BJKS Podcast

112. Gordon Pennycook: From Carrot River to Cornell, misinformation, and reducing conspiracy beliefs

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Gordon Pennycook is an Associate Professor at Cornell University. We talk about his upbringing in rural Northern Canada, how he got into academia, and his work on misinformation: why people share it and what can be done about it.

BJKS Podcast is a podcast about neuroscience, psychology, and anything vaguely related, hosted by Benjamin James Kuper-Smith.

Support the show: https://geni.us/bjks-patreon

Timestamps

0:00:00: Straight outta Carrot River: From Northern Canada to publishing in Nature

0:37:01: Exploration vs focusing on one topic: finding your research topic

0:48:57: A sense of having made it

0:54:17: Why apply reasoning research to religion?

0:59:45: Starting working on misinformation 

1:08:20: Defining misinformation, disinformation, and fake news

1:15:52: Social media, the consumption of news, and Bayesian updating

1:24:48: Reasons for why people share misinformation

1:35:57: Are social media companies listening to Pennycook et al?

1:38:19: Using AI to change conspiracy beliefs

1:44:59: A book or paper more people should read

1:46:33: Something Gordon wishes he'd learnt sooner

1:48:12: Advice for PhD students/postdocs

Podcast links


Gordon's links


Ben's links


References

Costello, Pennycook & Rand (2024). Durably reducing conspiracy beliefs through dialogues with AI. Science.

Dawkins  (2006). The God Delusion.

MacLeod, ... & Ozubko (2010). The production effect: delineation of a phenomenon. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition.

Nowak & Highfield (2012). Supercooperators: Altruism, evolution, and why we need each other to succeed.

Pennycook, ... & Fugelsang (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief. Cognition.

Pennycook, Fugelsang & Koehler (2015). What makes us think? A three-stage dual-process model of analytic engagement. Cognitive Psychology.

Pennycook, Cheyne, Barr, Koehler & Fugelsang (2015). On the reception and detection of pseudo-profound bullshit. Judgment and Decision making.

Pennycook & Rand (2019). Lazy, not biased: Susceptibility to partisan fake news is better explained by lack of reasoning than by motivated reasoning. Cognition.

Pennycook & Rand (2021). The psychology of fake news. Trends in cognitive sciences.

Rand (2016). Cooperation, fast and slow: Meta-analytic evidence for a theory of social heuristics and self-interested deliberation. Psychological Science.

Stanovich (2005). The robot's rebellion: Finding meaning in the age of Darwin.

Tappin, Pennycook & Rand (2020). Thinking clearly about causal inferences of politically motivated reasoning: Why paradigmatic study designs often undermine causal inference. Current Opinion in Behavioral Sciences.

Thompson, Turner & Pennycook (2011). Intuition, reason, and metacognition. Cognitive Psychology.


[This is an automated transcript that contains many errors]


Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:00:00] Yeah, I can't remember whether I wrote this to you in the initial invitation or maybe I'm not sure, but like the first time I actually came, I think across your work was actually that Twitter feed you had that I think starts with sentimentality ahead or something like that a bit of a warning Yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: Okay. Oh, yeah, the post about the, it must have been in the Nature paper or something like

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah exactly I think David Rand had just posted that it came out and then you said I guess you you let the emotions flow

Gordon Pennycook: Uh huh.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but now I mean that that was really interesting to me because the I mean, I didn't grow up like that, but basically like Especially my mum's side, like my grandparents both grew up on a farm completely like in the middle of nowhere.

Gordon Pennycook: hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: in Germany. I guess the middle of nowhere in Germany is slightly different than the middle of nowhere in Canada. But,

Gordon Pennycook: Right.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: slightly different like scale to this. Um, but, uh, a lot of these kind of things you wrote about [00:01:00] were very, kind of from stories I'd heard from my mother, from my grandparents, were very, very familiar to me.

From that way, so it was this kind of, um, I just found it really interesting and really I don't know. Yeah, I just found it very lovely.

Gordon Pennycook: I mean, a rare case of people being genuine on social media, but I've never been that good at that part of the social media, which is like the putting on the persona thing or whatever, but, um, yeah, I just, and I know that there are people. Uh, in the field that have backgrounds like that, but you don't really hear from them a lot.

Or maybe people, I mean, generally people don't want to overshare or whatever, but I felt like, uh, it was a good opportunity to kind of explain some of the background behind how someone gets to that position.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. And I feel like it's, um, I don't know. I feel like it's probably a lot more common than people think just because it's, I don't know. I mean, maybe it's not, I don't know. It probably depends on country and all sorts of things. But anyways, I wanted to talk a little bit about. Carrot River,[00:02:00]

Gordon Pennycook: Okay.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: goes on there.

Um, so maybe, what is Carriage River? Let's start there. I mean, that's, uh, something probably

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, that's a good

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: haven't heard of, but

Gordon Pennycook: well, there was a river and there's carrots beside it and so they, uh, Called it Carrot River. So that was the, that's the story behind the name. There's not actually more interest in that. Um,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I, I did, uh, when I, I did actually take a trip to carriage river on Google maps. I don't know how to look around. And so I, at one point I was zoomed out. And so I had like Saskatchewan, is that how you pronounce it? 

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, so I think it was like that kind of level where you could see it.

So you could see all the towns, like on a broad scale and basically all of them are just people describing things that they are literally looking at, at the moment that they're founding the city. So I just, I wrote a couple of them down.

Gordon Pennycook: Okay.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, so, I mean, this is again, slightly broader scale, but. Uh, so here's some names.

Uh, Rivers, Swift Current, Canoe Narrows, Maple Creek, Creek and Swan Rivers. Then there's a couple of lakes. Again, these are towns, not lakes. [00:03:00] I mean, maybe they're also lakes, but the town names are Cold Lake, Snow Lake, Green Lake, Meadow Lake, Clearwater Lake, Candle Lake, Gold Lake, Frog Lake and Moose Lake. Not to be confused with Moose, Jaw, Elk Point.

There's Plenty Wood, which is Uh, outlook, uh, presumably named before Microsoft came along,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Winnipegosis, which sounds like a disease, some sort of infectious disease. Uh, then two that I thought were kind of interesting, uh, named after people. One is Humboldt, which is, I guess, if you want to name something after German, that's a.

It's a good German to name something after, and then Herbert, which is just like the most generic male name.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And Bow Island, or Bow Island, I'm not sure, which, um, is not an island. It's just a town near a lake. But what I found interesting is that it has an airport, which is just a field with a single tarmac in it and nothing else.

Gordon Pennycook: Oh

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Uh, I love the kind of,

Gordon Pennycook: uh huh.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it's like that counts as an airport.

Gordon Pennycook: I'm surprised you [00:04:00] didn't mention Climax Saskatchewan.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Ah, no, I didn't see that. Maybe it was a different, maybe I had to zoom in a bit more, I'm not sure.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly. It's hard to find that one. Um, yeah, we like to name things. I mean, it was like, by the time people got to, like, the, uh, Western society, uh, the colonialists got to Saskatchewan, they had run out of names, I think.

I mean, it was just, let's just, whatever's around, whatever's on the ground, whatever it is, that's what we're gonna call it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So yeah, we mentioned what Karatov is, but it's also, I believe, the place you grew up in.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, that's right. I mean, so if you, and I actually suggest people go on to, I do this for students. I like, I will pop up Google maps and just like, because you can explain it intellectually. Like you say, well, while it's quite a bit further north than you might expect. Uh, but then you have to kind of like look it up and actually to underappreciate that it's like, um, yeah.

I mean, I'm an academic psychologist that I'm aware of. Like there's not many people who are from further north than that. In fact, in cat river, like if you go. [00:05:00] North of where I'm from. Basically, I mean, it's like the tree line, so like, there are like small towns that are around there. But if you go north of my town, it's just trees for like thousands of miles.

And there's like, I mean, there are some, there's some like, um, First Nations reserves in a few places and like, but the population I mean, the population density north of that is like, lower than Siberia, probably.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, it's just, yeah, three, three scientists trying to find something out, and

Gordon Pennycook: yeah,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: one person who got lost somewhere. But, uh, so, I, I mean, it's, my assumption is that this would be a, Completely working class community is that is that correct? Or is that

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, it's a farming, it's a farming, it's, the community is based on, there's a mill, there's a sawmill in town, that's where my father worked after, so, so we were on a farm, uh, if you want to know the whole story, until I was about, uh, five or six. Uh, the farm went bankrupt, it was like the family farm, and then there was [00:06:00] like, interest rates in the 80s, blah blah blah, my dad started a pig farm, it all didn't work out.

So the farmer and bankrupt went to move into town and he started working at the sawmill and he also had a construction job and some other stuff. Um, and then mom worked at the kind of like old folks home, uh, assisted kind of living place. Um, yeah, and that was like, I mean, that was, and, but we were like, the thing about a small town like that is like there, there aren't huge class differences.

Uh, because everybody is in the same boat, you know what I mean? Like, there are some people, you know, the pharmacist had the nicest house, you know what I mean? Uh, but, and they were like, we would call people rich. Of course, when I grew up, if you were rich, that was a, that was like, a big insult. You know, people would brag about how crappy their TV was, and we'd have two stations or whatever.

But then the farmers started doing well at some point, and they got satellite dishes and whatever. But, uh, so, um, yeah, so, but it was It was a, I really enjoyed it. I mean, I, as far from my own perspective, my childhood was amazing. [00:07:00] Mm

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: in a like in the in the countryside basically, although, you know, in this conversation, I guess I can't really make that point. But generally speaking, I say that because I was like 6000 people or something like that. And then 20 minutes away from a city that was like, quarter of a million,

Gordon Pennycook: hmm,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So, you know, around On the right side of our house, there were sheep, you know, not ours, but like, there were sheep from some farm. Behind, there were sometimes some horses, that kind of thing, right? Lots of cows, uh, around, that kind of thing. But, um,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, but I mean, here's the thing, was that your morality was probably more salient to you because you were close to a city than it was for me. That'd be, I mean, we're so far out, the closest, like, Walmart's like an hour and a half away, you know what I mean? That everything around was the same and we wasn't, we didn't have the contrast.

Now when I went to, we did go to the city every so often, uh, you know, a couple times a year ish or something. We would go to Prince Albert, which is like a city of like, uh, 200, 000 people maybe. Um, and that's where we'd get the, we'd go school shopping at the [00:08:00] start of the school year to get new clothes or whatever.

 Oh and then we'd go for Christmas shopping. So that was basically when we went to the city. And so that was like, when I, when I first moved after I graduated high school, uh, I moved to Saskatoon, which is the kind of closest bigger city that has a real university, the University of Saskatchewan, which is like where I went to undergrad.

Um, and I was actually literally afraid of the city, and I mean that, I mean that I actually like, it was like the experience of being in a city with people that you don't know and like being around that like consistently for the first time was actually quite scary.

And then 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mean because everyone at home, you knew everyone, everyone knew

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, because there was never, I'm just trying to imagine if you could put yourself in the position of like, always knowing everybody all the time, there might be a person there that like, you don't remember their name or recognize, but that you would be able, if you talk to them, you could figure out within a few seconds that, you know, the same person or they're, you know, related to someone that you know or whatever.

Um, so that was like kind of a shield of a sort of like familiarity. Um, and I think that's one of the things that draws people to small towns. [00:09:00] Uh, getting to the city, you go on the bus and no one's looking at each other. They're not like, it's, and it's totally, it's totally weird. It doesn't take very long.

It didn't take me very long to like, become a city guy and like, do that myself and put the headphones in and just not pay attention to anybody. But initially it was quite a shock.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Do you do you like the I mean, you know, I, I, I never had that, but, uh, so I'm just curious like for you, do you like kind of the, in a way like complete anonymity in the city? I'm not complete, I guess, but, uh, you know, not knowing anyone can also be kind of really, there's something really nice in that, I find.

Gordon Pennycook: Hmm. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and I remember once when I was It's funny, some people really don't understand this point, but some people really get it. Uh, when I was living in Berlin, um, I remember I went to this baker's and occasionally, you know, there'd be this, it was like a big bakery, so lots of people would be working there, right?

So you'd rarely see the same person twice or whatever in a row, um, [00:10:00] selling you whatever. And, uh, I, I guess I had the same orders. Frequently with the same order. And so at some point, this lady was like, Oh, you want this and this, you know, the thing that always order that in my mind was just like, Oh, I can't go anymore. now I it's now I can't cover anymore. This is and I never went there again. And yeah, some people really empathize with that. thing and people, a lot of people don't really don't get it, but there's a kind of like niceness to complete anonymity in the city.

Gordon Pennycook: Interesting. Yeah. Put me on the side of not getting it. Uh, but that's because that's so far removed from what my, uh, uh, growing up was like, I mean, I think there are, you know, I mean, cause I am kind of introverted to some extent. Like I, when I go, if, if you're in a small town, when you go to the store, you have, you're running into somebody there's no, like just quickly go to the store.

