Cyber Alliance Seminar: Intuition, Reason, and Social Media

Abstract: This Cyber Alliance talk, featuring University of Regina’s Hill/Levene Schools of Business Assistant Prof. Gordon Pennycook, will discuss how, contrary to the narrative that social media algorithms impact cognition, his research shows that people can and do override their intuitions and that reasoning often facilitates accurate belief formation. Although social media may impact what is salient to us when making choices about what to share with others, this is not intractable: Simple prompts that remind people to think about accuracy are sufficient to increase the quality of the news content that people share. This indicates that unreasonable behavior on social media is more a function of lazy thinking than of an inability for people to overcome social media algorithms. Bio: Gordon Pennycook is an Assistant Professor at University of Regina's Hill/Levene Schools of Business. His research focus is on reasoning and decision-making, broadly defined, and he investigates the distinction between intuitive processes and more deliberative reasoning processes. His research has spanned numerous topics, including religious belief, morality, science communication, pseudo-profound bullshit, fake news, and political ideology. His research sits at the intersection of cognitive and social psychology. He obtained his B.A. in Psychology in 2009 from the University of Saskatchewan and his PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 2016 at the University of Waterloo. Prior to starting at the University Regina in 2018, he held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University. Gordon received the University of Waterloo Arts Alumni Gold Medal and the Governor General’s Gold Medal. He was named Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network “Researcher of the Year” in 2017 and was awarded the Vincent Di Lollo Early Career Achievement Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science in 2020. He was also recently elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists. He has published 75 peer-reviewed articles, including in journals such as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature Human Behavior, Psychological Science, and Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.