Gordon Pennycook is the Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow and Associate Professor in the Department of Psychology at Cornell University.
He received his PhD from the University of Waterloo in 2016 and was a Banting Postdoctoral Fellow at Yale University. His expertise is on the science of human reasoning and decision-making biases – including research on analytic thinking, misinformation, beliefs (conspiratorial, religious, paranormal, etc.), metacognition, overconfidence, Artificial Intelligence, and more. He has published over 135 peer-reviewed articles, including in journals such as Nature, Science, and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. He has received early career awards from organizations such as the Association for Psychological Science, the Canadian Society for Brain Behavior and Cognitive Science, the International Social Cognition Network, and the Psychonomics Society. In 2016, he won an Ig Nobel Prize for his research on the psychology of bullshit.
He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in 2020. Finally, Gordon’s research on debunking conspiracies using AI (coauthored with Thomas Costello and David Rand) won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s Newcomb Cleveland Prize for the top paper published in Science in 2024. His cross-cultural research on understanding and combating misinformation on social media won the 2026 Behavioral Science and Policy Association’s award for top paper.
