Gordon Pennycook
Gordon Pennycook is a psychologist and the first author of the 2021 paper in Nature titled 'Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online'. The paper reports four survey experiments and a field experiment on whether attention to accuracy changes what people share.
Who they are
Pennycook wrote the paper with Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Mosleh, Antonio Arechar, Dean Eckles and David Rand. This page rests on that one paper. His affiliation and his wider publications have not been checked against a source here, and no claim is made about them.
Key papers
Key ideas
What the 2021 paper proposed
The paper proposes that people often share misinformation because their attention is on factors other than accuracy, and not because they have stopped valuing accuracy. Most participants said it mattered to share only accurate news. The authors suggest that a subtle attention-based nudge can improve the quality of what people share.
The idea is catalogued on this site as Accuracy Inattention.
Sources
- Pennycook, G., Epstein, Z., Mosleh, M., Arechar, A. A., Eckles, D., & Rand, D. G. (2021). 'Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online.' Nature, 592(7855), 590-595. doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03344-2