Gordon Pennycook
Biographic Data
| ID | 106675 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gordon Pennycook |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gordon |
| FAMILY NAME | Pennycook |
| SIGNATURE | PENNYCOOK G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Regina |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-1344-6143 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 51 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 259 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 51 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Overconfidently Conspiratorial: Conspiracy Believers are Dispositionally Overconfident and Massively Overestimate How Much Others Agree With Them
There is a pressing need to understand why people believe in conspiracies. Although past work has focused on needs and motivations, we propose an alternative driver of belief: overconfidence. Across eight studies with 4,181 U.S. adults, conspiracy believers consistently overestimated their performance on numeracy and perception tests (even after taking their actual performance into account). This relationship with overconfidence was robust in con…
Increasing conflict between intuitions triggers deliberation
Unbundling Digital Media Literacy Tips: Results from Two Experiments
Recent studies have found promising evidence that lightweight, scalable tips promoting digital media literacy can improve the overall accuracy of social media users’ sharing intentions and improve their ability to determine the accuracy of true versus false headlines. However, existing research is designed to test entire bundles of such tips, which limits our practical knowledge about whether some kinds of tips are more effective than others and …
Examining Partisan Asymmetries in Fake News Sharing and the Efficacy of Accuracy Prompt Interventions
Who benefits from debiasing
On the role of analytic thinking in religious belief change: Evidence from over 50,000 participants in 16 countries
Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI
Conspiracy theory beliefs are notoriously persistent. Influential hypotheses propose that they fulfill important psychological needs, thus resisting counterevidence. Yet previous failures in correcting conspiracy beliefs may be due to counterevidence being insufficiently compelling and tailored. To evaluate this possibility, we leveraged developments in generative artificial intelligence and engaged 2190 conspiracy believers in personalized evide…
Crowds Can Effectively Identify Misinformation at Scale
Identifying successful approaches for reducing the belief and spread of online misinformation is of great importance. Social media companies currently rely largely on professional fact-checking as their primary mechanism for identifying falsehoods. However, professional fact-checking has notable limitations regarding coverage and speed. In this article, we summarize research suggesting that the “wisdom of crowds” can be harnessed successfully to …
On the Disposition to Think Analytically: Four Distinct Intuitive-Analytic Thinking Styles
Many measures have been developed to index intuitive versus analytic thinking. Yet it remains an open question whether people primarily vary along a single dimension or if there are genuinely different types of thinking styles. We distinguish between four distinct types of thinking styles: Actively Open-minded Thinking, Close-Minded Thinking, Preference for Intuitive Thinking, and Preference for Effortful Thinking. We discovered strong predictive…
Canadians’ knowledge of cancer risk factors and belief in cancer myths
While Canadians were able to identify tobacco-related cancer risk factors, many myths were believed and numerous risk factors were not recognized. Cancer myths can be harmful in themselves and can detract the public's attention from and action on established risk factors
Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Thinking more or thinking differently? Using drift-diffusion modeling to illuminate why accuracy prompts decrease misinformation sharing
Recent experiments have found that prompting people to think about accuracy reduces misinformation sharing intentions. The process by which this effect operates, however, remains unclear. Do accuracy prompts cause people to "stop and think," increasing deliberation? Or do they change what people think about, drawing attention to accuracy? Since these two accounts predict the same behavioral outcomes (i.e., increased sharing discernment following …
Does Analytic Thinking Insulate Against Pro‐Kremlin Disinformation? Evidence From Ukraine
Pro‐Kremlin disinformation campaigns have long targeted Ukraine. We investigate susceptibility to this pro‐Kremlin disinformation from a cognitive‐science perspective. Is greater analytic thinking associated with less belief in disinformation, as per classical theories of reasoning? Or does analytic thinking amplify motivated system 2 reasoning (or “cultural cognition”), such that analytic thinking is associated with more polarized beliefs (and t…
