In this episode of Crossing Channels, Richard Westcott talks to Sander van der Linden from the University of Cambridge and Marion Hoffman from the Toulouse School of Economics about how social connections shape our lives.

They explore how relationships form, why having many connections does not necessarily protect people from loneliness, and how online and face-to-face interactions influence wellbeing, trust and access to information.

The conversation examines how algorithms, likes and echo chambers shape what people see and believe, why some social groups mix while others remain separate, who is most vulnerable to online manipulation, and what schools, policymakers and technology companies can do to create safer and more inclusive spaces for connection.

For more information about the Crossing Channels podcast series and the work of the Bennett School of Public Policy and IAST visit our websites at https://www.bennettschool.cam.ac.uk/ and https://www.iast.fr/

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With thanks to:

Audio production by Alice Whaley
Associate production by Burcu Sevde Selvi
Visuals by Tiffany Naylor and Pauline Alves

More information about our host and guests:

Richard Westcott is an award-winning journalist who spent 27 years at the BBC as a correspondent/producer/presenter covering global stories for the flagship Six and Ten o’clock TV news as well as the Today programme. Last year, Richard left the corporation and he is now the communications director for Cambridge University Health Partners and the Cambridge Biomedical Campus, both organisations that are working to support life sciences and healthcare across the city.

Marion Hoffman is an Assistant Professor at the Toulouse School of Economics. Her research aims at furthering statistical methods for the analysis of social networks and social groups. Her work has particularly focused on the development of relational event models and exponential family models tailored for social group data. She has also worked on empirical studies devoted to understanding the role of depressive symptoms and socioeconomic attributes in the emergence of social interactions. She received a PhD from ETH Zürich in Switzerland before joining the IAST and TSE.

Sander van der Linden is Professor of Social Psychology in Society and Director of the Cambridge Social Decision-Making Lab in the Department of Psychology at the University of Cambridge. He is ranked among the top 1% of highly cited social scientists worldwide and has published over 200 research papers. He is the author of Foolproof: Why We Fall for Misinformation and How to Build Immunity (2023). He was elected a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in 2025 and received the BPS President’s Award for Distinguished Contributions to Psychological Knowledge.