Sander van der Linden is Reader (Professor) in Social Psychology in Society in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. His research interests center around the psychology of human judgment, communication, and decision-making, including social norms and networks, attitudes and polarization, reasoning about evidence, and the public understanding of risk and uncertainty. He is especially interested in a) the social influence process and how people gain resistance to persuasion and b) how people form (mis)perceptions of the social world, including the emergence of social norms in shaping human cooperation and conflict in real-world collective action problems such as climate change and the spread of fake news and misinformation.

His research on the psychology of judgment and decision-making has been widely recognized. In 2017, Dr. van der Linden was named a "Rising Star" by the Association for Psychological Science (APS). In 2019, he received the Sage Young Scholar Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) and the Sir James Cameron Medal for the Public Understanding of Risk from the Royal College of Physicians in Edinburgh. He has received best paper awards for his research from organisations such as the American Psychological Association (APA), the International Association of Applied Psychology (IAAP) and the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues (SPSSI), particularly for his work on the psychology of sustainability and climate change. He received the 2020 grand Frank Prize awarded by the University of Florida's College of Journalism for research in the public interest on fake news and misinformation. Fast Company Magazine recently described van der Linden as one of "4 heroes of digital democracy", WIRED magazine featured him as one of "15 top thinkers".

He is the current Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Environmental Psychology (JEP) and sits on the editorial board of Personality & Individual Differences, Psychology, Public Policy, & Law, and Current Research in Ecological and Social Psychology, among others. Prior to Cambridge, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Psychology, the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs, and the Kahneman Center for Behavioral Science at Princeton University. Before that, he was a visiting research scholar (2012-2014) with the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication at Yale University. He received his Ph.D. from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE).