Fake News and the Brain: Dangers and How to Protect Ourselves!

Prof. Dr. Markus Knauff 

January 30, 2023, 4:00 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.

Olbers Hall, House of Science, Sandstr. 4/5, Bremen 

In a society in which the greed for attention supplants the ideals of truth and veracity, fake news has an easy time of it. So far, politicians have not been able to put a stop to it. And Facebook, Twitter and Co. make good money from spreading misinformation. So we have to protect ourselves. It helps us if we better understand how our brain processes information. What makes our brain so vulnerable to misinformation? Why are we so quick to believe and spread targeted disinformation? How can we protect ourselves from targeted attempts at manipulation? The lecture offers two things: results from basic cognitive research on how our brain processes true and false information,

Recommended reading: Knauff, M. & Spohn, W. (2021) (eds.). The Handbook of Rationality . Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.