2020 CSBBCS Vincent Di Lollo Early-Career Award Winner: Dr. Gordon Pennycook

Dr. Gordon Pennycook did his undergraduate degree at the University of Saskatchewan working with Dr. Valerie Thompson and his graduate studies at the University of Waterloo under the co-supervision of Dr. Jonathan Fugelsang and Dr. Derek Koehler. He completed his PhD in 2016 and went on to a 2-year Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship at Yale University with Dr. David Rand. Gordon returned to Saskatchewan in 2018 to begin a faculty appointment at the Hill/Levene Schools of Business and in the Department of Psychology at the University of Regina.

Gordon’s CV would be impressive for a full tenured professor let alone a researcher in the early stages of their career. He has already amassed 60 peer reviewed journal publications, many of which appear in the top journals such as PNAS, Science, and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. Gordon has also recently edited a book, The New Reflectionism in Cognitive Psychology: Why Reason Matters (Hove, UK: Psychology Press), and authored five book chapters in the past four years. Recent invited talks at the University of Stockholm, and Fordham, Yale, Harvard, and Brown Universities demonstrate his growing international reputation. Gordon’s research is supported by recent grants from SSHRC, the Miami Foundation, and the Templeton Foundation.

As his PhD co-advisor Jonathan Fugelsang notes, Gordon has the ability to develop clever and novel paradigms that test and challenge existing theory in new ways. He understands the theoretical issues in Reasoning and Decision-Making in great depth. In addition, Gordon has a knack for coming up with and tackling issues that are timely and highly relevant for society at large. For example, he was one of the first researchers to investigate the psychological consequences and predictors of susceptibility to Fake News.

Dr. Fugelsang also points out that Gordon has incredible breadth and is extremely well read. Although he has a clearly defined primary program of research that examines the contributions of Intuitive (i.e., Type 1) and Analytic (i.e., Type 2) processes in higher level cognition (for example, see his model in the journal Cognitive Psychology), Gordon has also managed to apply this general framework to a wide variety of other domains such as creativity, moral judgments, religiosity, and politics. In addition, when you read his papers in these areas, it is clearly evident that he has read broadly in each and every one, and has a deep understating of the issues relating to his research.