Gord Pennycook is a Himan Brown Faculty Fellow and Associate Professor in Psychology at Cornell University.
He is also a field member of the Communications Department at Cornell University and adjunct faculty at the Hill/Levene Schools of Business at the University of Regina. He completed PhD in Cognitive Psychology at the University of Waterloo in 2016 and held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University. His expertise is on human reasoning and decision-making - or, more colloquially, his interest is in the science of human stupidity.
His research has spanned numerous topics, including understanding the nature of various beliefs (religious, health, science, conspiratorial, etc.), as well as morality, creativity, fake news and misinformation, political ideology, and social media. Gord has published over 100 peer-reviewed articles, including in journals such as Nature, Science, Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Nature Human Behavior, Trends in Cognitive Science, and Psychological Science. He has received several awards, such as the Governor General’s Gold Medal, Poynter Institute’s International Fact-Checking Network “Researcher of the Year”, Vincent Di Lollo Early Career Achievement Award from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour, and Cognitive Science, the Psychonomic Society’s Early Career Award, and the Association for Psychological Sciences “Rising Star” award. He was elected to the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists in 2020.
