Gordon Pennycook

@gordpennycook.bsky.social

Associate Professor, Psychology @cornelluniversity.bsky.social. Researching thinking & reasoning, misinformation, social media, AI, belief, metacognition, B.S., and various other keywords. 🇨🇦

https://gordonpennycook.com/

@carlbergstrom.com Oct 11, 2026, 8:25 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

In our course and book _Calling Bullshit_, we posit that If something seems too good, or too bad, to be true, it probably is. Now as a college professor I'm pretty confident that overreliance can AI can harm our thinking ability, but just ten minutes of use? Let's dig into this this study a bit.

@jdeska.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 7:47 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Psychology department at Toronto Metropolitan University is hiring at the assistant rank, several possible areas of expertise, see ad here: hr.cf.torontomu.ca/ams/faculty/...

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Oct 9, 2026, 1:03 AM

Who is even asking for this?!? Absolute insanity

@onwisdompodcast.bsky.social Oct 8, 2026, 5:39 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Episode 2 of On Wisdom's five-part special series is live!

This week features a discussion on Metacognition and Judgment with hosts Igor Grossmann and Charles Cassidy. They are joined by guests Gord Pennycook, Steve Fleming, and Thomas Costello.

🎧Listen here: www.onwisdompodcast.com/70

On Wisdom. What does science tell us about wisdom? Two owls look onward.

@sanjaysrivastava.com Oct 7, 2026, 4:12 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Interesting that the top 4 most-cited papers of the last 20 years are methods papers. Number one is False-Positive Psychology, which is definitely an interesting framing for the empirical papers in the rest of the list

@klauspforr.eurosky.social Oct 5, 2026, 10:10 AMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Interesting paper shows high and increasing institutional concentration in Economics, in comparison to *all* other fields www.nber.org/papers/w35875

@ajwright.bsky.social Sep 25, 2026, 7:29 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Since our paper on the Changing How I Live Life (CHILL) Study is now out in Psychological Science (doi.org/10.1177/0956...), here's a LONG overdue post on the intervention work we've been doing the past few years!

Have you ever wanted to change one of your personality traits?

@jeremiebeucler.bsky.social Sep 22, 2026, 12:44 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

1/15

What do we actually do when we deliberate, and how does it change over time?

New preprint with @wimdeneys.bsky.social : "Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning". 🔗 doi.org/10.31234/osf...

(yes, I like flashy titles 💅)

A 🧵👇

Title page showing:

Rhythm of Thought: Tracing the Dynamics of Deliberation in Reasoning
Jérémie Beucler a,* and Wim De Neys a

a LaPsyDÉ, CNRS, Université Paris Cité, F-75005 Paris, France

Abstract

When an intuitive answer is uncertain, people are thought to engage in further reasoning. But what people actually do during this additional thinking, how it unfolds over time, and why it sometimes leads to better answers remain unclear. We scored think-aloud protocols with large language models to track, moment by moment, four possible functions of deliberation (generating candidate responses, justifying them, controlling intuitive responses, and regulating cognitive effort), together with expressed confidence. Deliberation showed a clear temporal organization: generation dominated early, whereas justification, control, and regulation became increasingly prominent as reasoning progressed. Correct responses involved more justification, control, and regulation than biased responses, and these evolving dynamics predicted accuracy for out-of-sample participants and items. Confidence and deliberation also showed reciprocal lagged associations: lower confidence predicted further generation, justification, and control, whereas regulation predicted subsequent increases in confidence. Deliberation, then, appears to involve not a single act of "thinking harder," but an evolving interplay of reasoning processes whose organization is linked to whether reasoning succeeds.

Keywords: deliberation; reasoning dynamics; verbal protocols; large language models; metacognition; dual-process theories

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 21, 2026, 11:09 PM

We tested that, actually, and it doesn't appear to just be blind deference to the AI: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ad...

It seems to work because the AI is just really good at constructing strong arguments

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 21, 2026, 7:35 PM

We have a new paper on AI debunking that includes a bunch of interesting data on various "epistemically suspect beliefs". Check it out!

@anneapplebaum.wsocial.eu Sep 14, 2026, 11:27 AMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Trump's foreign policy is not isolationist. On the contrary, his ideologues want to build an international empire run by far-right political movements who serve American crypto, mineral and tech companies, many with links to the president.
Read more here:
www.theatlantic.com/magazine/202...

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 18, 2026, 11:20 PM

I need new friends, evidently

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 18, 2026, 11:13 PM

I know this isn't the important part, but having a friend pay for a wedding is very common?!?

@dgrand.bsky.social Sep 16, 2026, 8:44 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

🚨New WP: Protecting users from AI persuasion🚨
🔸A 1-paragraph AI literacy treatment (explaining AIs can be told to pursue non-accuracy goals/to persuade) cuts AI dialogue political persuasion by ~half!
🔸No sig effect on general genAI trust
arxiv.org/abs/2609.16432
w/ @rorchinik.bsky.social

@tompepinsky.com Sep 16, 2026, 1:41 AMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

the hardest thing for the politician-bureaucrats to understand -- but which NSF staff *absolutely do* understand and always have -- is that you actually make scientific progress by giving young people money and promising not to bother them

@lindseypowell.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 5:16 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

UCSD Psychology is hiring!! We’re seeking a new assistant professor colleague who studies high-level human cognition, broadly construed. Please share and/or apply! apol-recruit.ucsd.edu/JPF04646

@williambrady.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 3:29 PMReposted by @gordpennycook.bsky.social

Glad to see a revised version of this out now at Current Opinion in Psychology!
www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 12:35 PM

Sometimes I like to imagine a fantasy world where statements like this (from a president) would need to be backed up with evidence - when did it happen? - what was the context? - who are the fire fighters? - are there other witnesses? - did you tell other people about it at the time? - etc.

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 9, 2026, 2:32 AM

Fun fact: This particular name change (removing a slur for indigenous women) happened at a dam close to where I grew up in rural Saskatchewan

The difference? The name change occurred in 1988(!) instead of 2022

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.B._Ca...

Some name changes are justified. "Lake America" is not

@gordpennycook.bsky.social Sep 8, 2026, 3:42 AM

And, FWIW, they're probably right: bsky.app/profile/jako...

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