Author Correction: Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents
Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents
How to think about whether misinformation interventions work
Accuracy prompts are a replicable and generalizable approach for reducing the spread of misinformation
Interventions that shift users attention toward the concept of accuracy represent a promising approach for reducing misinformation sharing online. We assess the replicability and generalizability of this accuracy prompt effect by meta-analyzing 20 experiments (with a total N = 26,863) completed by our group between 2017 and 2020. This internal meta-analysis includes all relevant studies regardless of outcome and uses identical analyses across all…
Beliefs About Covid-19 in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Novel Test of Political Polarization and Motivated Reasoning
What are the psychological consequences of the increasingly politicized nature of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States relative to similar Western countries? In a two-wave study completed early (March) and later (December) in the pandemic, we found that polarization was greater in the United States ( N = 1,339) than in Canada ( N = 644) and the United Kingdom. ( N = 1,283). Political conservatism in the United States was strongly associated…
Does deliberation decrease belief in conspiracies
Nudging Social Media toward Accuracy
A meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing is likely attributable to Internet users failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the importance of accuracy and describe a limited-attention utility model that is based on a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. We review research that shows h…
The Psychology of Fake News
We synthesize a burgeoning literature investigating why people believe and share false or highly misleading news online. Contrary to a common narrative whereby politics drives susceptibility to fake news, people are 'better' at discerning truth from falsehood (despite greater overall belief) when evaluating politically concordant news. Instead, poor truth discernment is associated with lack of careful reasoning and relevant knowledge, and the use…
Belief in fake news, responsiveness to cognitive conflict, and analytic reasoning engagement
Analytic and intuitive reasoning processes have been implicated as important determinants of belief in (or skepticism of) fake news. However, the underlying cognitive mechanisms that encourage endorsement of fake news remain unclear. The present study investigated cognitive decoupling/response inhibition and the potential role of conflict processing in the initiation of analytic thought about fake news as factors that may facilitate skepticism. A…
Quién es más susceptible a la información errónea en línea sobre la salud
Traducción oficial al español del artículo original en inglés efectuada por la Organización Panamericana de la Salud. En caso de discrepancia, prevalecerá la versión original en inglés. Acceso al artículo original: Am J Public Health 2020;110:S276-S277. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2020.305908
Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand
A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines - headlines designed to deprecate…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
How to think about whether misinformation interventions work
Toolbox of individual-level interventions against online misinformation
Understanding and combatting misinformation across 16 countries on six continents
Does Analytic Thinking Insulate Against Pro‐Kremlin Disinformation? Evidence From Ukraine
Pro‐Kremlin disinformation campaigns have long targeted Ukraine. We investigate susceptibility to this pro‐Kremlin disinformation from a cognitive‐science perspective. Is greater analytic thinking associated with less belief in disinformation, as per classical theories of reasoning? Or does analytic thinking amplify motivated system 2 reasoning (or “cultural cognition”), such that analytic thinking is associated with more polarized beliefs (and t…
Does deliberation decrease belief in conspiracies
Nudging Social Media toward Accuracy
A meaningful portion of online misinformation sharing is likely attributable to Internet users failing to consider accuracy when deciding what to share. As a result, simply redirecting attention to the concept of accuracy can increase sharing discernment. Here we discuss the importance of accuracy and describe a limited-attention utility model that is based on a theory about inattention to accuracy on social media. We review research that shows h…
Reflective minds and open hearts: Cognitive style and personality predict religiosity and spiritual thinking in a community sample
We examined associations between two psychological constructs, analytic cognitive style and the personality facet ‘Openness to Experience’, and several dimensions of religiosity: religious affiliation, strength of faith and spiritual epistemology. In a relatively large (N = 1093), older community sample (M = 55.4 years), analytic cognitive style was associated with a lower probability of affiliating with a religious denomination and a higher prob…
