Meet PLOS Climate Section Editor Sander van der Linden

PLOS Climate recently welcomed Prof. Sander van der Linden of the University of Cambridge as a Section Editor for the journal’s Behaviour & Psychology section. Here, we get to know Sander and his motivation for joining the journal.

Could you tell us a bit about how you ended up in your area of research?

I’ve always been fascinated by human psychology and the social influence process. How do we make decisions about important societal problems? How are our judgments and perceptions shaped by information, our social networks, and the media?  When I was studying psychology (a long time ago now!), I wanted to understand how we can explain and predict human behaviour in different situations using both formal models and experiments. Around that time, I stumbled upon a physics class about climate change for social scientists – mostly by accident – which not only alarmed me in terms of thinking about the future of our planet, but also made me realize that there is a huge human, social, and behavioural dimension to this problem that certainly back then was relatively unexplored. For example, I started wondering about how humans perceive spatially and psychologically distant risks that cannot be experienced in the same way as other physical (health) risks, how we discount future events, how social norms guide behaviour in collective action problems, how the media frames the problem and how misinformation about climate change could lead people astray. I ultimately decided to make the psychology of climate change the topic of my doctoral degree.

What’s the focus of your current work, and what questions are you hoping to answer?

Much of my current work still focuses on problems of influence and persuasion but I have become increasingly concerned about the onslaught of misinformation and disinformation about climate change (whether it concerns the human causes of climate change or potential solutions). Some disinformation campaigns are organized and coordinated whereas other forms are more centred around confusion and lack of public understanding of science, uncertainty, and evidence. My research looks at the social and psychological factors that make people susceptible to believing in misinformation, understanding how it spreads in social networks, and building evidence-based interventions that can empower people to discern credible from manipulative information. Closely related questions address the issue of how to best communicate about the science of climate change and how such communications relate to individual and collective behaviour change. My research combines computational, experimental, and survey-based methods to help address these questions.

Why does Open Science matter in your field?

In order to build a cumulative knowledge base in psychology and the behavioural sciences more generally, researchers need access to the stimuli and materials used in studies in order to be able to replicate them and extend the work. Without Open Science we cannot estimate the reliability of the key insights that are generated by a field of study. Scientists should be able to check each other’s work by accessing the underlying data. We also need open data to perform meta-analyses of the field to understand the evidence base and identify critical gaps. Being part of a journal which requires data to be deposited and makes the science accessible to all is a key part of this effort. Climate change is a big interdisciplinary challenge, so for all scientists to have access to relevant research and understanding how to integrate and combine social scientific data with physical climate data is another reason why we should advocate Open Science.

Why did you decide to join PLOS Climate’s editorial board?

I’ve always been a big fan of Open Science and the PLOS model has proven advantageous to the public and media not only in terms of being able to read and access scientific research but also in making the underlying data available. So far there hasn’t been an exclusive focus on climate change, so with the launch of PLOS Climate, I think there’s a tremendous opportunity to carve out a special role for the social and human dimensions of climate change and I’m excited to be able to help lead the editorial strategy for submissions in the area of behavioural science.

What kind of research would you be particularly excited to see submitted to your section of PLOS Climate?

I’m particularly keen on more computational research that tries to understand how people engage with the issue of climate change on popular social networks, anything from how information about climate change propagates (both good and bad) to the role of echo chambers and polarization to how online trends and climate discussions relate to offline behaviour change. I’m also excited about novel research that integrates social science data (e.g. opinion surveys on perceptions) with physical climate data (e.g. temperature trends or extreme weather patterns) to explore critical human-environment interactions. Finally, I’d also like to see more real-world campaigns and field work testing psychological theories and predictions in ecologically valid settings using measures of behaviour or action rather than just self-reported intentions and attitudes.

Ready to submit your work to PLOS Climate?