The psychology of fake news
The spread of misinformation online can have dramatic consequences, from influencing election outcomes to compromising public health initiatives. In this lecture, award-winning scholar and fact-checking researcher MIT Professor David G. Rand will explain why people believe and share fake news, and offer scalable fact-checking strategies such as crowdsourced veracity ratings to improve social media ranking algorithms.
Speaker
Professor David G. Rand (he/him), MIT Management Sloan School and MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Prof Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and a Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Team, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Spanning the fields of cognitive science, behavioural economics and social psychology, Prof Rand’s research combines behavioural experiments with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs and choices. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and ‘fake news’, understanding political psychology and polarisation and promoting human cooperation.
Prior to joining MIT, Prof Rand was a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology and an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics and Management at Yale University.
His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science and the American Economic Review and has received widespread media attention. He was named in Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” and nominated fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
Host
Department of Economics, Monash Business School
BET (Behavioural, Experimental, Theoretical) Research Group, Monash Business School.
Monash Laboratory of Experimental Economics (MonLEE), Monash Business School.
Organised by
Department of Economics, Monash Business School
Event Details
- Date:
- 6 May 2022 at 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
- Venue:
- Online
- Categories:
- Economics
Description
The spread of misinformation online can have dramatic consequences, from influencing election outcomes to compromising public health initiatives. In this lecture, award-winning scholar and fact-checking researcher MIT Professor David G. Rand will explain why people believe and share fake news, and offer scalable fact-checking strategies such as crowdsourced veracity ratings to improve social media ranking algorithms.
Speaker
Professor David G. Rand (he/him), MIT Management Sloan School and MIT Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Prof Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and a Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, the director of the Applied Cooperation Team, and an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the Initiative on the Digital Economy.
Spanning the fields of cognitive science, behavioural economics and social psychology, Prof Rand’s research combines behavioural experiments with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs and choices. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and ‘fake news’, understanding political psychology and polarisation and promoting human cooperation.
Prior to joining MIT, Prof Rand was a postdoctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology and an Assistant Professor and Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics and Management at Yale University.
His work has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Nature, Science and the American Economic Review and has received widespread media attention. He was named in Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” and nominated fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network.
Host
Department of Economics, Monash Business School
BET (Behavioural, Experimental, Theoretical) Research Group, Monash Business School.
Monash Laboratory of Experimental Economics (MonLEE), Monash Business School.
Organised by
Department of Economics, Monash Business School