Melissa Ferguson: podcast appearances and interviews

Melissa J. Ferguson is an American professor of psychology with a background that includes serving as a Senior Associate Dean of Social Sciences at Cornell University and becoming a faculty member at Yale University in 2020. Her research focuses on how people form and evolve their interpretations of social events and how individuals recognize and evaluate information such as fake news. Ferguson's work emphasizes that consumers of information can reduce misinformation by paying attention to the quality of the sources from which information originates. She has collaborated on studies examining social biases, including a 2018 study with Stav Atir published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. That research investigated the inclination to refer to male professionals by their last names more frequently than female professionals, a practice thought to confer greater authority and fame and thereby disadvantage women. Ferguson also led the implementation of the Cornell Center for Social Sciences in 2019, a public policy organization established in collaboration with Christopher Wildeman.