Inoculation and accuracy prompting increase accuracy discernment in combination but not alone
Who Is Susceptible to Online Health Misinformation
[ ]Guess et al recently reported that a brief digital media literacy intervention improved detection of fake news headlines in both the United States and India 2 Another perspective is that people tend to be susceptible to misinformation that is consistent with their preexisting beliefs or worldview 3 Considerable research has shown that people tend to preferentially believe information that is consistent with their other preexisting beliefs 3 Ho…
Character deprecation in fake news: Is it in supply or demand
A major focus of current research is understanding why people fall for and share fake news on social media. While much research focuses on understanding the role of personality-level traits for those who share the news, such as partisanship and analytic thinking, characteristics of the articles themselves have not been studied. Across two pre-registered studies, we examined whether character-deprecation headlines - headlines designed to deprecate…
Construction of an Aboriginal Theory of Mind and Mental Health1
Most research on aboriginal mind and mental health has sought to apply or confirm preexisting European-derived theories among aboriginal people. Culture has been underappreciate. An understanding of uniquely aboriginal models for mind and mental health might lead to more effective and robust interventions. To address this issue, a core group of elders from five separate regions of North America was developed to help determine how aboriginal peopl…
Construction of an Aboriginal Theory of Mind and Mental Health1
Most research on aboriginal mind and mental health has sought to apply or confirm preexisting European-derived theories among aboriginal people. Culture has been underappreciate. An understanding of uniquely aboriginal models for mind and mental health might lead to more effective and robust interventions. To address this issue, a core group of elders from five separate regions of North America was developed to help determine how aboriginal peopl…
Intuition, reason, and metacognition
Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief
Reflective minds and open hearts: Cognitive style and personality predict religiosity and spiritual thinking in a community sample
We examined associations between two psychological constructs, analytic cognitive style and the personality facet ‘Openness to Experience’, and several dimensions of religiosity: religious affiliation, strength of faith and spiritual epistemology. In a relatively large (N = 1093), older community sample (M = 55.4 years), analytic cognitive style was associated with a lower probability of affiliating with a religious denomination and a higher prob…
Everyday Consequences of Analytic Thinking
We review recent evidence revealing that the mere willingness to engage analytic reasoning as a means to override intuitive gut feelings is a meaningful predictor of key psychological outcomes in diverse areas of everyday life. For example, those with a more analytic thinking style are more skeptical about religious, paranormal, and conspiratorial concepts. In addition, analytic thinking relates to having less traditional moral values, making les…
The brain in your pocket: Evidence that Smartphones are used to supplant thinking
On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit
Although bullshit is common in everyday life and has attracted attention from philosophers, its reception (critical or ingenuous) has not, to our knowledge, been subject to empirical investigation. Here we focus on pseudo-profound bullshit, which consists of seemingly impressive assertions that are presented as true and meaningful but are actually vacuous. We presented participants with bullshit statements consisting of buzzwords randomly organiz…
What makes us think? A three-stage dual-process model of analytic engagement
Going against the Herd: Psychological and Cultural Factors Underlying the ‘Vaccination Confidence Gap’
By far the most common strategy used in the attempt to modify negative attitudes toward vaccination is to appeal to evidence-based reasoning. We argue, however, that focusing on science comprehension is inconsistent with one of the key facts of cognitive psychology: Humans are biased information processors and often engage in motivated reasoning. On this basis, we hypothesised that negative attitudes can be explained primarily by factors unrelate…
Domain generality in religious cognition
Johnson, Li, and Cohen (JLC) bring together a large and varied set of evidence to support a relation between fundamental motives and variation in religiosity. They highlight the ways in which evolv
Is the cognitive reflection test a measure of both reflection and intuition?
