Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity

Sander van der Linden, a world-renowned expert on fighting misinformation, reveals the psychology behind its power and how to protect ourselves from it. His book "Foolproof" provides eleven antigens to help stop the spread of misinformation.

Format: Hardback
Length: 336 pages
Publication date: 16 February 2023
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers

Winner of the British Psychological Society's Best Book Prize (Popular Science) for 2023, Nature's Top 10 Books of 2023, A Financial Times Book of the Year for 2023, and A Waterstones Book of the Year for Politics for 2023, one of the world's top experts on combating misinformation reveals the psychology behind its power and how we can protect ourselves. From fake news to conspiracy theories, from pandemics to politics, misinformation may be the defining problem of our era. Like a virus, misinformation infects our minds, altering our beliefs and replicating at astonishing rates. Once the virus takes hold, our primary strategies of fact-checking and debunking are insufficient cures.

In Foolproof, Sander van der Linden describes how to inoculate yourself and others against the spread of misinformation, discern fact from fiction, and push back against methods of mass persuasion. Everyone is susceptible to fake news. Society is polarized, conspiracy theories are rife, fake experts dispense misleading advice, and accuracy is often lost in favor of sensationalist headlines. So how and why does misinformation spread if we are all aware of its existence? And, more importantly, what can we do about it?

Sander van der Linden takes us through the psychology of conspiratorial thinking and equips us with the eleven antigens needed to help stop the spread of misinformation once and for all.

Weight: 618g
Dimension: 162 x 243 x 35 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9780008466718