David Rand

David Rand is the Erwin H. Schell Professor and Professor of Management Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences at MIT, an affiliate of the MIT Institute of Data, Systems, and Society, and the director of the Human Cooperation Laboratory and the Applied Cooperation Team.

Bridging the fields of cognitive science, behavioral economics, and social psychology, David’s research combines behavioral experiments run online and in the field with mathematical and computational models to understand people’s attitudes, beliefs, and choices. His work uses a cognitive science perspective grounded in the tension between more intuitive versus deliberative modes of decision-making. He focuses on illuminating why people believe and share misinformation and “fake news,” understanding political psychology and polarization, and promoting human cooperation. David received his B.A. in Computational Biology from Cornell University in 2004 and his Ph.D. in Systems Biology from Harvard University in 2009, was a post-doctoral researcher in Harvard University’s Department of Psychology from 2009 to 2013, and was an Assistant and then Associate Professor (with tenure) of Psychology, Economics, and Management at Yale University prior to joining the faculty at MIT. His work has been published in peer-reviewed journals such Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, the American Economic Review, Psychological Science, Management Science, New England Journal of Medicine, and the American Journal of Political Science, and has received widespread attention from print, radio, TV and social media outlets. He has also written popular press articles for outlets including the New York Times, Wired, New Scientist, and the Psychological Observer. He was named to Wired magazine’s Smart List 2012 of “50 people who will change the world,” chosen as a 2012 Pop!Tech Science Fellow, and awarded the 2015 Arthur Greer Memorial Prize for Outstanding Scholarly Research, fact-checking researcher of the year in 2017 by the Poyner Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network, and the 2020 FABBS Early Career Impact Award from the Society for Judgment and Decision Making. Papers he has coauthored have been awarded Best Paper of the Year in Experimental Economics, Social Cognition, and Political Methodology.

Papers related to misinformation from
David Rand and Gordon Pennycook’s research team

1. Evaluating interventions to fight misinformation

General introduction: “The Right Way to Fight Fake News” NYTimes op ed 2020 [Tweet thread]

Accuracy nudges / Inoculation

• Understanding and reducing the spread of misinformation online [including field experiment increasing quality of news actually shared on Twitter] Working paper [Tweet thread]

• Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention Psychological Science 2020 [Tweet thread]

Crowdsourcing

• Scaling Up Fact-Checking Using the Wisdom of Crowds Working paper [Tweet thread]

• Fighting misinformation on social media using crowdsourced judgments of news source quality PNAS 2019 [Tweet thread]

• Will the crowd game the algorithm? Using layperson judgments to combat misinformation on social media by downranking distrusted sources. CHI ’20: Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems [Tweet thread]

Warnings/Corrections

• The Implied Truth effect: Attaching warnings to a subset of fake news headlines increases perceived accuracy of headlines without warnings Management Science 2020 [Tweet thread]

• You’re definitely wrong, maybe: Correction style has minimal effect on corrections of misinformation online Media and Communication, forthcoming [Tweet thread]

• Debunking Handbook 2020 [PDF] [Tweet thread]

Source Information

• Emphasizing publishers does not effectively reduce susceptibility to misinformation on social media HKS Misinformation Review 2020 [Tweet thread]

2.  Role of reasoning in detecting versus falling for misinformation

General introduction: “Why do people fall for fake news?” NYTimes op ed 2019

Manipulation-based papers:

• Fake news, fast and slow: Deliberation reduces belief in false (but not true) news headlines JEP:General 2020 [Tweet thread]

• Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications 2020

Correlation-based papers:

• Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning Cognition 2019

• Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking Journal of Personality 2019

• Belief in fake news is associated with delusionality, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, and reduced analytic thinking Journal of Applied Memory & Cognition 2019

• Beyond “fake news”: The role of analytic thinking in the detection of inaccuracy and partisan bias in news headlines Working paper

• Twitter data reveal digital fingerprints of cognitive reflection Nature Communications, forthcoming [Tweet thread]

• Predictors of attitudes and misperceptions about COVID-19 in Canada, the U.K., and the U.S.A. Working paper [Tweet thread]

3.  Illusory truth and the effect of repetition

• Prior exposure increases perceived accuracy of fake news JEP:General 2018

• Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review 2019

• Investigating the robustness of the illusory truth effect across individual differences in cognitive ability, need for cognitive closure, and cognitive style. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2019

4.  Other papers related to misinformation

• Information gerrymandering and undemocratic decisions Nature 2019 [Tweet thread]

• The (Minimal) Persuasive Advantage of Political Video over Text Working paper
  [Tweet thread]

• Character Deprecation in Fake News: Is it in Supply or Demand? Group processes and intergroup relations, forthcoming [Tweet thread]

• A practical guide to doing behavioural research on fake news and misinformation Working paper [Tweet thread]

• Cognitive reflection and the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2019

Politically motivated reasoning (or lack thereof)

Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often prevent causal inference Current Opinion in Behavioral Science 2020 [Tweet thread]

• Rethinking the link between cognitive sophistication and identity-protective bias in political belief formation Journal of Experimental Psychology:General, forthcoming

• Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating Cognition 2020 [Tweet thread]

• Science beliefs, political ideology, and cognitive sophistication Working paper [Tweet thread]

• On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs Judgment and Decision Making 2020 [Tweet thread]