Pete Yaksick, a Johns Hopkins and Columbia trained developmental psychologist, recently co-published a cognitive science article as a member of a five-person Ivy League research team based at Columbia University.
The article is titled “How does discourse among like-minded individuals affect their thinking about a complex issue?” It was published in December 2018 in the peer-reviewed scholarly British Journal “Thinking and Reasoning.”
The primary research aim investigates the effect of dyadic-dialogue interaction on reasoning, meta-cognition, attitudinal polarization and confirmation bias. The death penalty was used as the divergent discussion point. Like-minded and opposite-minded subjects were utilized for the research design, which included pre and post-essays, along with extensive coding mechanisms.
Yaksick gives special thanks to the United Neighborhood Centers of NEPA for providing research sample participants from both the South Side and West Side Scranton Active older Adult Community Centers,
Yaksick holds advanced psychology degrees from Johns Hopkins and Columbia and has been accepted to the University of Pennsylvania to study mental health counseling.
During the 1990s, he was a crime and investigative reporter for WBRE-TV’s “I Team,” along with several other NBC and CBS television affiliates.
Currently, he is an assistant professor of criminology and psychology at the Tom Ridge College of Intelligence Studies & Applied Sciences at Mercyhurst University in Erie.
He maintains residences in Old Forge and at Mountain Lake in Bear Creek Township.
