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Seminar: 9.30 am – 11.00 am PST (60 minutes for the talk and up to 30 minutes for questions)
Session with PhD students: 11.30 am – 12.30 pm PST

Note: PhD Student session is for current SFU PhD students only. This is a small group discussion, active engagement and participation is encouraged.

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Speaker: Gordon Pennycook

Title: Intuition, reason, and social media

Abstract: A growing folk-psychological narrative contents that social media algorithms are so effective that they impact our very cognition. This narrative coincides with prominent claims from psychologists about the power of intuition and infirmity of reason insofar as our capacity to engage in analytic thinking is unable to overcome the (perhaps unconscious) influence of the social media algorithms. In this talk, I will present evidence that reports of the death of reason have been greatly exaggerated. Our research shows that people can and do override their intuitions and that reasoning often facilitates accurate belief formation. Furthermore, although social media may impact what is salient to us when making choices about what to share with others, this is not intractable. In fact, simple prompts that remind people to think about accuracy are sufficient to increase the quality of the news content that people share. This indicates that unreasonable behavior on social media is more a function of lazy thinking than of an inability for people to overcome social media algorithms.

Bio: Gordon Pennycook is an Assistant Professor at University of Regina's Hill/Levene Schools of Business. His research focus is on reasoning and decision-making, broadly defined, and he investigates the distinction between intuitive processes (“gut feelings”) and more deliberative (“analytic”) reasoning processes. He obtained his B.A. in Psychology in 2009 from the University of Saskatchewan and his PhD in Cognitive Psychology in 2016 at the University of Waterloo. Prior to starting at the University Regina in 2018, he held a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University. 

Learn more about Gordon Pennycook online | Twitter: @GordPennycook