Events Calendar

YINS Seminar: David Rand

Weekly Seminar
Event time: 
Wednesday, October 11, 2017 - 12:00pm to 1:30pm
Location: 
Yale Institute for Network Science See map
17 Hillhouse Ave, 3rd floor
New Haven, CT 06511
Event description: 

“The cognitive science of fake news”

Speaker: Professor David G. Rand
Associate Professor Psychology, Economics, and Management 

Talk Summary: Why do people believe patently false news headlines, and what can be done to stop the spread of “fake news”? In this talk I will describe a number of recent findings from my collaboration with Gord Pennycook exploring these issues. For example, in one set of studies we showed that just reading a fake news headline made people subsequently more likely to believe it - even if the headline was flagged as “Disputed by 3rd party fact-checkers,” ran counter to the subject’s political orientation, or was not even explicitly remembered by the subject. In another set of studies, we found that - contrary to a common argument that people use processes such as rationalization to convince themselves of the truth of stories which fit their political worldview (often called “motivated reasoning” or “cultural cognition”) - instead people who engaged in more analytic thinking were better at discerning fake from real news, even for headlines that aligned with their political ideology. This work also assessed the impact of showing versus hiding the website that each headlines came from, and surprisingly found no effect on judgments of accuracy. We hope that the results of these studies, as well as others I will discuss but are not yet posted, will help guide policy makers in their efforts to reduce belief in blatantly false information.

Speaker bio: David G. Rand is an Associate Professor of Psychology, Economics, Cognitive Science and Management at Yale University and director of Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory and Applied Cooperation Team. David’s research focuses on human cooperative behavior. Cooperation is an essential aspect of life, from bacterial bio-films to social insects, and from friendships and workplace collaborations to environmental conservation, political participation, and international relations. Yet cooperation is often individually costly. So why are people (usually) willing to incur these costs, and what can we do to promote cooperation in the world around us? David works together with the other researchers in Yale University’s Human Cooperation Laboratory to answer these questions. He takes into account interactions across different scales, and integrating approaches from numerous disciplines. He asks (1) what prosocial and antisocial decisions people will make in particular situations and social environments, (2) the cognitive mechanisms that determine how these decisions are actually made (often looking at conflicts between intuition and deliberation), and (3) the ultimate explanations for why our decision-making processes have come to function as they do (in terms of evolution, cultural, and learning). In doing so, David combines empirical observations from behavioral experiments with predictions generated by math models and computer simulations using evolutionary game theory. He draws on approaches from psychology, economics, and evolutionary biology, and addresses a range of applications including public policy, management, and law.