Gordon Pennycook

Gordon Pennycook is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Cornell University and a Himan Brown Faculty Fellow. He is also an adjunct faculty member at the University of Regina’s Hill/Levene Schools of Business and a field member of Cornell’s Communications Department. His research focuses on human reasoning, decision-making, and the cognitive and social factors underlying belief in misinformation, conspiracies, and pseudoscientific claims. Pennycook has authored over 100 peer-reviewed articles, including work published in Nature, Science, and Psychological Science.

Education: PhD in Cognitive Psychology from the University of Waterloo (2016), Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University (2016–2018), and prior roles as an Assistant/Associate Professor at the University of Regina (2018–2023).

Research Highlights: Pennycook’s work examines why people believe in conspiracies, the role of analytic thinking in combating misinformation, and the application of behavioral science to social media interventions. His lab develops tools to measure cognitive biases (e.g., the Bullshit Receptivity Scale) and tests AI-driven strategies to reduce conspiracy beliefs.

Awards: Includes the APS Rising Star Award (2020), Royal Society of Canada Fellowship (2020), and the Ig Nobel Peace Prize (2016) for his study on bullshit receptivity.

Labs/Teams: Leads the Behavioral Science Lab at Cornell, focusing on computational social science and misinformation research.