And like, so like maybe if you're someone who cares about their appearance, which I'm not really, but if you're someone who did that, then you like going to the store with your sweats on and like looking like garbage. You know, you're going to run into, you know, somebody [00:11:00] if you do that, so you can't really do that in a small town.

Um, so that, that's one thing that's nice. But I mean, I'm in Ithaca now, and I, and I, one, it was like one of the things that drew me to Ithaca, New York, which is a smaller city, is the fact that it is like that, where, where you see people, uh, and you're in a community and you know everybody. And so I am still drawn to that, I guess.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. Nice. So one, one thing I was just curious in general about is that this is such a, so maybe one brief question. So the roughly thousand people who lived there, was it a kind of fairly, I mean, I'm assuming it was fairly insulated in the sense that wasn't like lots of people coming in and out all the time.

Right.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Oh, totally. Yeah, yeah. If it was a new person in town, you would know about it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I'm generally curious about the kind of, um, social dynamics in a way, because it's, um, like, for example, let's say school, right? I'm assuming there would be like 50 kids or something roughly your age in the entire place or

Gordon Pennycook: Oh, no, it's 20,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: [00:12:00] 20 or even

Gordon Pennycook: We had the same, yeah, we had the same kids were in the same class from kindergarten to grade 12. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay.

Gordon Pennycook: Except for the kid. I mean, there's a few kids who got held back, you know what I mean? And like, or, uh, so like they, and then you, we had, there was a, this is like it really in the details, but there was, there was another small town near us called Auburfield about 15 minutes away there.

Some of the kids, their school was kind of like, uh, failing because there were so few students in it. Uh, and they didn't have funding and blah blah blah. Um, and so like some of the students from there came to our, so we got like an influx of like three or four new, I can't, I could, I could count if I thought about it, but, of new people in our class.

And that was a, that was a really exciting thing and it kind of like, uh, Yeah, but

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Overwhelming experience.

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, it was just, wow, it was like, this was great. But it was great, I mean, I made great friends with them, and, uh, they all, it's like, yeah, you end up just, everyone, you know everybody, it's like everyone's sort of like, um, family.

I think it does actually prepare you to some extent for being a faculty member, because that's [00:13:00]also what it's like. It's just the same people every year, all the same, you know, for, for 40 years, you know what I mean? And then everyone has, knows everyone else's history and all everyone's, you know, stuff, so that's sort of what it's like.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Okay. So I wasn't okay. 20s. Yeah. If that's a few people, that's interesting. So You don't have to answer this or you can choose as little detail as you want to but what's dating life if there's like 20 kids your age 

Gordon Pennycook: It's not very good. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean

Gordon Pennycook: Also, you know what, I gotta tell you, it's worse than that because I have a twin sister. So, uh, me and my twin sister were in the same class. In my class only had, for most of the time, six girls. It went up to eight girls at one point. One of the girls was my twin sister, and then the other ones were friends with my twin sister.

But if I say to Tiffany, who's my twin, uh, I, I could never get a date because they all were afraid of her or they didn't want to, like, date her brother. She was like, no, they just didn't like you. So, I don't know. Uh, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So you had an ex, you had an [00:14:00] excuse in your, in your, in your youth why, why it didn't work, but

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, I did ultimately get married, but it wasn't from somebody with from care of her.

Uh, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Okay. Um, and so, I mean, I remember in that, in that Twitter thread you mentioned , the kind of, I should put it, the thing that's like, there's a bit of a nuance here to put it correctly, where it's like. Not receiving academic support wasn't like an active thing. It's just like a thing that didn't exist So i'm assuming or maybe it's rather question like so Did most people then stay there and kind of continue doing that life and working in a farm or working at the mill or whatever?

Or what was kind of the the normal the expectation kind of spoken or unspoken for like what you end up doing with your life? Kind of

Gordon Pennycook: Right, well, I mean, well, a lot of people left. It wasn't, uh, like, you know, probably at least half the people have left. I've moved to some other place or whatever. Some of them are living in smaller towns elsewhere or whatever. Um, and that's just like a [00:15:00] matter of jobs. But the, this idea of, uh, achieving academic success and being a part of some sort of elite, intellectual elite, it's just obviously not connected whatsoever to the way that people think about things.

Success. Uh, when I grew up was getting a good job was like being, if you, if you were able to get a job and then maintain a family or whatever, or like be, that was the, that was our marker for whether you're a successful person or not. Um, and so that was like when people, when we were talking about university, it was like, you know, like, I mean, that was just one avenue by which you might be able to get a job, a good job to be able to whatever.

There was no, uh, Just never any kind of talk ever of like, trying to become, uh, a highly functioning intellectual or whatever. School was always a means to an end. Uh, and there was never kind of like any Yeah, I mean, and I don't, [00:16:00] I can't blame the teachers that were in the thing. In that context, what you're serving the community is like trying to get them prepared for the lives that they're going to be living.

And that's like preparing them for, uh going into the workforce, essentially. More than half of the the guys in our class, uh, by, in grade 12, the way that, that works, because we don't have a lot of, like, different options for classes. Like, we, it was like, either you take the kind of hard classes, you take Bio 30, and, like, CAM and stuff like that, or, what they would take is basically work experience in the, in the afternoons.

Which would mean they're getting school credit to go work at a welding shop or something. Uh, and that was like half of their day, and they were like, right on, like, I don't need to be at the school anymore, I can start doing the, learning the thing that I actually care about, which is like, how to work and get a job, and, and, you know, whatever.

Um, so it was, that's, it's like, you know, the working class came all the way through, uh, and that's how the teaching was.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I like how you refer to percentages like half the guys, but I was like seven people or [00:17:00] something, right?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, it was like ten, yeah, it was about ten of them, yeah, ten or twelve.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But was that something you planned on doing I guess the question is like how Did you end up deciding to go to university, right? So like, was it just, you were always really, really good at school and it was very easy? Or was it just curious about certain things? Or like, how did that kind of come about in

Gordon Pennycook: Uh, oh no, I wasn't like, I don't, I wasn't, like, my sister had higher grades than me. Like, I have a twin sister, like I said, the twin sister was the one who got better grades in school, but she tried much harder than I did. Um, actually, I remember a time where my mom bought me a book. Uh, it was like the Hardy Boys.

And I wanted pogs. And I was like, I don't read, like, that's lame. You know, like, I was not remotely intellectual. I did sports and I was the class clown or whatever. Uh, when I was in high school, but I knew also that I wasn't the sort of guy to do labor that was like, I mean, I did do labor, like I worked at a honey farm to, to pay for college, but I wasn't like, I knew I didn't want to, [00:18:00] I wasn't really good at that sort of thing, I just, I knew that I didn't fit into the farmer mold essentially, uh, and maybe part of that was, what's, what's that?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like, why did you think you, like,

Gordon Pennycook: I don't know. Maybe it was, I, maybe it was because like, Now I'm trying to, I'm, I'm, uh, therapizing myself. I never went to a therapist about this. It's not, it's not like traumatic or anything, but like, I guess that the shift is this. So I'm the youngest of the five kids that are in my family. My older brothers were raised on the farm and knew how to do things, which is like they could fix stuff or they knew what the farm equipment was.

Uh, when I started, like when I was like six, when we moved to town. Uh, that's when the farm, so we weren't talking much about farming when the farm went under, you know what I mean, and we weren't, and dad was working a lot, and so I didn't like learn about a lot of that stuff, and so I already knew just based on my difference between my brothers, that they knew how to fix things, they knew how to do that kind of stuff, and I didn't do that, uh, and so like I, uh, but what I did do instead is like, uh, um, what I was good at was [00:19:00] talking to people about their mundane problems, I was the person that people would come to when they were like, Why did he say that to me?

Or like, what, what's her, what's the deal with this? Or whatever. And so then I, that's how I decided. I was like, well, maybe I should become a psychologist. Uh, because, you know, I don't know. And, but, at the time, what I didn't realize was that I was just using logic. You know, I was just kind of like, it was just problem solving.

And I actually have, I'm not particularly empathetic, or I'm not like, really good at actually like, helping people with their actual problems. That was just like, in that position, I was the sort of person that was able to think through things in ways that other people weren't really thinking through in a small town.

Um, and then I was like, well, I can't, I'm not going to be a pipe fitter or like a welder, so I should go to university probably and like, I can talk to people, so I might as well be a psychologist. That was the extent of it. Uh, and then I was like, I have to go to university, so that's what I did.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: okay. And that was, so one thing I find interesting about, um, how should I put it? I mean, it seems to me that there's [00:20:00] this, uh, from, again, I haven't experienced this first time per se, but like from what, People who grew up in a roughly similar situation, who grew up very working class or something like that, have told me is that sometimes, like, people who went to university and have, you know, higher education and all these kind of things, there's this weird, like, two things happening at the same time.

One is often a kind of like, oh, wow, these people are so smart and geniuses and different. At the same time, often a bit of a, like, disdain for it.

Gordon Pennycook: Hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: of like, uh, I mean, yeah, like you think you're something better than us that kind of thing. So I'm just curious, was that something that was that at all a factor?

Or was it just like, Oh, really? Like, cool, you're going to university? Good luck? Or?

Gordon Pennycook: Uh, I don't, I think it's actually sort of like neither almost. In the sense that like. It was neither venerated, as being some special thing, but it wasn't really, like, viewed as being, uh, some, because, because it, they were, it was viewed as just a means to an end anyways. So like [00:21:00]people, if you go into the trades, if you're a plumber, you have to, you still go to school for that, you're not going to university, but you're going to a trade school, and so like it wasn't, uh, it would be kind of expected that most people would try to do something to help them get a better job, uh, and university is just one of those things.

Uh, and so it wasn't, it wasn't thought of as an intellectual pursuit even, really. Uh, it was thought of as a vocational decision. Uh, and so, um, wasn't, so therefore wasn't, it was just like, uh, uh, an economics choice. You

know, like how do you 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what you mean. Yeah, you just Yeah, you take a different kind of trade or training in that

Gordon Pennycook: yeah. And then so one other thing that's important about that is like, in the States there's this whole thing about, Where you go to school, and like, which one did you get into, and like, what, how are they ranked, all that kind of stuff.

Not even remotely was this a consideration. We, we go to the university that's closest. That makes the most sense economically, for like, I can't, do you know people that live in the city? Uh, do you, like, can you afford rent there, or whatever, like, um, And so I [00:22:00] went to the city, the university that was the closest to where I grew up.

Which is what 90 percent of people would do.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I just I mean, obviously, so was it, it's funny, like when you said like, it was a way of like training and almost like a kind of trade kind of thing. But like, I don't know, for me, my study of psychology wasn't like very goal oriented specific towards the job, right? It's very, very broad. I'm assuming it's similar to what in Canada, what?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, yeah, the universities are the same. Like, it's not like the universities are. Internally treating them themselves as being more, they're still, like, I took and I took mostly humanities courses like I did, uh, it was like, I mean, it's arts and sciences, but my only science classes I took were computer science.

I took mostly history. Uh, and it wasn't like they were like trying to, uh, mold me for the workforce. You know what I mean? They were, they were, they, they were academics like everybody else. Uh, it's just, that's the way that we thought about it. I mean, most, like my family [00:23:00] didn't. Nobody went to university. Uh, my twin sister did go to university.

But, uh, like, my parents hadn't. And like, obviously, our teachers had gone to university, but they went to education, which is more of a vocational thing. So, anyways, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. But then, so somewhere along the line, you stopped. Trying to be a therapist

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly. So I went, so like, well, what happened, if you want the full story, we, uh, we couldn't really get student loans sufficient to pay for me to go to university. For reasons that are uninteresting. And then, so I couldn't, and my parents didn't give us any money to go, we didn't have money to spare to send us to university.

So I had to take like a gap year, where I worked, at a, like a teleservices company. I had to call, actually called Americans, who didn't pay their like Sprint, uh, cell phone bills. Uh, I was like at collections, uh, and that was an interesting job for me. My dad wanted me to work, by the way in the pipeline, which is like, you go to a different, [00:24:00] probably Alberta, and then you like, are at a camp, and then you have to like, and you make more money, but like, you'd throw your entire, like, you're 18, 19 years old, you throw that into the pit because you're just working all the time, and I was like, I already knew at that time that I was, yeah, exactly, and I was like, I'm not, I don't, like, I, I already knew at the time that I was not, um, Motivated by making lots of money.

I just wanted to live my life, you know, and so anyway, so I worked at a, uh, I worked at the shitty job mostly so I can hang out with my buddies and, uh, and mess around and we played some Warcraft and, you know, did some drinking and things like that. And then eventually I got student loans and I got into university and then I, once I did that, I started actually like being exposed.

It was the first time I was exposed to just it. Intellectual pursuits for the sake of them, you know, like just knowing things and learning about things, uh, and, uh, that really like lit a fire somewhere. And I just started reading books about, like, different [00:25:00] topics, like, uh, a lot of that in the start was about religion.

