Rakoen Marieke Maertens

Department of Psychology

Rakoen Maertens is a final-year PhD Candidate in Psychology and Lab Manager at the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab. He graduated with a Master of Science (summa cum laude with honours) in Experimental Psychology from Ghent University, where he received the national Best Master Dissertation in Psychology award for his work applying behavioural insights to tackle climate change misinformation. At Cambridge he co-founded the Cambridge University Behavioural Insights Team and is focusing on making applied science more robust by applying the latest advancements in psychometrics, long-term impact evaluation, and behavioural insights. His research on the long-term effectiveness of psychological inoculation against misinformation led to high-impact publications such as "Long-term effectiveness of inoculation against misinformation: Three longitudinal experiments", with an Altmetric score of over 900, making it one of the highest impact articles in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. He also developed the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST), which is now used to detect at-risk populations in the US, UK, India, and Nigeria, and for investigating the relationship between regional misinformation susceptibility and vaccine uptake rates, enabling practitioners to improve the effectiveness of vaccine uptake campaigns.

I am the lead researcher on the Misinformation Susceptibility Test (MIST) and long-term effectiveness of inoculation projects. The MIST was designed with an international team, but the conceptualisation and principal research was done by me. The inoculation interventions were designed by colleagues, but the long-term-effectiveness evaluation was led by me.