Professor Stephan Lewandowsky FBA
- Fellow type
- UK Fellow
- Year elected
- 2026
- Honours
- FBA
- Subjects
- Psychology
- Sections
- Psychology
Summary
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. His 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 them.
His awards include a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council, a Wolfson Research Merit Fellowship from the Royal Society, and a Humboldt Research Award. He is a Fellow of the Academy of Social Science (UK), the Association for Psychological Science, and the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, and was elected to the Leopoldina (the German national academy of sciences) in 2022. He holds an Honorary Professorship at the University of Potsdam, and Clarivate has named him a highly cited researcher every year since 2022 - a distinction awarded to fewer than 0.1% of researchers worldwide.
His research examines the clash between social media architectures and human cognition, including countermeasures to misinformation, "fake news", and conspiracy theories; the role of platform algorithms; and why people accept or reject scientific evidence on issues such as vaccinations and climate change.
He has published more than 300 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, regularly appearing in journals such as 'Nature Human Behaviour, Nature Communications', and 'Science' (see the full list at www.lewan.uk). His research is funded by the European Research Council and Horizon 2020.
A frequent media contributor with around 100 opinion pieces, he has long advised European policy makers: he was first author of the EU report Technology and Democracy (2020), which helped shape EU digital legislation, and recently co-led Fractured Reality, advocating European digital autonomy.