That was my kind of first, um, real interest was like, why do people believe in all that kind of stuff? Uh, and then I, at some point realized Clinical psychologists have to deal with actual problems. You know, it's not just use problem solving. What I realized, I realized I was, what I was interested in was solving problems and thinking and, uh, engaging in like, uh, you know, critical thinking is actually try to try to figure in that.

And it's much more interesting to solve problems of the intellectual nature, uh, in research than it is to help somebody who has schizophrenia. I mean, that's also interesting, but there's way more weight on that. And that's not something that I was ready to. Uh, to thrust myself into.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yes. Uh, so I just, I just had a random kind of connection just because you said, you know, kind of common sense logic and problem solving and that kind of stuff. Um, uh, skipping ahead just a little bit. I remember that. Um, so, I mean, you did [00:26:00] a postdoc with David Rand, right? And, um, I remember, so, uh, you know, he, Did his PhD, whatever, with Martin Nowak, 

Gordon Pennycook: Uh 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: or something like that, and so I read Martin Norvig's book where he talks about some people he also worked with, and one of them was David Rand.

I remember, I think with him, the description was something like, it was something that almost seemed like a backhanded compliment, where it was something like, like, one of the most, like, common sense kind of, uh, something like that kind of people. Um, but it's also like, also in the context, like, this is a really undervalued skill, uh, to kind of just have.

Gordon Pennycook: Well I think that, I think that by the way is a great descriptor of Dave. But it's also what makes Dave a genius. In the sense that like, um, cause there's the, another version of the intellectual pursuit thing that I'm talking about is that you turn down into something more similar to navel gazing. You know, where you're solving problems that I guess the thing that I would think, and this is maybe how Dave and I became such good collaborators, which at some point we can get to, I guess, but, I never kind of [00:27:00] got away from, uh, it's not just for the sake of knowing something, uh, Also, there should be a purpose or something that matters, uh, and some, some relevance to people.

Uh, and so, like, what I'm driven by and interested in is just, like, knowing and, like, wanting to figure out something and solving the problem. But I'm still have that kind of underlying kind of, like, let's try to make sure this is relevant. And that the common sense thing is what, um, Noack's talking about was, like, that Dave is amazing at knowing what, where people stand.

What is the misconception, and where does the thing that we're doing fit in to like, to actually change what someone would think about this thing? Um, and so you need to have common sense for that. If you, if you're doing work at a level that's, that's too removed from where everybody else is, then you can't get them to where you, like, where they need to be in terms of what the knowledge is.

So you have to bridge those gaps, uh, and, yeah, so you have to, [00:28:00] um, yeah, so you need common sense for that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, and I guess, uh, I mean, from that perspective, it makes complete sense, uh, what you're researching, right?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah,

exactly. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: stuff that has a potential kind of, uh, well, uh, can, can help with real world problems and not some, you know, More like the stuff

Gordon Pennycook: Some abstract

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: sort of abstract, weird thing, you know, like once you've solved you're like, well, I'm not entirely sure what to do with this, but it looks cool.

Um, yeah, but okay. So how did that, so you realized at some point, like, okay, real problem. Weirdly enough, real problems. You don't want to work on them. At least not important. Big problem. I don't know. It's, there's an interesting kind of, uh, I

Gordon Pennycook: Well, I can be removed from it. I don't want to, like, I don't want to solve an individual person's Like, you know what I mean? Like, if they have trauma or whatever, like, that's like, I, you know, that, I'll put that, that weight will be on me. I, I can, I can think about the world's problems, or like, a collective issue that we have, and that's fine.

And that, that's, [00:29:00] for me, that's a way of coping with myself, you know what I mean? Like, here's this problem in the world, like, how do I understand it? Um,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: if it's somebody else's problem, that's, that's, you know.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That's their problem. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But then, uh, Your initial reason for studying psychology then kind of I guess fell away But boy, you at that point already just so fascinated by just learning for learning's sake and

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: topics that kind of stuff that it didn't matter anymore or was it

Gordon Pennycook: Well, I think what I realized was this, this same underlying, the reason that I was I was interested in understanding why people did what they did, and that's why I would be engaging in these conversations about, like, helping people with their problems or whatever. Like, I thought that I was, like, I wanted to help people with their problems.

What I want to do is actually to understand the people, you know what I mean, like, and I, and so I was a psychologist the whole time. Uh, and then when I started, I was reading mostly about, like I said, like about religion and stuff like that, and I, what I, the thing that I was most interested in was just the way that people think about things, and like how they come to believe different things.

And then what happened was, uh, I took, um, a [00:30:00] research, like a 300 level, like third year research course in psychology, um, and that's where you do, and so like, you know, I was taking all these survey courses where like, you know, the professors lecturing about stuff and then you learn about all these different things, and I took a cognitive psychology course, and that was really interesting, and I took some other courses, um, and then I, so I did this like, but then I did a course where you actually do research, and in the class, what happens is, the professor was Jamie Campbell, uh, uh, the late Jamie Campbell, there would be like a, basically we would do the, an experiment, like a classic psychology experiment, like the Stroop task or something.

Um, and as a class we'd do it, then we'd analyze the data as a class, and then we'd write a report as a class. Uh, and then you'd each kind of write your own report, but with like based on the data that we generated in the class. Um, and so we kind of like literally just like went through the steps of doing, and we did that like three times in the semester.

And I just thought that was the best ever, like the most interesting generating actual information. Um, and then at the end of the class, uh, the [00:31:00] professor Jamie had said, you know, you should, uh, apply for this undergrad summer research award thing. Um, and this was like, one thing I should be clear about is like, I didn't, I did not talk to professors, you know what I mean?

Like, I wasn't like a keener student. I was just like, it would, it would not occur to me that they would ever even remotely be interested in anything that I have to say or whatever, right? Um, but he kind of pulled me aside on his own, uh, decision, like volition. And then like, So I, so he told me to apply and I was like, Oh, I never heard of that.

I didn't know what, uh, I never, I had to like get it translated. What is an RA or what do they do? But what that was, was like, I applied, the Canadian government has this program where you would, you could get paid to do research in the summertime. Uh, what I had done in the summertime before that was worked at as a bee farmer, a honey farmer to pay for school.

And I was like, that was the first time. So I eventually got the thing. So I got into the lab to do actual research. And that was the first time that I didn't have to do labor to pay for school or whatever. And then I got to actually do the research, and that was with Valerie Thompson, who was, [00:32:00] ended up being my honor supervisor.

So that, and that's how I got into a lab, and that's how I got doing actual research, and then that's how I got into grad school. So that was that one conversation from Jamie Campbell. He just pulled me aside, and that's the thing that changed my life. Hm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's so funny the

Gordon Pennycook: hmm. Mm

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: the parallels in a sense Because it was very similar for me. I mean, I think in general from what I understand in North America I mean us usually I don't know sounds like Canada's very similar then It's much broader University than it is in europe. So usually in europe you specify a topic from the beginning you apply for And then that's pretty much what you do And so for example you described there with the psychology thing.

That's that was first year for us Uh, we had these right from the beginning It was just psychology and you start off with these we had right I think it was like either an essay or lab report pretty much every week for the first year basically and on these kind of different things and um Uh, but taking aside like that, I guess your first two years were a bit broader.

It's funny how [00:33:00] similar it is to me because I had a kind of, um, first year I was really like, I want to do, be a scientist, be a researcher, you know, no clue what that meant, but I was like, that's what I want to do. And, uh, then. I guess there's so many people in the second year, you have this like dip where you're just like, I don't want to, I came, the only reason basically I didn't quit is because I wasn't rich and I'd already paid the tuition fees.

It's like you're ready to pay the tuition fees for the year. I mean, like you might as well, this is okay. Fair enough. I might as well continue at least this year. Right. And. Yeah, I can't afford to just like waste, you know, just throw all this money away, right? And uh for me it was then You know as I was kind of just like going through the motions, basically we had these like little tutorials.

It was basically like one Professor whatever with like 10 students in the room and you could ask kind of these informal questions or whatever and he mentioned there are these summer research scholarships you can apply for [00:34:00] and I applied for it thinking so at the time I wanted to switch to do film

Gordon Pennycook: Uh

huh. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I was like, okay if I get this like I've already paid my rent for part of the summer Then I can keep the money by camera

Gordon Pennycook: Ah, nice.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And luckily I had very good grades in first year, but not in second year They only asked for my grades from first year.

So I applied for the thing and then I got it and I loved doing research. It was basically exactly the same thing.

Gordon Pennycook: It's hard. It's like, this is the amazing thing about it, because you don't, it's like, when, when you start doing it, it clicks for some people and it clicks for, or it doesn't. And that's the thing that matters the most, but you, it's like, the odds of getting into that position to do it, you know, there's like, I mean, at least in my case, it was like, it was, like, um, it could have went a thousand different ways easily.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, the weird thing for me is also, I think I was the only person out of the ten who just asked him about it. It wasn't like, it was just, like, I was just the only person who kind of tried, you know? I mean, I don't know why the other people didn't, I didn't ask them, but, uh, [00:35:00] yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, in my case, I actually did not get the scholarship immediately. It was like, I was waitlisted, and then someone said no. And then I got it. So it's like, even more, like, that's one extra level of, like, the chances being, uh, against me of, like, having gotten here. But,

um, Yeah, 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: But that's what sparked the love.

And then I, and I did a lab. I was, after, I didn't get into

grad 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: what was the, what research, kind of, were you doing then? Like, collecting data for, presumably, or

Gordon Pennycook: That was, that was research on reasoning. It was my first project was working with Valerie Thompson. And she was doing this work on, uh, metacognition, essentially, what is the connection between our intuitions that come to mind immediately and the extent to which we engage in this deliberation process that occurs kind of later.

Uh, and she had this idea of like this middle step of like, uh, essentially metacognitive feelings of rightness is what she calls it. Where like if you have initial, something pops into your head initially really fluently and like it feels right to you. Then you're not going to spend much time [00:36:00]thinking about it again.

And then we had these, this paradigm that she invented, this like, it's called the two response paradigm. And so my first ever research was just on that. And then that paper was eventually published in cognitive psychology called Intuition, Reason, and Metacognition. It was my most cited paper for a long time.

Uh, it was the first thing they ever did. But it was, that was all like, that was just me plugging into a lab and doing the, doing the stuff. But my, my experiment was on Base Rate Neglect, and that was the, I had done a study on base rate neglect in the second half of the, because in the, I did a, that 300 level course I told you about.

The second half of the course you do it at your own project, kind of mini project in the class. And so I did a base rate neglect thing because I like the reasoning stuff. And then I did a base rate neglect experiment for the honors thesis, and that's what's in the paper anyways. So it all, it really kind of connected as it went through, but, That's, I didn't, at the time I didn't realize that's because I was being guided, uh, into a kind of a, uh, research topic.

It just so happens that that's the thing that I, it's worked [00:37:00] perfectly for what I was interested in.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I have a broad question about, so it sounds to me that you've pretty much been working on more or less the same research topic than from right from the beginning. I mean, broad, you know, branching out into different aspects of it. But, um, within the world of research, you could be doing in psychology, it's, it's a pretty well defined field, right?

And, um, so I'm just curious, because I think it's I've always been the exact opposite of that. And I often, so occasionally I'll have like a, you know, a bachelor's or master's student or something who's, you know, working in the lab or whatever, and, um, wants to, you know, maybe do a master's project or whatever.

And I remember once I supervised a guy's bachelor's project and he was very good. I was very happy, you know, it was great. And then he asked whether he could also do the master's project with me. I was just like, Do you want to do something else? Like, you know, don't just do one thing. Like, go out and do something completely different, you know?

Um, and, uh, [00:38:00] I don't know. I just, for me, it's, I always have it as a kind of general principle that it's probably very good to be exposed to lots of different things and kind of see what you like and then really, you know, find your thing in that sense. But also, In a way, I think what I really, what I'm working on right now, whatever you like is basically just like, after doing all this exploration, I kind of randomly ended up in one topic and then within that found the thing that I like and did that.

So I'm just curious from your perspective. I mean, I guess it's not necessary to explore that much. Um, or kind of what's your perspective on, on this kind of exploration versus just doing one thing, if you like it,

Gordon Pennycook: That's an interesting question, you know, cause I mean, it kind of depends on what the thing is. So for me, the thing is reasoning and thinking. And so like, I can do a lot of exploration within that topic. And that's why like in, in the undergrad lab that I was in, there wasn't a lot, it was like pretty constrained in the sense that all the work was focused trying to very specifically understand [00:39:00] the underlying reasoning processes.

And so that's a certain sort of type of experiment, which is like, um, you get people problems, you kind of modify different sorts of instructions, et cetera, and then that's essentially what the stuff is. When I got into grad school, I started doing the exploration thing. I wanted to like, well, I want to know why people believe.