Atheists and Agnostics Are More Reflective than Religious Believers: Four Empirical Studies and a Meta-Analysis
Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning
Repetition increases perceived truth equally for plausible and implausible statements
Logic, Fast and Slow: Advances in Dual-Process Theorizing
Studies on human reasoning have long established that intuitions can bias inference and lead to violations of logical norms. Popular dual-process models, which characterize thinking as an interaction between intuitive (System 1) and deliberate (System 2) thought processes, have presented an appealing explanation for this observation. According to this account, logical reasoning is traditionally considered as a prototypical example of a task that …
Belief in fake news is associated with delusionality, dogmatism, religious fundamentalism, and reduced analytic thinking.
Delusion-prone individuals may be more likely to accept even delusion-irrelevant implausible ideas because of their tendency to engage in less analytic and actively open-minded thinking.Consistent with this suggestion, two online studies with over 900 participants demonstrated that although delusion-prone individuals were no more likely to believe true news headlines, they displayed an increased belief in "fake news" headlines, which often featur…
Using social and behavioural science to support Covid-19 pandemic response
The COVID-19 pandemic represents a massive global health crisis. Because the crisis requires large-scale behaviour change and places significant psychological burdens on individuals, insights from the social and behavioural sciences can be used to help align human behavior with the recommendations of epidemiologists and public health experts. Here we discuss evidence from a selection of research topics relevant to pandemics, including work on nav…
Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference
Self-reported willingness to share political news articles in online surveys correlates with actual sharing on Twitter
There is an increasing imperative for psychologists and other behavioral scientists to understand how people behave on social media. However, it is often very difficult to execute experimental research on actual social media platforms, or to link survey responses to online behavior in order to perform correlational analyses. Thus, there is a natural desire to use self-reported behavioral intentions in standard survey studies to gain insight into …
Bayesian or biased? Analytic thinking and political belief updating
A surprising finding from U.S. opinion surveys is that political disagreements tend to be greatest among the most cognitively sophisticated opposing partisans. Recent experiments suggest a hypothesis that could explain this pattern: cognitive sophistication magnifies politically biased processing of new information. However, the designs of these experiments tend to contain several limitations that complicate their support for this hypothesis. In …
Fighting Covid-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention
Across two studies with over 1,600 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they are asked directly about accuracy. F…
Fighting Covid-19 Misinformation on Social Media: Experimental Evidence for a Scalable Accuracy-Nudge Intervention
Across two studies with more than 1,700 U.S. adults recruited online, we present evidence that people share false claims about COVID-19 partly because they simply fail to think sufficiently about whether or not the content is accurate when deciding what to share. In Study 1, participants were far worse at discerning between true and false content when deciding what they would share on social media relative to when they were asked directly about a…
Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking
OBJECTIVE: Fake news represents a particularly egregious and direct avenue by which inaccurate beliefs have been propagated via social media. We investigate the psychological profile of individuals who fall prey to fake news. METHOD: We recruited 1,606 participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk for three online surveys. RESULTS: The tendency to ascribe profundity to randomly generated sentences-pseudo-profound bullshit receptivity-correlates posi…
Measuring supernatural belief implicitly using the Affect Misattribution Procedure
Asking about religious beliefs, or lack thereof, is a sensitive and complex issue. Due to cultural norms, people may be motivated to respond in a socially desirable way. In addition, deliberating about beliefs may yield different responses than intuition-based responses. To develop a better understanding of the relationship between intuition and self-reported belief, we developed a new implicit measure of supernatural belief. Specifically, we ada…
Who Is Susceptible to Online Health Misinformation
[ ]Guess et al recently reported that a brief digital media literacy intervention improved detection of fake news headlines in both the United States and India 2 Another perspective is that people tend to be susceptible to misinformation that is consistent with their preexisting beliefs or worldview 3 Considerable research has shown that people tend to preferentially believe information that is consistent with their other preexisting beliefs 3 Ho…
Psychology (43 works) · Social Psychology (35 works) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (28 works) · Computer Science (20 works) · Epistemology (20 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (18 works) · Cognitive psychology (17 works) · Cognition (12 works) · Political science (12 works) · Misinformation (11 works)