Academic staff and HDR students who are interested in speaking with Professor Lewandowsky personally should contact Dr Li Qian Tay to organise a time within the schedule on 24 March below.

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9:00– 9:30 AM | Arrival and Welcome Coffee

9:30– 10:30 AM | Meeting with Early Career Researchers and HDR Students

10:30– 10:50 AM | Break

11:00– 12:30 PM | Seminar and Discussion

12:30– 2:30 PM | Lunch

2:30– 3:00 PM | Break

3:00– 5:00 PM | Individual Meetings 

All are in invited to the seminar on 24 March. Please register your attendance.

Honest Liars and the Threat to Democracy

Fact-checkers documented over 30,000 false or misleading claims by Donald Trump during his first presidency, yet most Republican voters still considered him honest throughout. This paradox can be understood through the lens of two distinct psychological conceptions of honesty: “fact-speaking,” which prioritizes factual accuracy, and “belief-speaking,” which values sincere expression of belief and authenticity. A politician may state falsehoods but still be perceived as honest if their followers see them as sincerely expressing their beliefs. I analyze political communication on Twitter/X to explore these conceptions. Using computational methods, I show that politicians who engage in belief-speaking are more likely to spread low-quality information. Additionally, in conversations with the public, responses mirror the honesty framework of the original political statements, demonstrating a “contagion” effect. Experiments further support these findings, showing that people’s conceptions of honesty and truthfulness shift based on the conversational context. Individuals can also be explicitly asked to adopt either a fact-speaking or belief-speaking perspective when evaluating politicians and political content. Encouraging fact-speaking reduces the acceptance of misinformation and decreases tolerance for democratic norm violations by politicians. These findings suggest that the way people define honesty is critical to democratic health. Promoting fact-based honesty may help counter the spread of misinformation and reinforce democratic norms.

Biography

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol whose main interest is in the pressure points between the architecture of online information technologies and human cognition, and the consequences for democracy that arise from those pressure points.

He is the recipient of numerous awards and honours, including a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society, and a Humboldt Research Award from the Humboldt Foundation in Germany. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (UK) and a Fellow of the Association of Psychological Science. He was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education. He was elected to the Leopoldina (the German national academy of sciences) in 2022. Professor Lewandowsky also holds a Guest Professorship at the University of Potsdam in Germany. He was identified as a highly cited researcher in 2022, 2023, and 2024 by Clarivate, a distinction that is awarded to fewer than 0.1% of researchers worldwide.

His research examines the consequences of the clash between social media architectures and human cognition, for example by researching countermeasures to the persistence of misinformation and spread of “fake news” in society, including conspiracy theories, and how platform algorithms may contribute to the prevalence of misinformation. He is also interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science. He has published hundreds of scholarly articles, chapters, and books, with more than 200 peer-reviewed articles alone since 2000. His research regularly appears in journals such as Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications, and Psychological Review.

His research is currently funded by the European Research Council, the EU’s Horizon 2020 programme, the UK research agency (UKRI, through EU replacement funding), the Volkswagen Foundation, Google’s Jigsaw, and by the Social Sciences Research Council (SSRC) Mercury Project.

Professor Lewandowsky also frequently appears in print and broadcast media and has contributed around 100 opinion pieces to the global media. He has been working with policy makers at the European level for many years, and he was first author of a report on Technology and Democracy in 2020 that has helped shape EU digital legislation.