normative ideas that shape how fake news is being addressed across the globe. Doing so, it provides an innovative, critical contribution to contemporary debates on democracy, post-truth, and politics. Three new chapters: Chapter 2 provides an outline of the scholarly field of research into fake news; Chapter 5 examines how issues of fake news and (mis)information have become intertwined with contemporary crisis events; and Chapter 9 presents democratic alternatives to post-truth solutionism. A new foreword by Professor Sarah Banet-Weiser. Fully updated examples and studies from contemporary events, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the United States Capitol attack, and the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Extended discussions on the causes of democratic decline, currently proposed solutions to fake news, and democratic alternatives to our current predicament. Interesting, informative, and well documented, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy continues its commitment to understand and engage with the current state and future of democracy.

In a world where people have 24/7 access to the Internet, social media, and other digital technologies, developing healthy habits around how we interact with our screens can have an enormous impact on our physical, mental, and social well-being. Part of the Q&A Health Guides series, this book offers a broad introduction to healthy technology use – a topic of utmost importance in our “always connected” world. The book's questions cover the potential negative impacts of technology overuse and addiction on mental and emotional health, physical well-being, and our relationships with others. Questions also address concerns such as digital information privacy, identity theft, piracy, and the dangers of misinformation circulated online. Finally, the book includes questions covering how to best address technology overuse and addiction, including mindfulness strategies, “digital detoxes,” and therapy. Augmenting the main text, a collection of 5 case studies illustrate key concepts and issues through relatable stories and insightful recommendations. The Common Misconceptions section at the beginning of the volume dispels 5 long-standing and potentially dangerous myths about healthy technology use, directing readers to additional information in the text. The glossary defines terms that may be unfamiliar to readers, while the directory of resources curates a list of the most useful books, websites, and other materials. Finally, whether they're looking for more information about this subject or any other health-related topic, readers can turn to the Guide to Health Literacy section for practical tools and strategies for finding, evaluating, and using credible sources of health information both on and off the Internet.

This book argues that misinformation poses a multifaceted threat to knowledge, while arguing that some forms of content moderation risk exacerbating these threats. It proposes alternative forms of content moderation that aim to address this complexity while enhancing human epistemic agency. The proliferation of fake news, false conspiracy theories, and other forms of misinformation on the internet and especially social media is widely recognized as a threat to individual knowledge and, consequently, to collective deliberation and democracy itself. This book argues that misinformation presents a three-pronged threat to knowledge. While researchers often focus on the role of misinformation in causing false beliefs, this deceptive potential of misinformation exists alongside the potential to suppress trust and to distort the perception of evidence. Recognizing the multifaceted nature of this threat is essential to the development of effective measures to mitigate the harms associated with misinformation. The book weaves together work in analytic epistemology with emerging empirical work in other disciplines to offer novel insights into the threats posed by misinformation. Additionally, it breaks new ground by systematically assessing different forms of content moderation from the perspective of epistemology. Misinformation, Content Moderation, and Epistemology will appeal to philosophers working in applied and social epistemology, as well as scholars and advanced students in disciplines such as communication studies, political science, and social psychology who are researching misinformation. The Introduction and Chapter 1 of this book are freely available as downloadable Open Access PDFs at http://www.taylorfrancis.com under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives (CC-BY- NC- ND) 4.0 license.