Information and Influence: Collective Information Processing under Societal Threat

This forthcoming Springer volume addresses the collective dimension of information processing under threat — how groups, communities, and societies process information when facing external pressures, adversarial influence, or crisis conditions. The book develops a theoretical framework that integrates individual cognitive processes with group and systemic dynamics, examining both how societies can be made vulnerable to influence and manipulation, and what regulatory and cultural mechanisms produce resilience.

The collective level of analysis is underrepresented in a field dominated by either individual-psychological or platform-level accounts. Understanding how information cascades through social systems, how norms of epistemic trust form and break down, and what conditions allow false information to achieve systemic effects requires exactly the kind of sociological and systems-level framework this volume develops. For researchers and policymakers working on strategic resilience — as opposed to individual-level counter-messaging — this framework is directly relevant.