Uh, you know, religious claims and so like, but the way I did that was by connecting it to reasoning, uh, and the underlying kind of cognitive process part of it. And then I did work on like sleep paralysis or creativity or like why offloading your thinking to your smartphone. These, all these, every single one of those things connects to underlying kind of reasoning and thinking.

Um, but just in different ways and like, uh, and they're different kind of like consequences of. The same general thing so there's like there's a through line from all my work and which is basically just like It relates to human thinking But then you can go from that to this information to to you know, the [00:40:00] dialogues with artificial intelligence to whatever Yeah, so I was able to do so I mean that's that's just the reality of it now in terms of the actual question Which is like what should people do is like well, that's up to you I mean if you if you can if you're so obsessed with one thing that you can like if you're like There's this professor at the University of Waterloo called McLeod, uh, a really highly, uh, respected, great professor, amazing research.

Um, and at the end of his career, he got really interested in the production effect. And which is basically, it's a memory effect where if you give people a list of words and half of them, they say them out loud, they'll remember the ones that you say out loud better than the ones that you don't say out loud.

Uh, and there's like, you can do a million different iterations of these experiments, which is like, what happens if you whisper it? What happens if it's blocked, so it's not like a list? If you like, say out loud one set of words, but then you don't say out loud another set of words, that's different. Et cetera.

And so like, they were just going through every iteration of all these experiments because they were so interested in this one thing. [00:41:00] Um, and there's like, there's a kind of like, there's a beauty to that too, you know what I mean? Um, so I guess it's just up to your own interests, I guess.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: do whatever you want. Uh,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, in a term, I mean, there's the other version of the question is, what is the best to do for your career? Uh, and like for a young person in this, the kind of, I think I would like to say explore, but probably the reality is if you are on the job market, you, the typical, especially in North America, the idea is you want to become known for at least one thing.

And so you should probably focus on a topic and then, uh, nail that down. And then, maybe, with new students or something later on, you can explore new topics, but that's, that's the career advice that I've gotten. Anyways.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I know. I mean, that makes complete sense to me. And I guess there's also like. In the sense that, you know, this is a question at two different levels, right? One is just like, before you've even like, I mean, I always try to get like research experience while studying whatever I [00:42:00] could like help out with different research and whatever and do bachelor's and master's projects.

So, you know, in, again, in Europe, you usually have the master's project as like a separate, completely separate degree, often at a completely different university in your bachelor's and or your PhD.

Gordon Pennycook: Hm?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: but, uh, yeah, and the second kind of thing is like, once you actually. become a scientist by doing a PhD and a postdoc, then you focus on there.

But

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. But now the train's already rolling, you know what I mean? It's hard to, it's hard at any point to just switch to something else. Um, but, when you mentioned David Rand, he did that. I mean, like, he, David, uh, Rand was known and had done lots of work on cooperation, essentially. Understanding. Uh, and then I became his postdoc, uh, right?

Like I moved to, uh, we're now, if we can do the whole story, I, we're skipping some parts, but, uh, I did a grad, I did grad school at university of Waterloo. It was spectacular. Dave, uh, John, people saying, and Derek Kohler were my supervisors and they're amazing. And [00:43:00] I was doing work on, like, understanding how people think and applying it to different things.

Uh, then I moved to work with David Ryan. We didn't really know what we were going to do work on there. But then the 2016 election happened. And that, and Trump became president. And fake news was this big problem. And I had published, just before that, this, like, paper on the psychology of, like, bullshit. Of, like, why people, uh, that bullshit in that case was, like, this pseudo profound, like, more, like, mundane, like, woo stuff.

Uh, but then, like, this idea of People not necessarily lying, but just like not caring what's true, which is how we define bullshit, essentially, or Frankfurt did. Um, that became, it seemed like that was really what was capturing the moment. Uh, and we wanted to do work trying to understand that. And so, Dave, who was doing all this work on cooperation, basically was like, we started doing this work on misinformation, and he was like, that's what I'm gonna do now.

He doesn't do any cooperation research anymore. He's like, that's, that's the thing that's fun for me. And then he just shifted it, and the lab, it's still called the Human Cooperation Lab, uh, the [00:44:00] HCL lab, but it doesn't, they don't do research on cooperation anymore. They do research on, uh, misinformation and things like that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, I have to admit, I'm not very happy about that story. Because I did cooperation and still do cooperation. And it annoys me to no end that he stopped. So I guess now I know who I have to blame. I always wondered, like, why did he switch? He was doing really interesting stuff on cooperation.

Gordon Pennycook: It's my fault. You blame me, man. It was totally my fault. I just pulled him into my world. I was like, hey, stop doing that over there. Come hang out over here. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, no, because for me, yeah, it was generally like, because I was, I was also, I mean, I've never done the evolutionary kind of stuff, but I've always been very interested in it. And, uh, especially the beginning of HD, there's a question of whether I was going to do more also like evolution of cooperation kind of stuff.

Um, yeah. And, you know, you think about like, what might I do in the future or whatever, and then at some point it's like, yeah, he's not, he's not an option anymore. He's not, he's not doing this anymore.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, you're not gonna do it. Yeah Like there there are parts that are [00:45:00]relevant for some things and like but it's not yeah It's just like not the thing he's thinking about anymore And so like that ultimately is what it is Like what is the and and so because we're doing work and I've always tried to do work Like I said before but stuff that I think that it matters for the world What that means is like what is it?

That's drawing my attention? In the world that seems important And then the research, if you just look, I mean, like, that's what the research is about. It's just like, how do I understand this thing from the lens that I bring? Which is like, we, we start from understanding the nature of human thinking and reasoning.

How can we use that to better understand this kind of problem that's emerging in the world? Uh, and so that's, or this new technology or whatever it is. So then I've always got this question, like, you know, when you go on job interviews and stuff like that, people say, what's the, Okay, what's your five year plan for your research?

I was like, I don't, I mean like, there's no, there's no like, because it's about, it's, I mean, it's like, it's about what the moment, it's always about the, like, it's, I mean, it's like, it's a, there's a leg, but it's always about how do [00:46:00] we figure out what these problems are that is currently the thing that I think about when I, before I go to bed.

Uh, and so it's not like some, oh, I'm going to do this, then I'm going to do that. It's just, it's, it's almost more reactive, I guess, than that.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: How do you then handle that in these kind of interviews? Because saying, dude, I don't have a plan.

Gordon Pennycook: Not very

well. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: isn't the best answer that, in that

Gordon Pennycook: I don't know. You know what happened is, I mean, I'm not the best to answer this question because I don't know that I did very good at job interviews. Like I, I, if you want to know the nitty gritty of it, like I, I did not get a job offer in psychology until I came to Cornell. At that point, people stopped asking me that question because I'd done enough stuff that it's, I guess it was apparent that I, that it was going to continue, I guess.

I don't know. But, uh, I would, before I was a professor at Cornell. I was an assistant professor at the University of Regina at a business school. Um, and that was like a kind of unique situation, like I'm, because I was from Saskatchewan and like I had done more [00:47:00] research than like I was coming from a different field where, I mean, not just my own record, but just like the stat, like there's way more social psychologists and clinic psychologists publish way more work than people in organizational behavior.

Um, so like, Yeah, anyways, there's actually, the other side note on that one, if we want to get into the real details, is like, they had two positions open, and so they were able to hire someone who was more traditional, kind of business school hire, and then they were like, let's just take a flyer on this dude, like he's from Saskatchewan, publishes a bunch of stuff, let's see what happens, and it was great, I got lucky on that one too, but the, in terms of the actual, like, psych job market, like, I don't know, when people ask me that question, I, I can't remember exactly how I answered it, but, uh, probably not very well.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, so you just overwhelm them with good papers, and they're like, okay, whatever, we'll do something

Gordon Pennycook: he's gonna figure it out. I don't know, like, I think it's a dumb

question. It was like, who has a five year plan?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that is a good, um, You know, I feel like if you've if you have enough work that speaks for itself, the question kind of does answer itself.

But, you know,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, who, [00:48:00] do you plan five years in advance? Like, it, this seems like, it seems ridiculous to me, like a waste of time. Like, how am I gonna know, cause the first year of studies go differently than you expect. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know, a five year, I don't, I, this feels, it also feels like, I've never been someone who, uh, focuses on the career.

Like I was, and that if, uh, and that maybe was to my detriment, but I wasn't like doing things because I thought it would get me a job. I was just obsessed with answering the questions and trying to figure out what's going on. And I just liked the, I just liked the process of science and like, uh, the challenge of it.

And so we, uh, we're just doing things and it wasn't like there's no plan there. And I feel like if I were doing it in a way that was more. Conducively getting a job, it would kick, it would really sap a lot of the fun out of it. It would make it seem less genuine to me. Uh, so, I was fortunate enough that I survived despite the fact that I was not being very mindful about my own career.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, by the way, quick question, just because we [00:49:00]discussed your background. And then you mentioned, you know, you were a professor then in, in Canada, in Saskatchewan, was that like, a big, like, wow, I've become a professor, like in, you know, me became a professor in Saskatchewan, was that kind of just at that point, just you were so it was so normal for you to, like, be thinking about those things that

Gordon Pennycook: Oh

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I'm just curious.

Like, was it a bit like I was like one of us, like, or like, even in the, in the place you grew up, was it like, it was like, wow, so one of us like made it to professor, like kind of thing, or was it just a Yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: a good question. I mean, for me it doesn't, it didn't feel, like, uh, important or Uh, there was never a moment where I was like, I mean, so like apart from there's a few cases where like when we published the nature paper, for example, I had this thread where like I actually started reflecting on how like far I had gone, I guess you might say, or like how different the, like, or the, just the path, I guess.

Um, but like, for example, when I got my PhD, um, my parents came and they'd never [00:50:00] seen me give a talk before. And they never, I think they'd never been to a talk. Um, And my mom was like really thrown off by the external examiner, like asking me these questions. Uh, and she's like, what was that guy's deal?

Like, why was he so, like, aggressive or whatever? And I was like, oh, he was just And they weren't even aggressive questions, really. Like, he was just So, uh, which was really funny. And then the other story is that after, after we got out my So my dissertation was about, uh, what triggers analytic thought. It was like really theoretical about, like, conflict detection and reasoning.

It was just like I just kind of, I just had this one chunk and I had this model that I had, whatever. Um, and so my dad, I had, I had made no in, nothing about why that was important to anything. And so I, we walked out and they're deliberating and then he was like, wow, that was really interesting. Uh, what's it for?

He didn't, he couldn't, he was like, I don't understand what this is, or like, he's no, um, eventually at some point he realized. Um, once I started doing work that was more applied, like I wanted some misinformation, he kind of got the connection. So anyways, [00:51:00] that's a long way of answering. I, when I got a professor there was like, I guess there was some extent of like, Oh well, Gord got a real job, finally.

And like, he's not just messing around going to school. And so that was like, I achieved the thing that I had set out to do all those years before, which was like gainful employment. Uh, and a job that people respect. And so that was, that was a big thing. But the bigger thing was I, uh, because the work grabbed some attention, like the misinformation stuff, the, the biggest single thing was like, there was the Nature paper, all that kind of stuff, whatever, but I was on the radio, uh, uh, Gormley is this guy who is a, he basically is the radio person that would be on at the mill when Dad was working, and I did an interview with Gormley on the radio, and the whole mill heard me talking or whatever, uh, and that was the thing that was like Wow, okay, maybe Gore's doing something different here, like this is, whatever.

Um, so it wasn't the professor's job, it wasn't anything else, it was going on Gorma.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: no, I get that. Yeah. I also find it funny when you mentioned like, wow, you finally have a job. My. [00:52:00] So like, the what the first thing is, like, I've never been a huge like partier in my, in my studies, you know. But I think my English grandmother always thinks like, if you're a student, that's all you're doing.

I'm. And so when I, you know, when I, especially a PhD, like it's It's a normal job, right? I mean, well, enjoy it. Like,

Gordon Pennycook: yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: maybe if you it's in northern, you say, of course, or whatever, but like, it's basically you're just doing research all day. And it's a job, right. And even though, like, every time I talked to her, which, you know, isn't a super often, because he's in England, and I'm in, well, now I'm in Switzerland, but usually in Germany, you know, it's a bit of a Every time is like, I think she thinks I get up like at 11am every day, like hung over that kind of stuff.

I remember so when I, you know, so now I'm in Zurich doing a postdoc, right? And, you know, she's like, Oh, so you're like, you know, you're doing this thing. And, uh, so is this like a proper job now? And she always asks like when I'm getting paid, you know, like, are you getting paid for this? So like, uh, and it's so weird because also like, I mean, [00:53:00] this is mainly because it's, uh, Switzerland and like.

