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Join Senior Associate Fellow at the Henry Jackson Society Andrew Fox, as he launches he latest paper The Psychology of Disinformation: Strategies of Influence and Cognitive Impacts.

Andrew examines disinformation not simply as false or misleading content, but as a psychologically engineered form of influence that exploits predictable features of human cognition, emotion, and social identity. It identifies four core mechanisms through which disinformation operates: cognitive biases such as confirmation bias and motivated reasoning; emotional manipulation, particularly through fear and outrage; identity-based framing that embeds narratives within in-group and out-group dynamics; and visual persuasion, including the use of misleading imagery and deepfakes. Drawing on interdisciplinary research across psychology, neuroscience, and communications, as well as case studies from the Gaza conflict and Russian information operations in Ukraine, the paper argues that disinformation succeeds because it aligns with how people naturally process information. It concludes that effective countermeasures must move beyond reactive factchecking and instead address the underlying cognitive vulnerabilities that allow disinformation to take hold.

Major (Ret.) Andrew Fox

Senior Research Fellow, Henry Jackson Society

Herb Lin

Research Fellow, Hoover Institution

Leah Siskind

Director, Foundation for Defense Democracies