David Rand

Erwin H. Schell Professor of Management Science and Brain & Cognitive Sciences at MIT; director of the Applied Cooperation Team. Researcher working on judgment, decision-making, and cooperation, with a focus on how people evaluate and spread misinformation. His work examines both the cognitive mechanisms underlying false belief formation and interventions to reduce misinformation spread, including crowd-sourced fact-checking systems.

Key works

• How Polarization May Help Combat Misinformation (2026 talk) — Theoretical and experimental work showing that polarized individuals may be more effective at crowd-sourced fact-checking through systems like Community Notes.
• Shared partisanship dramatically increases social tie formation in a Twitter field experiment (with Mosleh et al., 2021) — Field experiment demonstrating that partisan preference causally drives social tie formation on Twitter.
• Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online (with Pennycook et al., 2021) — Nature paper demonstrating that subtle reminders to focus on accuracy increase accurate sharing across six experiments and a Twitter field experiment.
• Fighting COVID-19 Misinformation on Social Media (with Pennycook et al., 2020) — Experimental evidence that accuracy-salience interventions improve discriminative sharing behavior on social media.
• Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter — Cognitive reflection correlates with behavior on Twitter — field validation of cognitive factors in social media discernment
• Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained — Lazy, not biased (with Pennycook) — showing analytic thinking predicts resistance to partisan fake news.

Areas of research

• Misinformation and belief formation
• Social spreading of false information
• Fact-checking and corrections
• Behavioral approaches to combating misinformation