The living cost of a crazy but like I think I'm making more than anyone in my family's ever made right and yet I think she thinks I'm like just hanging out all day.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah. I have to say, I mean, it was similar because when I went to grad school, I had to constantly explain, Oh, but I'm getting paid. So you can think about it as a job. Like I have a job now. And then, uh, cause I did my postdoc with Dave Brown was at Yale. And so that was the thing where they were like, Oh, well, like that's, I've heard of that before.

You know, they didn't, they wouldn't have been able to tell you where it was or anything. But, uh, um, that was the kind of the first thing where I was like, they. They thought, oh, that's interesting. Okay,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: they don't, they still really don't understand the whole process of research, but like, you know , when I published a paper on the psychology of bullshit, I printed it off and gave it to my grandma, uh, and she, and she read it and she'd have it on her, like, uh, in her, in her room and she would show it to people or whatever.

So that when they had that, they, like, there was something there that they could show people, uh, that made it more tangible.[00:54:00]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. It's an actual like object that you created

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, this is what Gord is doing here or whatever. Yeah. And I, yeah, so

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: about bullshit. Yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: I have a picture of my grandma holding up the paper with a big smile on her face. It's one of my treasured things. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Maybe kind of a final question that goes a little bit, I dunno, into, into your background, which is you mentioned a couple of times that you were interested in religion almost like a topic within which, or to which to apply kind of reasoning research and that kinda stuff. Uh, was, was that because it was like a, a big, a big thing where you grew up or was it just like by religion specifically?

Basically?

Gordon Pennycook: Oh, that's a great question, actually. So, so it wasn't like, certainly on American standards, we were not, it's like, um, it's not like American religion. Like it wasn't in Canada, it would be kind of improper to really wear religion on your sleeve, at least in a small town where I grew up at the time. Um, but we went to church when we were young and then I went, my grandma, who was like, uh, my favorite [00:55:00] person, if, uh, we went to church with her on Sunday, she'd take us out for Chinese food.

So I was like the last one in the family to continue to keep going to church. But of course I wasn't, I didn't believe in any of that stuff. I just like hanging out with grandma. And then, uh, there was one story from my youth. We had Sunday school. It was a United Church, which was a Canadian church. It's kind of like a, something similar to a Lutheran church or Anglican church, I guess.

Um, uh, and whatever. Sunday school, they would teach us all these, like, stories about the Bible. Like, you know, Jericho, the walls of Jericho, and they blew the horn and the walls crumbled down. And I would ask way too many questions. You know what I mean? Like, is this like How did that happen? Like, is that, like, is this, like, something that literally happened?

That's just a story? And they would, eventually I was booted out. They were like, he doesn't, just don't, he doesn't need to come back here anymore. He can just stay with the adults during that part of the, the sermon or whatever. So, the way that I got into understanding religion was because I was, like, everybody believed it.

A lot of people didn't seem to think that much about it or care that much about it. [00:56:00] And, once we, as kids, were old enough, my parents stopped going to church. They were like, oh, we did. What we're supposed to do, we, you know, we taught them morality or whatever, like we, they went to church when they were young and now we don't have to do that anymore.

So, like, they, people weren't, like, really fervent, but they all believed it. Um,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: they actually did believe it, or?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah, yeah, they do, yeah. And, like, I know my parents do, and, like, uh, they do, yeah, cause it's like, One of the, one of the things from my own work was that, Part of the reason why people believe it is because they just don't think about it.

Like, it's just like, it's just a background thing. Like, they believe it. And they, and they do believe it in the same way that they would believe a lot of things that they haven't thought about. Uh, and part of that is because they haven't seen need to think about them. There's something that, nothing that really triggered them to think about it.

Uh, but I was always in that, uh, the one, I guess the thing that was, I thought that was a unique about myself was that I couldn't stop, like, thinking about why this is that or whatever. And that's what most scientists, that's how most scientists become scientists, is they can't stop asking questions. And I

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: how [00:57:00] big was Noah's boat exactly?

Gordon Pennycook: I was like, how did they get, and I was like,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And how didn't they eat each other?

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, why weren't they eating each other? They put the predators and the prey all in the same boat. And why were the birds on there? Like they, you know, you, you collected the birds, you know? Anyway, so it doesn't make any sense. And so like that kind of thing, uh, I was just always fascinated by that.

And so then, um, and also like just historically, when I went, I, I graduated in, in high school in 2004. I started, University, and therefore 2006, I guess, uh, or five. Um, yeah, uh, and then, you know, Richard Dawkins The God Delusion came out in 2006. Uh, I had read, I was reading about that kind of stuff before The God Delusion came out, but that was all kind of like, this big debate about new atheism and all that kind of stuff was all at the same time.

And so that, um, really kind of like made that a salient kind of moment for me.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And so just because it was a big kind of topic that you'd occasionally rubbed against in your life, you were just like, let's[00:58:00]

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, it was just, I was, I mean, in grade 10, we had to choose a debate topic. And my topic was religion was constructed to control the youth. So it

was, 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that or was that from an

Gordon Pennycook: I chose it. No, I chose it. I was like, I wanted to, and I debated the teacher or something and like, uh, I thought that was fun. So like I had long this like, kind of like, I long didn't like the idea of religion.

And I can't remember a time when I learned about evolution in whatever, grade 5 or whatever it was. Uh, and I told, I was excited about this idea and I told mom about it. And then she kind of spontaneously said, oh, but you still believe in God though, right? And I said, and I said, yeah, but then what she didn't know is that like, that was like, wait a second, what does that have to do?

And then I

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: why is she asking me

Gordon Pennycook: then she, and then it went,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: those two topics?

Gordon Pennycook: and then within probably, probably within, I don't know how long, I mean, this is probably just me making up memories or whatever, but like it didn't take very long after that where I was like, I guess God doesn't exist, you know? And so, um, that, yeah, [00:59:00] anyways, that, that like, uh, I guess because I'm a navel gazer myself, I'm thinking about the way that I'm thinking about things.

That's, that just got me interested in that. And religion is this, this big topic. It, now it seems almost quaint, actually. Uh, that we were debating about the existence of God. And, uh, that seems like that would be fun. If we were, if that was the major thing that we had to debate about in modern life. Now it's like, uh, you know, um, ice raids and whatever else.

So, whatever.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Um, yeah, I think I had lots of things I could say to that topic 

Gordon Pennycook: like, I just, I opened up a giant can

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, exactly. But, uh, I guess I should, uh, I want to also ask about the actual content of what you did.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, then let's maybe start with, uh, when you when you moved to David Rand's lab. I mean, so why did you go to his lab?

I mean, if you didn't want to do his research, you know, I

Gordon Pennycook: Oh, well, okay, so what, the part of the issue is [01:00:00] that,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: mean, other people are available, you know,

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, yeah, but I had, uh, it's a good question. I'm going to try not to answer it in a too lengthy of a way, but like I had, so through the course of grad school, I had kind of developed my own kind of dual process model, uh, like a, they call it the three stage, uh, model of dual process model of analytic engagement or whatever.

And so I couldn't really go to grad school, like the person that, or the postdoc. It would have made sense for me to post doc, for example, with Wim Denaes, uh, who's now at Paris Descartes, or CNRS, also, in France. But we basically, like, have different, well, they're pretty similar, but like, we were already overlapping too much, you know what I mean?

Like, it would be like, I wouldn't learn from that, you know what I mean? Like, we, I knew what he thought, and he knows what I thought, and we'd already engaged, and we, like, we had, uh,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: each other on the back for the

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly. So there was like, so I want, so I wanted to work with somebody that was doing, that was still within the realm of [01:01:00] like a kind of dual process type, you know, thinking, understanding what thinking stuff, but that was different.

And so Dave had been publishing all this, you know, great work about dual process theory on cooperation. Now I wasn't really interested in cooperation. Um, but I just assumed as has happened in the past, we would figure out something that would be interesting to do. Uh, and so I didn't know, like I said, I really didn't know what we would work on, but I just knew that I've always been able to figure out something to work on.

And like, I would be able to find something that he would be interested in. I would, I'm sure. And so then, and I was right. So that's how it happened. I just kind of rolled the dice on it, but,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Just from a practical perspective, because, I mean, very, a year ago or two, this would have been a big question of mine. And so maybe a couple of listeners also, is the kind of So practically, like, did he have funding? And he was just like, this guy seems interesting? Or like, did you have to apply for something?

[01:02:00] You just made something up? Or like, how? What was the?

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, that's,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: How did how did you get the money to be there? Basically?

Gordon Pennycook: this is also Canadian government. My, like. Uh, the importance of federal funding for research is the undercurrent of my entire career because that was that what got me the RA job. But also I got a, it's called the Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Canadian government, which is a fellowship that you can take anywhere you want.

And so I just emailed him saying, listen, I'm giving you a free postdoc. Uh, I, we have some overlapping interests. He had published also work on. Uh, dual process theory and religion, not that like one paper, but, so I was like, can I, you know, what do you think about that? Uh, so I just emailed them. Uh, the other story though, that,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Sorry. So you literally just got that because you were so good before? Did you have to apply? Or like, what was

Gordon Pennycook: I applied, yeah, I made the postdoc funding was the applicant, yeah, a competition and within Canada and I applied and got the thing. Um, so yeah, so I won that [01:03:00] competition. That's how I got it. Of course, I guess I would have e mailed them before I knew that I got it, but like, based on past precedent, I had some guess that I would get it, and uh, that's what it worked based on what people were telling me.

But the other part of the story is that because I was so like, I had never, I don't know if I even met somebody from Ivy League or whatever, I probably did, but like, I had never been to one and I didn't really know, and certainly like, I mean, you know David Rand, like he had published. He published like a nature paper every, or a couple like every year or something.

Like I had assumed that this guy was insane, you know what I mean? Like I just, my idea of him was so inaccurate. And so I, and I had to write this like cold email being like, Hey, can I join your lab? And I had really no idea how to do that. And I ended up writing like probably the most obnoxious, shitty email of all time.

Like it was not, uh, I, part of it also was that, this is really in the weeds, but, um, Shane Frederick, who, [01:04:00] uh, was the guy that, he's also at Yale at the School of Management but a business school, which is what I didn't want to do at the time. Um, he was the person who invented the Cognitive Reflection Test.

So I had already talked to him, and I was like, I thought that maybe they would know each other, and I guess they do sort of, but, uh, and so I was like, he was like, and I had talked to Josh Green at Harvard, who was Dave Rand's postdoc supervisor, and we had a call, and that didn't work out because our interests weren't really aligned.

Um, so he was the third person I talked to, and I didn't want to, like, I wanted to be honest with him about it, but then it made it seem like I was like, I guess I'll work with you if you, if like, if that's, you know, whatever. And so I just didn't do it right, you know, and I tried to, like I was big dogging and whatever.

And then what happened was he sent the, he sent the email to the, everybody in the lab. He was like, uh, what do you guys think about this? And then like, they were like, you can't hire this guy, he sounds insane. And then, uh, Nick Stignaro, which is a, was a PhD student in his lab, uh, who had similar interests to mine.

He had, we had a Skype call and that was like his day was like [01:05:00] getting a feel for like whether I was cool. He'd like talk to Nick and then we had a good call and Nick's a great guy and he's like, no, he's normal. It's fine. And so he, he gave me the position.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: He just doesn't know how to write. But

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, he just doesn't know and if he would have known, I mean if he would have known the backstory of like small town, whatever and like doesn't, uh, He's just really reaching here.

Has no idea what's, what's going on. Then maybe that would have added context but, um, This is, I mean, it goes to show that like, we, we make these sort of rapid decisions about people all the time without knowing where things are coming from and like, um, yeah. So I got lucky on that one as well.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: one thing that I think is that I think many people are happy to look over an email, if you're a grad student and you're applying to your supervisor, it's probably going to be, if you have it finished and say, like, is this kind of,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: is there some, is there like a major, you know, should I change the stuff that they're probably happy to look over it and tell you that you're.

Email that does not maybe exactly convey

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: who you are as a person. I don't know.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. [01:06:00] Really? Like I, yeah. I don't know what. Yeah. Why I didn't get more advice on that, but probably it was some, some element will actually was genuine overconfidence too. Where I was like, well, it was a free postdoc. So like, but yeah, I don't know.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, to be fair, I mean, I don't want to speak too generally, but I think most people are going to be happy if someone says, Hey, can I, can I work for free in your lab? And I already have a PhD and I have my own funding

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah,

exactly. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: a bunch of papers today. Yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah. And I felt like, I was like, I almost screwed up even though I was on really strong footing. You know what I mean?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, that's actually, that's actually the most impressive part of us about your career. So you almost managed to screw that up.

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, yeah, totally. Yeah. There's a lot of those. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So, um, Okay, so you're there. Don't know what to do.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. And

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you're just like, what, reading stuff, finishing old papers, talking to people there

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, exactly. And I was like applying for

jobs. I 

applied for like. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: or

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I was like, I mean, I was

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: was that also the first time in the US then? Like, living

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And that was also,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: interesting.

