333 | Gordon Pennycook on Unthinkingness, Conspiracies, and What to Do About Them

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll

Physics, Science

4.7 • 4.7K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2025

⏱️ 70 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Why are people wrong all the time, anyway? Is it because we human beings are too good at being irrational, using our biases and motivated reasoning to convince ourselves of something that isn't quite accurate? Or is it something different -- unmotivated reasoning, or "unthinkingness," an unwillingness to do the cognitive work that most of us are actually up to if we try? Gordon Pennycook wants to argue for the latter, and this simple shift has important consequences, including for strategies for getting people to be less susceptible to misinformation and conspiracies.

Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2025/10/27/333-gordon-pennycook-on-unthinkingness-conspiracies-and-what-to-do-about-them/

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Gordon Pennycook received his Ph.D. in psychology from the University of Waterloo. He is currently an associate professor of psychology and Dorothy and Ariz Mehta Faculty Leadership Fellow at Cornell University as well as an Adjunct Professor at University of Regina's Hill/Levene Schools of Business. He is a member of the Royal Society of Canada's College of New Scholars, Artists, and Scientists, and a 2016 winner of the IgNobel Prize for Peace.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. I don't know about you, but doesn't it bug you when other people are wrong about things? Like, I know you and I generally are correct about all of our beliefs, but out there on the internet or even in society, it seems that there's more and more people who have false beliefs about things. And they even
0:21.2	sort of nurture those false beliefs by hanging out with other people who have false beliefs.
0:26.3	What is up with that and what can we do about it? Now, of course, all of us have some false
0:32.0	beliefs. And famously, there's this idea that we have biases that nudge us towards one set of false beliefs or another.
0:40.6	Then some of us are going to say, like there's a whole group of people who have more biases than we do and we can have that argument.
0:46.0	There's motivated reasoning, right?
0:47.9	There's a reason that people either for wishful thinking purposes or for identification with some political tribe or other kind of
0:56.2	group want to have some beliefs because it's part of their identity.
1:00.9	Okay, but is that really the reason why people have these false beliefs, either susceptibility to,
1:08.5	just as our guest, Gordon Pennycook will put it today,
1:12.3	pseudo-profound bullshit, or susceptibility to misinformation or conspiracy theories.
1:18.4	And what Gordon is going to tell us is it's actually not quite about cognitive biases and motivated reasoning
1:24.9	so much as it's about what he calls unthinkingness.
1:29.1	That is to say, when you're faced with a claim, whether it's a claim you see on the
1:33.0	internet or, you know, someone's giving you a fortune cookie, you evaluate that claim.
1:37.9	And you can evaluate it either instantly like, oh, it feels right to me, right, or it feels
1:42.5	wrong or that fits in with my views, or you can evaluate it in a more careful, oh, it feels right to me, right? Or it feels wrong or that fits in with my views.
1:44.4	Or you can evaluate it in a more careful, reflective, cognitive way.
1:49.0	Like, how do I know that this claim is on the right track?
1:52.3	What are the sources?
1:53.6	What are the reasons to believe it?
1:55.7	The same thing goes true for not just a proposition about truth in the world, but a saying or an aphorism, right?
	...

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