Episode Details

Dr. Gordon Pennycook studies why people share misinformation. His research has used many techniques to understand people’s ability to judge the accuracy of information, their willingness to share that information, and what we can do to encourage people to only spread true information.

Some of the things that come up in this episode:

• There’s lots of coronavirus misinformation out there
• Seeing fake news repeatedly makes it feel more true (Pennycook, Cannon, & Rand, 2018)
• Believing fake news is more about not paying attention than partisanship (Pennycook & Rand, 2019)
• Encouraging people to think about accuracy reduces sharing of false and misleading news (Pennycook et al., preprint)
• Using Twitter bots to get people to think about accuracy
• Interventions to stop the spread of COVID-19 misinformation (Pennycook et al., in press)
• The problem with biased thinking or “motivated reasoning” (Tappin, Pennycook, & Rand, 2020; preprint) 

For a transcript of this show, visit the episode's webpage: http://opinionsciencepodcast.com/episode/fake-news-with-gordon-pennycook/

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