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, yeah, it was, yeah, [01:07:00] and I was in New Haven. I don't know if you've ever been to New Haven before, but Connecticut, but it's like, it's like bizarro Canada in the sense that like, so in, in Saskatchewan, all the neighborhoods are essentially the same.

There's usually one core neighborhood where like 90 percent of the crime is, unfortunately. Um, but it's like, so there's like, there's like the bad area, then there's like whatever. That's the way that Canadian cities are often, um, especially in like, uh, Saskatchewan. Uh, in New Haven, there was like, one hyper rich area that has all the resources.

And then all the rest of the city, it's like a different city. Uh, where like, they don't clean the streets, you know what I mean, or it seems like to me. And like, and there's no gradient at all. Where they'd like, the city like, just tries to keep everybody out of the rich area. And then, like, it seemed like they were just, like, fending for themselves, like

it, 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you mean it's like the, like the Lion King.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: nice area and then 

Gordon Pennycook: yeah. yeah. No, that's a great Exactly. That's exactly what it seems like. And, like, the inequality was [01:08:00] so, uh, drastic. And, uh, yeah, it was just an interesting experience. Uh, and quite a culture shock. Um, uh, but, I mean, we, we, it was, we enjoyed it. We weren't there for a huge amount of time before I ended up getting the job in Canada and then moving back.

Having health care again, but, um, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Um, maybe since we'll be talking about, uh, actual content now, um, or moving towards it, at least, um, a couple of definitions, maybe I think are always, uh, useful when talking about, for example, I actually didn't quite know, uh, the definition of fake news really, uh, or at least not the way that you defined it.

Um, And, uh, misinformation, disinformation, 

Gordon Pennycook: Right. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: exact, what's the difference between these terms?

Gordon Pennycook: Right, so, fake news is like literally just a fabricated news story. So, it's like a faked, so like that is just in the format of a news story. [01:09:00] Um, but it's just like not actual news, it's something that someone made up. So like the Pope endorsing Donald Trump during the 2016 election. It's a very famous example, he never actually endorsed Donald Trump.

Um, so it's a subclass of misinformation. It's a very specific type of falsehood. Um, that was basically like for one period of time, a kind of like key primary form of it. Over time, you know, there's, you have much, misinformation is just false or misleading information. Although, some people might debate about the misleading part.

And that makes it complicated. So anyways, yeah. So a false thing, something could be false, and like that's kind of easier to define. But whether it's misleading is like, misleading to whom? It really depends, that's a harder thing to define in many cases.

But it still like generally fits into the, um, into the definition. Disinformation is just, it's deliberately created as being false. You know, or misleading, like you've done it on purpose. Misinformation may or may not [01:10:00] be deliberate, it's just like a general category. And so disinformation is a subcategory also of disinformation, or of misinformation.

And fake news is like, could be either. So, does that clarify? Ha

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Hope, I mean, I've read up on it, but I hope so. . Uh, but the, um, so how do you, so this is something I'm generally curious about. How do you think about. Uh, I guess lying by omission or like, uh, misleading by omission. So one thing that's, um, this can be taken out of context beautifully. Uh, so sometimes I go to Fox news, um, and also in Germany, I would go to Bild, which is a kind of tabloid. They're not, I think they're not allowed to call themselves a newspaper because they don't have enough words on each page, but I think they call it a magazine then 

Gordon Pennycook: Oh, okay. Mm hmm. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you know, a kind of, uh, maybe not the highest, uh, anyway, so there's like two who are kind of, let's say, say, from my perspective, at least not the kind of mainstream of information, like one thing I, so that the reason I [01:11:00] started occasionally going on Fox news is to see kind of like, if there's a big event, same with Bild in Germany, what are they saying about it?

Like, what's the kind of, um, you know, especially in general, like, we have a pretty neutral news system. And then there's, you know, to either side, you can have the extremes.

Gordon Pennycook: hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: But So I was curious, like, what are they reporting on this? Like, well, how are they, you

Gordon Pennycook: What's the narrative?

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: exactly. And so one thing I found interesting with Fox News is that whenever, in this case, Donald Trump would do something outrageous again, they just wouldn't report on it at all.

Gordon Pennycook: Mm

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: It would just be nothing. Like, I can't remember what it was at one point, but like, it was just like, he'd, I can't remember what, yeah, that's a fun part of it is pick any one. I don't know which one it was, but he did. So he said, he said something like, you know, Not out of taken out of context, he just said something crazy.

And, um, Fox News, I think, reported on Biden's son or whatever,

Gordon Pennycook: Uh huh.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: know, that kind of thing, where they just report something really different. So I'm just curious, like how you think about this kind of stuff in this [01:12:00] context, when, um, there's a, by not reporting on something or by reporting on something else instead, you're kind of implicitly saying this is the biggest news that happened today, even though to most people.

That wouldn't be the case. I'm just curious, like, does that fall under misinformation? Is it a subcategory? Is it just its whole own thing? Or like, how does that fit into it?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, I mean, I think it doesn't, it wouldn't traditionally fit into misinformation as it has been investigated by psychologists because it's a little bit too It's hard to research the counterfactual, you know what I mean? Like it's, I mean you could imagine studies that are built on that And I think the, but, so okay, that's, so that's one way to answer the question.

The other one is whether you want to call that misinformation is really a judgment call and one that I think is not actually that important. Like that is just a label that you put on it. Uh, what is important is that that is something that happens and we should understand it better. Um, and that it leads to [01:13:00] the thing that we care about, which is, are people being misled?

Uh, which is, I mean, the reason, the essential reason why we care about fake news is that it leads people to be misled, uh, and they believe things that aren't true, or they fail to believe things that are true. Uh, but not reporting on something that happens because it doesn't, isn't consistent with the political narrative.

That's, that serves a similar purpose. Um, it's just, I mean, it's a different sort of thing. And you might expect, it might not be that this, there's this underlying, the same psychology that really explains why someone falls for fake news may not be entirely applicable to like, not realizing what's not there.

Uh, because that's a much more difficult problem to solve, obviously. You have to do what you do. You have to go look at the different things and then bridge the gaps. Most people are not engaging with news to that extent. Uh, they're not that informed, and so that is a major problem.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I guess also in general, from what I understand, most of the things we'll be talking about more specifically, all the stuff you found, is usually about people actively doing stuff, not about something [01:14:00] not doing something.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: though they could have.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah,

exactly. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: counterfactual is, you know,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, I mean if we, if we get people to think more about what's in front of them, that would already be a big step. But to think more not only about what's in front of them, but what is not in front of them, you know, that's, uh, yeah, it's difficult. By the way, I looked up, I wanted, I was curious about, uh, This myself.

So I went on Fox News right now, and I was looking to see if there's any mention of all of Trump saying Because they were he was asked if he would go to the crash site and he said what like in the water Should I go swimming or whatever and like totally egregious comment if Obama had said something like that, you know This was front page news for Fox, but I

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, that's I had. So yeah, I mean, for context, today is the 31st of January. So there was the, what was it, a plane crashed into a helicopter, right in somewhere in 

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah in in DC. Yeah

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, in Washington. Okay. And, um, yeah, so actually, I also looked up this morning, because I think then he blamed the previous administration for this or something like this, right?

He made [01:15:00] a political talking point out

Gordon Pennycook: Oh yeah, he blamed Biden, he blamed DEI for

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's what I mean. Again, Fox News, nothing about it. Right.

Gordon Pennycook: it has nothing to do with anything, obviously,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah. Anyway, um,

Gordon Pennycook: broke a cardinal rule, don't talk about current news events on a podcast, because people could listen to this a year from now. But

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, I mean, this is a bit of a problem with your research, right? I mean, it's a lot of this is, um, has to use specific

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, to illustrate, yeah, so,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, exactly.

Gordon Pennycook: Sorry future podcast listeners.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Sorry for anyone listening,

Gordon Pennycook: We actually, sorry in advance for having to listen to me talk about, uh, things. So, but if you're

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Well, generally speaking, I don't force my listeners.

Gordon Pennycook: yeah, that's good. Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: as well finish. I mean,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. There's

more 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: own bloody fault. You have no one else to blame but yourself.

Gordon Pennycook: It's good stuff coming up. I swear. I don't know. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I mean I guess one interesting thing about I guess A coincidence of biography of yours is that once you started [01:16:00] working on this, social media became a, uh, well, a big influence than it's ever been before. So basically how does the introduction of social media kind of change the whole, the whole way that information is shared, um, or that people access their news?

Gordon Pennycook: Oh, that's an interesting question. I mean, I think people started using it more as a news source. Because, so old school Facebook was just, you know, people are taking pictures of their food and things. Like it was, Purely entertainment, then people, then it became a thing where there was a news feed.

Uh, uh, and you would actually get information about the news on the same place that you get pictures of, you know, dogs and babies and food and whatever. And so things started being intermixed. Um, and so that, that's one part of it, which is like the extent to which people are like really paying attention to whether things are accurate, because they're not, they're engaging with things that have nothing to do with accuracy at the same time.

Uh, but then also it was like sharing news [01:17:00] and being reinforced socially for it, which is like you share a story and people like and comment on it and like you get rewarded for sharing stuff that, that, uh, for sharing information that is like important or whatever. Um, that changes sort of like, both like how people interact with it, but also the way that news is reported, like what the headlines are, they need to make sure that people click on the headline.

To read the story and so that you have to have a headline that like works for that and that's like different than like Reporting the news at six o'clock when everybody's tuning in you don't really you just have to say it You know, I mean so that that changes a lot of dynamics And yeah, we're seeing the repercussions of it.

I think

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah, it's, it's very different from, you know, 30, 40 years ago, that was just like the main news thing. Once a day. And then that was it. Yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: like there was a shared reality there which was like this is the news these are the events not [01:18:00] with the spin or whatever just like this is what's happening and Um, and then people kind of were in the same world together. Uh, now it's like, not only because different things or different events are being reported differently, but there's a, they're being interpreted on the fly by, uh, you know, news opinion people or whatever, or even by like political elites.

And that's what's being fed to people. And then if you, so if you, I mean, one way I like to talk about this is like, imagine if you grew up in a house, uh, where Fox News was on in the background all the time. And like, you don't care about politics. Like, you actually maybe dislike politics, but it's just always there.

You're gonna have a different set of beliefs and like, positions than somebody who was raised in a house where MSNBC was on in the background. And it has nothing to do with your political, like, allegiances or identity or anything. It's just like, what have you been exposed to? Uh, and like, we're just running that experiment over and over and over again with different states and different counties and whatever.

And like, the, uh, people are living in different realities. Uh, and that's It's not, it's no surprise that we are so politically [01:19:00] fractured in the States because of that. Mm hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: um, in, in previous podcasts, I heard you also talk about the, um, which is funny because it's like such a basic fact of, you know, Bayesian updating, but how your prior beliefs influence, uh, how you, um, interpret new information coming in.

Gordon Pennycook: hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um, so just because you kind of already almost explained most of it there, can you just go a little bit into a little bit more detail kind of how Um, a lot of the, how should I put it, um, things that might look like, uh, a kind of political bias might just be a difference of background information.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly. So, what we, uh, do too much in, like, particularly social psychology is we take some sort of, like, outcome. Uh, like how you interpret a crowd size or something. I don't know. You see a correlation with political ideology and say, Well, ideology, [01:20:00] people's identities are driving this difference.

But it could be that the different exposure to different information for people with those ideologies is what's driving it. And it might be that they, it has nothing to do with their own identities or what they care about. It's just what they, what their lives have been like. I mean, I think there's other areas of psychology that have a, uh, where we, we care a lot about people's experiences.

Like, how do they get, what, that's what forms our perspective. It's like the things That we've experienced in our lives, which includes the information that we have been exposed to, and we expose ourselves to, that's who we are. That's how, that's how we get where we are. We're a product of our environment in a very, like, literal sense.

And so, like, if we, if you take people that have totally different information environments, they will necessarily have different beliefs. And we can attribute that to their, like, motivations to want to believe those things. necessarily, or their, like, identities as people within those groups. Uh, we have to separate them to know what actually is causing [01:21:00] what.

As psychologists, we often, like, put way too much weight on the identity part, which is kind of like saying the people have control over what they want to believe and what they do believe, and less on the, like, exposure part, on the environmental part, the stuff that they've been exposed to, the, the, uh, information that is around in their environment, and that's what determines a lot of what they believe.

Yeah,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: curious, just because a lot of this, I'm not entirely sure exactly about, um, the details of this, does your work rely on like, formal models in this case, or is it, um, all verbal because I'm just curious or not necessarily your work per se, but like work in this area in general in particular with, fake news and misinformation, et cetera.

