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Gordon Pennycook Profile picture
Gordon Pennycook
@GordPennycook
Associate Prof @Cornell (formerly @UWaterloo/@Yale/@Hill_Levene). Reasoning, beliefs, misinfo, BS, etc. Peddler of gifs, polls. Dad. he/him
Jun 26, 2023 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
This is a really interesting look into the margins: How effective are misinfo interventions for content that is selected to be highly consistent with values they consider sacred?

Accuracy prompts are unlikely to work when false beliefs are really strong.

A short 🧵 on why Accuracy prompts are short interventions that subtly remind people to think about accuracy. This works, in general, b/c there's a disconnect between belief & sharing: People share content that they would be able to recognize as false if accuracy were the focus of their attention
Dec 6, 2022 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
Conspiracy believers know that their beliefs are on the fringe… right?

Wrong!

We (@JabinBinnendyk, @DG_Rand) find that conspiracy believers massively overestimate how much others agree with them. Why? They are more likely to be overconfident people. 🧵

psyarxiv.com/d5fz2 Conspiracy belief is often explained as being a response to various needs and motivations, such as the need to be unique (onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…). Other work argues that believers are particularly intuitive (sciencedirect.com/science/articl…).

We argue that *overconfidence* is important
Apr 6, 2021 • 16 tweets • 7 min read
New review in @TrendsCognSci “The Psychology of Fake News” w @DG_Rand

We synthesize research on belief in, sharing of, & interventions against misinformation, with a focus on false/misleading news cell.com/trends/cogniti…

And now a thread that synthesizes our synthesis!
1/ We make three major points in the paper, which I will summarize here. However, there are several other elements to the paper that may be of interest. E.g. a short review on the prevalence of fake news, a discussion of the heuristics that people use, such as familiarity, and more!
Apr 2, 2021 • 5 tweets • 5 min read
@EthanVPorter @YamilRVelez @thomasjwood @EthanVPorter @YamilRVelez @thomasjwood
Mar 18, 2021 • 15 tweets • 5 min read
Warning: Sentimentality ahead

I'm not someone who publishes papers in Nature. I'm just not.

And it's not just this paper, of course. This is just the thing that caused me to reflect on my life and how absolutely bonkers this all still is for me.

So, I thought I would share. First, I need to give props to @DG_Rand. He is an absolute hero. You know how some PI's just slap their name on work that has been done by junior collaborators? Not Dave. If anything, he takes LESS credit than he deserves. He's also just the best person.

But, anyway, back to me
Nov 18, 2020 • 9 tweets • 4 min read
There has been a surge of behavioral research on misinformation & "fake news". To synthesize things, @DG_Rand & I wrote a systematic review: psyarxiv.com/ar96c

We take a cognitive/social psych perspective, but we tried to cast a wide net for the review. Feedback welcome! Sorry to those who retweeted an earlier version of this tweet that I deleted because the image preview was too zoomed in
Nov 8, 2020 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
We're likely to face an unprecedented situation where the incumbent refuses to concede. Although it may not be necessary, things would certainly be easier if Republicans viewed the election as legitimate.

How uphill of a battle will this be? Well, I ran a study with @DG_Rand... Study was run on Prolific & Lucid on Friday. In total, we have 509 Biden voters & 218 Trump voters. The samples are *not* nationally representative and a bit small. But, some fairly clear results came out.

More info on the sample:
Nov 7, 2020 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
The following may be of interest to those who use Prolific and/or Lucid for surveys.

Ran a study yesterday about election-related opinions (plus some other stuff - data is a bit depressing, coming tomorrow) using Lucid & Prolific's "nationally representative" sample function... Both sources use quota-matching to filter people into studies who match U.S. demo's on age, gender, ethnicity, and (for Lucid) region. However, there were some notable differences and similarities between the samples.

(Note: Target N for each was 500, study was ~10 min long.)
Nov 6, 2020 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
I do hope that someone is keeping a list of elected Republicans who a) supported Trump's baseless attacks on US democracy, b) said nothing, or c) repudiated him. And for (c), if they did so *before* the election was called for Biden or after
Jun 8, 2020 • 18 tweets • 6 min read
Our paper "Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy nudge intervention" is now in press at Psych Science!

I’m super proud of this paper - but first, a thread on the results.

Preprint: psyarxiv.com/uhbk9/ Actually, let's start with a different but first:

Please consider signing up for this:

Aug 9, 2019 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
Thought I would share the backstory behind this one, which I think is interesting. Pertains to open science... and also open-*minded* science. (See what I did there)

A thread Wim's work was absolutely seminal to my initiation into the field. My first ever experiment (an undergrad research course) was an extension of his 2008 Cognition paper.

I was (still am) a very big fan.

BUT, my master's work ended up being quite critical of some of his claims..
May 24, 2019 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
New working paper! "On the belief that beliefs should change according to evidence: Implications for conspiratorial, moral, paranormal, political, religious, and science beliefs" psyarxiv.com/a7k96

Read this thread if you're curious about how I (almost) fucked this one up. First, I'll briefly explain the key finding.

In essence, we show that "actively open-minded thinking about evidence" (AOT-E) - that is, self-reporting that you think beliefs and opinions *should* change according to evidence - is a really strong correlate of lots of things.
Apr 21, 2019 • 8 tweets • 3 min read
A couple of days ago I asked Twitter to help identify "anti-science" attitudes that are more common on the left than the right.

The post got >750 comments. I have since tested the most sensible of the suggestions (thread). Study was run on Lucid for Academics on an American sample (N=450). I'm reporting Democrat v. Republican here, but results are the same if I used continuous liberal v conservative likert scales.
Jun 21, 2018 • 19 tweets • 5 min read
What follows is a thread (rant) detailing one of the most frustrating yet fun experiences that I’ve had reading and ultimately commenting on a scientific paper. The original paper was published in TiCS, perhaps the top journal in cognitive science, by Melnikoff & Bargh (M&B). The paper, “Mythical Number Two”, criticizes dual-process theory (DPT). sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

They review evidence that some of the features commonly associated with DPT don’t align (e.g., there are cases where cognitive processing is both unconscious and intentional).