Um, because obviously a lot of this is studied very. Formally in slightly different contexts, 

Gordon Pennycook: yeah. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so I'm just curious, what's the kind of, for these particular topics, what's the, the way that that's usually approached right now,

Gordon Pennycook: So, uh, low on formal models, for sure. Because [01:22:00] it's at a level of abstraction that is kind of difficult to model. If one of your parameters is All the information that someone's been exposed to, you know, that's not going to be that easy to put in a formal model. I mean, you could, whatever, it's just, or like, that is, it doesn't, it's not as conducive to that as it would be for something, other things.

Um, there are, like, what we've tried to push is at least, at the very least, having some sort of like, uh, DAG, you know, uh, some sort of like, Um,

just a 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: uh,

Gordon Pennycook: acrylic graphic, something, I don't know. It's just, it's just boxes and arrows. We used to call them boxes and arrows. But it's just like a representation of the causal model that you are implying.

Um, so a great paper on this is Ben Tappan. Has some, uh, interesting work looking at that kind of thing. Um, uh, and so it's basically, it's basically a matter of like, Even if we can get people to be more explicit about what they think the causal model is. Uh, even if they don't even put it out [01:23:00] into like a boxes and arrows, just like, what is the causal role of identity in this outcome that you're talking about?

Um, we, that would even be progress, I think. So like, we're, we're pretty far away from having formal models about this sort of thing, I think. Um, we're still litigating basic causal factors. To what extent is it, is identity actually playing a causal role? Because it's correlated with all these other factors, we need to get people just to even measure these other things.

Um, Information exposure, whatever it might be. Uh, priors, like in many cases, when you're looking at like, so for example, um, we might do an experiment where you have like, you change the target to Democrat or Republican and you're getting information from them. And so one important piece of information there would be, measure how much they actually trust.

People who are Democrats, Republicans. That might explain your entire difference. Uh, and then like how do you explain whether they trust? That's different. But that's not necessarily identity that you're, you're varying there. So anyways, if we, first step is measurement. Then more, more understanding of the causal mechanisms.[01:24:00]

And then a few, you know, steps down the line is formal causal models. That would be great.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, okay. Um, and yeah, I mean, as you said that the problem is, I'm assuming that identity is correlated with Ada.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. It's

just 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: a, yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: yeah. It's a, I mean, it's exactly. And

like, it's just, these are messy. These, I mean, that's, it's not an easy problem to solve. So I should, I should be clear about that too. But, um, yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: So I just realized whilst you were talking, I don't know how I didn't notice this before, but your t shirt is starry night by Van Gogh with 

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, exactly. It's

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I didn't realize there was a dinosaur in the middle of it. Um, so for a second I was like, wait, is that a dinosaur? Yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, it throws me off.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: anyway, um, so

So one thing I'm really curious about because I. There's a couple of factors that I guess make the real life kind of reporting of news tricky, as you said, because lots of [01:25:00] people are trying to make money on the internet through clicks or whatever, right?

So that's, that's the whole thing. Um, but I guess. The way I understand it, you mainly study how, quote unquote, normal people, so people who aren't necessarily earning money through this, um, how they are sharing information on the internet and on social media. I'm curious about one thing, uh, because I, I, I kind of, I think I shared misinformation once, um, in a kind of very specific moment, and I'm curious kind of what your general take is on this, and, uh, because it's probably. In some sense, uh, I mean, I don't use social media for, so for me, it was only this one clear case. Um, but I'm curious kind of how that matches up with the research you've done and read about. So this was, uh, so I have a weird tendency for living in cities when there are terrorist attacks in them. Uh,

Gordon Pennycook: okay. Such a coincidence.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Um,

Gordon Pennycook: be questioning

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, exactly. Um, uh, there haven't been that many in Europe, I guess, but if then there's a solid [01:26:00] chance I'm around. Uh, anyway, so one of them was. Uh, the second terrorist attacks in Paris in two thousand and fifteen, I believe. Uh, so not the one where they, not the Charlie Hebdo one, uh, with the satirists, but the second one in the, around Paris in the Bataclan nightclub, I think that was the biggest one.

Um, and so for me, this was a particular Salem one because they initially, so there's a football game, Germany versus France. I actually almost got tickets to it, but I just couldn't afford it. And they initially planned to do something in the stadium, uh, but they couldn't get in basically. So they then ended up doing a lot of stuff around it.

And so basically as you know, the news was just coming in that all these terrorist attacks were happening across Paris. And I remember, so in our like WhatsApp group. From the, from the people who are, you know, in our masters, I remember, so I saw somewhere on Twitter that someone said like, Oh no, now they're like, they've spread to the, what it was like, Champs Elysees or so like one of the like big like touristy kind of things.

Right. And I remember reading [01:27:00] that.

Gordon Pennycook: hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: And in that moment, sharing it in the Whatsapp group. Oh, like saying that I read this. But also kind of thinking this might be bullshit. But like not saying that part. And it was this really weird, like, emotional thing of like, I mean, number one, obviously trying to warn people to like, not get shot.

But at the same time, it's really weird. Like it's, it was almost like a, again, not like, I wasn't thinking about this consciously, but like almost a glee in like sharing bad news,

Gordon Pennycook: Mm

hmm. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: and like, in like saying something that horrible that happened almost, and somehow like, again, not enjoying it, but somehow there was this, in being able to bring that bad news, there was, there was something weird in that, that I feel like might have also made me.

Share this information even though I had like no idea whether it was true or not and it was false Uh, so I'm just curious like how does that line up with the reasons that people share this kind of information that they you know Kind of know that might not be true. I [01:28:00] mean, I didn't know that it wasn't true But it was it was a big question mark around the truth

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah. Well, I think that, I mean, if you think about that evolutionarily, there are contexts where rapid transmission of information is more important than being conservative about the accuracy of it. So like if you, in a, in a context like that, where it's better be safe than the, sorry, you know, if there's an ongoing kind of like, uh, threat to safety, you know, you don't like, it's, it's, I mean, the simple example is something comes outta the bush, you know, you don't need to sit there and analyze.

If it's a bear, you just get the hell outta there, you know what I mean , you can figure out later. So there's, I think there's like, what we have this kind of . Adaptive response to being like this is really important. I need to pass it on. I don't know if it's true or not.

Let's just, you know, uh, the problem is that if you, if you scale that on social media, then it is very much not adaptive. Uh, it creates confusion and like,

uh, people, [01:29:00] yeah, at the societal level. And even though it's perfectly reasonable for each individual person to be like, you know, pass this on.

You know, yeah, that, rumors and, uh, especially in ongoing events, you really want accurate information. And because we can't communicate, there's like, everyone's connected. You, if only the people who had accurate information were, you would still get lots of information. Like, you still would be able to determine, very rapidly, if it's a bear coming out.

We have a system, essentially, to like, detect the bears. But we're not using it, because everyone's just like, uh, Ah, it's a bear, and then we run away, but it's like, 90 percent of the time it's not a bear. So, um, yeah, um. It makes sense, but it's like that, that, like, initial kind of emotional response will lead you to make the, make the rapid decision, uh, and at scale, that's a problem.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. So again, like an evolutionary mechanism, not designed for the current environment in which we operate most of the time.

Gordon Pennycook: I would say it's fair, fair to say we did not evolve to, uh, uh, understand social media.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. Okay. So why, [01:30:00] why do people share stuff on social media? I mean, so for example, I think you, uh, you have this interesting finding that people say accurate is super important, but then

Gordon Pennycook: Mhm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: that's not the main criterion they consider.

Gordon Pennycook: Exactly. I mean, it's, there's, there's lots of things. Mostly, it's like The, we've only been able to answer this at a kind of vague level because

it's 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I have to interrupt briefly. Always bugged me about this and I could never find it out. I'm assuming when you say share You mean share without criticizing it in a way, right? You mean like sharing in a neutral positive way

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah. And most, and like, mostly what we're looking at, and especially in the real data studies are sharing like retweets without comments. Uh, in the studies there's never, I mean, we don't really specify in the like hypothetical case, but like 99 percent of sharing is that anyways,

or like, yeah, it's quite a, quite

a 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it's always when this point where like i've I've never heard you say that I always assumed that was the case because otherwise the whole thing doesn't make sense

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's just a small fraction of it. Um, [01:31:00] Yeah, so we can only answer that question at a kind of, like, broad level because, I mean, at a specific level, like, people share things for any number of different specific reasons.

And most of the time it's not because they think it's true, unfortunately, but they think it's, I mean, one thing that captures a lot of it is, is it important? Does it seem like something that people need to know, especially when it comes to news? That's what news means. Is it news to people? Is it something that they should know about because it's relevant to them?

Um, and like, the way that, I mean, just think about the nature of news itself is like, it's assumed that everything is true. That you get from the news. Like, it, it otherwise is not news. Just literally is like, it has to be true for it to be news. Um, and so we're sharing it as if it is true. It's like, this is something that you need to know about.

Um, but sometimes it's a rumor or it's just made up or whatever, right? And also, like, things that, you know, obviously, the things that grab attention will be more likely to be shared. It's not really the reason to be shared, but it's the, that's the first step. It has to grab your attention, and it has to seem important, [01:32:00] and then, like, is it, is true is, like, you know, somewhere down the list.

And then , even the more thoughtful people would be, like, If I share this, what will people think about it? Um, and like, There's some, um, like there's people, these models of kind of reinforcement learning that relate to kind of social media sharing, which is like, they share the things that were reinforced in the past.

People like this sort of thing, et cetera.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah. That must be a weird value function because I guess there's lots of different ways in which you can be positively or negatively reinforced on social

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: like, yeah.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. But the problem is that there is so little negative reinforcement. I mean, people think this, they think it's because there's like, there's this narrative about social media where it's like, Oh, people are trolling or like, uh, and John Haidt will talk about like self censorship because of people.

Like, piling on to others. And that's true for people that have a huge amount of following, like Jon Haidt. But the vast majority of cases, if you share something crazy on Facebook, what happens usually is nothing. Or like, maybe you get like a few, the four people who agree with you, will like it. [01:33:00]But people aren't gonna disagree.

Like, that would be rude, and like, you don't want to get into a fight on Facebook. It's kind of like, embarrassing almost. And so , for the person that's sharing it, that feels like agreement to them. You know what I mean? Like, it didn't, it doesn't certainly feel like disagreement, even though A hundred people looked at that and were like, no thanks, don't like that.

And they don't like it. You know, you don't see the not likes. You only see the likes.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I guess it's easier to click like, I mean, I mean, they also like, depends, I guess, on the platform, but like, yeah, Twitter, or whatever, or blue sky, or, 

Gordon Pennycook: Mm hmm. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I guess, or even YouTube now doesn't at least publicly have a dislike

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: right. And it's, it's much more of a, so number one, I guess it's more of a step. You have to, you have to put a lot more effort and be a lot more confrontational to disagree with something than to just let it slide or positively reinforce

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Which people don't do. You don't really do

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, that's why I guess companies do it

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: to do stuff and to

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. You don't want to like get people not to post things. That's the business model.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah, yeah. But how, um, I mean, so, [01:34:00] yeah, maybe just briefly, very briefly the accuracy aspect and, um, I guess that was the big paper with which we kind of started this whole conversation.

Gordon Pennycook: Mm hmm.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: so what are the remind, basically, how does reminding people accuracy, I mean, what is the effect?

And also, how big is it? Because I think you said it's not huge, but, uh,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, it's not huge. And it really kind of depends on the sort of context. Like. We've done, we've done field experiments, like some version, like in that Nature paper, we have a Twitter experiment where we created all these bots that are cooking bots, kind of neutral, and they followed people on Twitter.

When you follow someone on Twitter, you can DM them, if they follow you back, right? Um, and so we sent, like, in stages, like, messages to people at different times to, like, so it's, because it's an actual randomized control trial. Uh, this, like, this message about accuracy, like, hey, do you think this headline's accurate?

It's a super random message to get from a cooking bot. Most people ignored it, obviously, but it's just the idea to get, we have to get the idea of accuracy in their [01:35:00] head. And people shared less like low quality news stuff after the 24 hours after the tweet. We also, in a recent paper, we have like an ad campaign, just like we made a bunch of ads, just like reminding people about accuracy.

So they're like our estimated effect, if you like, with some assumptions is like maybe a 6 percent reduction in low quality news. Uh, if you ask people directly in experiment, you know, 10 15 percent decrease in sharing of misinformation. Um, you could do, but you can do other versions of the experiment that are much more extreme.

Like if you ask people for every, if you give them like a news headline and ask one condition, Hey, would you share this? That's the control. The other conditions asked, Hey, do you think this is true? Or do you think it's accurate? And then ask them, would you share it? If you do that, you get like a 50 percent reduction in the sharing of false content.

Um, so like it really depends on how you're implementing it and like what you're doing, but yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: There is interesting because the, um, one question in general I had was like, are [01:36:00] social media companies at all interested in your research? Like how are they reaching out to you or whatever? Because obviously, like what you're doing is, you know, again, as we just mentioned, like you're discouraging their business model basically.

Gordon Pennycook: Well, there were times that they were interested. Uh, and we had done, and we'd worked with, uh, Google for example. Uh, I was a faculty research fellow there

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: media does Google have?

Gordon Pennycook: YouTube.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, YouTube. Sorry, I can't

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, and Google Chrome, actually. Like, you could, in theory, have accuracy reminders on Google Chrome.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Oh, okay. That's

Gordon Pennycook: Uh,

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Not in a social media setting,

Gordon Pennycook: search, yeah, exactly.

So, yeah, yeah, exactly. Um, and then Facebook. There's some discussions with Facebook and that kind of stuff. Um, unfortunately, things have now gone entirely in the opposite direction. Uh, for that, Facebook recently, you know, removed third party fact checking. They are not. You know, I think they're not, they're pretty far away from implementing like simple little nudges to get people to think more about accuracy there.

So we have lost the [01:37:00] ear, I think, in that case. So yeah, I mean, we started doing that work years ago and we have not really seen any serious uptake of it. I think part of the problem is that, so if you, if you ask people about the, this, Uh, tactic of like just reminding about accuracy, like people, users are fine with it.

They think it's a good idea. They like, they care about accuracy. Um, but you know, like the powers to be, or think it's kind of like too social engineering, I guess, or like, they don't want to be nudging. Uh, it's not really a nudge, uh, cause you're not changing the architecture at all, but, um, it sort of is, sort

of isn't. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you're changing the saliency of

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, but that's, you know, but that's not different than like, Um, any change the algorithm would do , it's a social media company, like you are inherently impacting the thoughts that people are having by showing them different things. And so like, why not show them something that they would want to see that encourages accuracy and the truth.[01:38:00]

Um, but they, for them, they feel like that's putting their thumb on the scale too much. You know, so, uh, you know, I mean, so like the, you could see, uh, you could see the argument for it, but, um, they're not, that's, we're moving away from that as being a possibility even more than we had in the past. Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: I mean, I guess you don't do plans, but, uh, has, what are you doing instead then if, I mean, it's not like that was your main thing, but, uh,

Gordon Pennycook: It was just an

idea. 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: because I guess you are doing applied research, right? Like how can this, how can you prove this stuff? So like what's, what solutions are, I guess, taking large ad campaigns out.

I mean, they would be very happy to social media companies if you took ads on the platform, but,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah. Yeah. We're not going to pay. Yeah, exactly. We need to, we need to partner. It's like, it's not a good scalable way to do it. And ads are like not the best way to deliver the treatments. Like people don't pay attention to ads. Way better to have like interstitials or something else, but, um, well, I mean, I don't know, we, we, I mean, we came with the idea because we thought it was scientifically interesting and like could be used, uh, but like we aren't setting out [01:39:00] with the goal of like, okay, now what policy should we test so that they can implement it?

Because we cannot chase that dragon because we can't, there's no guarantees they'll ever listen to us or, and obviously as those happen, they, you know, and the likely scenario is that they won't anyways. Um, but we are, we are doing other things that are like, Other ways to deal with the problem.

So, one of our recent papers is, um, using AI to help debunk things. So, one of the problems is, like, so fact checking is, like, by far the most common way to deal with misinformation. Like, you, someone says something false, you tell them the thing that's true. Instead, and that does, to some extent, does work.

You know what I mean? Like, you, it's just like, it works in the sense that people will pay attention to information, and if you give them accurate information, they'll have more accurate beliefs. And that's good. But there's this idea that, like, it doesn't work as well as you want it to, basically, like, because it's hard to match the fact check with what people actually believe, often we don't know what they saw, if they saw the falsehood or not, etc.

And so we can use artificial intelligence to actually [01:40:00] give people, like, personalized, critical counter evidence that will counteract the specific false beliefs that people have. And so we tested this using conspiracy theories, which almost everybody would think that, like, if you fall down the conspiratorial rabbit hole, There's like no getting out of that and I've said this in interviews like many times people always ask like, okay Well, how do you get people who believe this crazy conspiracy to not to believe it?

I'm like, well that you can't really do that. We you know, we're in trouble But what we showed is you can't actually do it And how we did this experiment was we we gave people in the who believed conspiracies explained in their own words a conspiracy that they believed In and they gave us the reasons why they believed in it.

Of course, we didn't say conspiracy We said like we Secret plot, you know, we use air quotes around conspiracies, but we define it and people say what they think. So they might think the Moonlighting is a hoax or 9 11 is an inside job or whatever. And they give us reasons, then we have an AI, in this case it was chat gbt4 turbo.

We give them what they said and we say, [01:41:00] persuade them, give them counter evidence to persuade them not to believe this thing. And then it does like a super thorough, it debunks every single possible thing that they could come up with. It has access to the entire internet, like it's got all the counter arguments.

And it hits every single thing that people say, one by one, nope, nope, nope, nope, nope. Uh, and it has a giant effect. Like, uh, uh, the effect size, the D is like a, a standard deviation of one. Like it, in some cases, it's like, people, people's certainty about the conspiracy that they believed in coming in, decreases like by 20%.

Another way to put it is, 25 percent of the people who believed a conspiracy didn't believe it after the conversation. And not only is it a big effect, but we asked them two months later. And not only is there still an effect, it does not decay. People still didn't believe it at the same level after, uh, after that time.

So there, the whole point of this is that it is the case that giving people good evidence has an impact on their beliefs. And we just have to find ways to do that in more scalable ways and better ways. Yeah.[01:42:00]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I mean, so we're running out of time, but just a quick follow up on question on that. Why do you think something like chat GPT is good for that versus a person doing it? Is it because it's seen as neutral? Or like,

Gordon Pennycook: No, because it provides better arguments. Like if I said, if

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: you know what I mean? Like, I feel like even if someone was very, very had all the arguments, they'd be like, Oh, well, that person's just,

Gordon Pennycook: maybe, maybe, but there was someone, someone did a replication of our study. Telling people it was a human, and it doesn't really matter. The problem there is that it's really implausible that it's a human. Because no one can do that. Like, it's like, you, and especially at the speed of like, you would have to memorize so many facts that are so insocratic, everyone has their own like, even somebody who believes 9 11 is an inside job, like one example is the person cited as evidence, Bush's reaction to it.

It's like, the way he reacted, he should have reacted in a more Emotional kind of drastic way if he didn't know about it, [01:43:00] and then like what the AI describes like well, like maybe but like He didn't want people to panic That's the kind of like standard way that people would do that sort of thing that gives a counterargument I mean, maybe you could come up with that but like I would have never thought about that as something to research or like the the like temperatures that steel melts Uh, and like all that carrying capacity of all this stuff.

Like, you really need really specific evidence and it's really good at that. Another version, we also did a version of the experiment where we, we told it, we did all these different conditions. We said, okay, like, we told people explicitly the AI is going to try to persuade you not to believe it. Or we said, we told the AI, um, only use facts but don't be persuasive.

Uh, we told people that like, um, try to debate the AI, try to beat it in the argument, all these different things. None of those things matter. The only thing that decreased the effect is if we told the AI don't provide counter evidence but be persuasive. If you remove the counter evidence, the AI is not effective at all.

So it's not that people are just deferring to it, they need, it needs to provide good arguments.[01:44:00]

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: That's very hopeful. 

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, 

right, so there's, 

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: information works.

Gordon Pennycook: it works, I mean it has to, I mean in a certain sense, it has to be true. I mean that's what, the basis of our education, our judicial system, all these things, that evidence does matter, it's just that it doesn't, we, it doesn't matter as much as we want it to.

Uh, but it doesn't not matter as much as we think it does.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: what I mean? And so there's, there's somewhere in between there that we can be. It's just a matter of getting people, uh, the good, good evidence and getting them out of their information echo chamber, uh, like the narratives that they're getting that are, are misleading and not containing the right information.

If we can break them out of that and give them the, the right stuff, then people will be more reasonable.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: cool. Um, yeah, if you don't mind, I'll go to the recurring questions now.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, that's it. I think that was a logical end to the, the

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: it actually made sense. Yeah. Um, so yeah. At the end of each of my interviews, I ask my guests the same three questions. The first is what's a book or paper you [01:45:00]think more people should read? Old, new, famous, unknown. I don't really care.

Uh, just, uh, some recommendation from you.

Gordon Pennycook: I think that more people should read Robots Rebellion by Keith Stanovich. Uh, it's a, it's a book that is not, I don't know how much copies that he sold or whatever. It is a little bit academic, I would have to admit, and there's like some dense terminology in it. Um, what, what Keith argues in the book is essentially like, The thing that makes humans unique is our capacity to essentially question our instincts.

Uh, and not just do the automatic thing that comes to mind, and engage in, you know, deliberation essentially, analytic thinking to, to And like, so the robot's rebellion is like, uh, he takes a meme eyed view of evolution. We're like, oh, sorry, mean, gene, I was, I'm, uh, mixing things, but actually it's relevant for that, uh, gene ID, so like, you, you know, uh, the, your genes don't care about you, they, you're just [01:46:00] the, uh, machine that can pass your genes on to the next generation, but like, because of the way that we evolved, we evolved this capacity to do things that are contrary to what our genes would want us to do, um, and like that would be, you know, like it could be altruistic actions or whatever.

And so that's the robots rebelling. We're rebelling against the robots inside of us, which are the genes. Um, and so I think, so it's really changed the way that I think about things, and I think it's something that people should, uh, think more about and be more aware of.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay? Uh, second question is something you wish you'd learned sooner. This can be from your private life, uh, from your work life, whatever you want. Uh, just something where you think, God damn it, it would have been nice if I learned, if I learned that a little bit sooner.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, it's interesting. I actually, I touched on this a little bit earlier. Um, this What I didn't appreciate, I had a, I mean, I had a naive view of academics coming in. This is, this is for, warning, this is for an academic audience, this, this next part that [01:47:00] I'm going to say. Um, I thought if the work was good, uh, and, uh, interesting and like people cited it and stuff like that, it didn't really matter where it was published or like whether it was all fits within this easy narrative or it's a part of a brand or whatever.

Um, and I underappreciated the like, How little, um, care people who make decisions about hiring actually put into that kind of thing. And a lot of it is prototypicality and these markers of prestige and all that kind of stuff that aren't relevant. Um, so I would, uh, I don't know exactly what the, I don't know that I want to encourage people to like be more careerists in the way that they think about things.

But maybe be less naive about it, uh, would be good. Um, and to like think about. Who, uh, is being hired in the jobs that you want, and what it looks like for them, and what it looks like for you, and how to bridge that gap, maybe, would be one way, tangible advice.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah,

Gordon Pennycook: I don't know, but still, it's science, if you're not having fun with it, then it's not going to [01:48:00] matter anyway, so, we have to carve out what I'm not sure that if I went back, I would change the way I did things anyways, but, it's just Yeah.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, yeah, I know what you mean. Yeah, yeah. Um, final question is any, maybe this is it, but, uh, any advice for PhD students or postdocs or People kind of on that border maybe. Um, anything you'd like to give? I don't know whether I still count as it now, but, uh, anything you'd like to give us on the way?

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, that's, I mean, it's a good question. Uh You still have to, I mean, my advice for postdocs is really enjoy yourself because that's, that's the best. The hard part about the postdoc obviously is you don't know what comes next. And that is difficult and that's something I struggle with, uh, like everybody does.

But, uh, it really is amazing. Like to be, I mean, grad school also is amazing. Like you, you get to just do the research. And then what I thought was going to happen when I got the job as a professor was like, now I can relax. And I, like, I don't have to worry about the career anymore. I can just, you [01:49:00]know, work.

But now I have to worry about the careers of all my trainees. You know what I mean? And it's not as much as I worry about for myself. But, like, collectively, it's like at least as much. So you never have to stop worrying about that. So, unfortunately, that's, that is a, uh, a kind of concern as you go through.

And, but the freedom that you have as a grad student and postdoc is just spectacular. And, like, I love, I wish I could go back to, like, the time where everything was open and I was just searching out ideas and all that kind of stuff. Uh, yeah, I think back very fondly on those days. Um, now I'm plugged into, I have like, uh, Yeah, I have just lots of responsibilities.

Like, I don't get to be as, as ephemeral about it as I used to be.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Yeah, I guess it's a weird system where you, you know, you make it to the next step and then you just add other people's worries on top of your own.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah. But I can't, I don't want to complain. I, I, you know, have a, I have a good paying job, and I have job security, and everything's great. So I'm, it's not as great, but, um, you know, yeah. That's one part I miss about it.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay. Yeah. I mean, anyway, the, the, the emphasis was enjoying [01:50:00] yourself as a postdoc,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: as a,

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly.

Benjamin James Kuper-Smith: Okay, great. Um, well, thank you very much. I think initially when I invited you, I think I said, I want to talk specifically about the cognition of misinformation. And we kind of didn't, but thank you that that was my, my structuring.

But, uh, yeah, thank you very much.

Gordon Pennycook: Yeah, my pleasure.