Individual differences in epistemically suspect beliefs: the role of analytic thinking and susceptibility to cognitive biases

Abstract

The endorsement of epistemically suspect (i.e., paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific) beliefs is widespread and has negative consequences. Therefore, it is important to understand the reasoning processes – such as lower analytic thinking and susceptibility to cognitive biases – that might lead to the adoption of such beliefs. In two studies, I constructed and tested a novel questionnaire on epistemically suspect beliefs (Study 1, N = 263), and used it to examine probabilistic reasoning biases and belief bias in syllogistic reasoning as predictors of the endorsement of those beliefs, while accounting for analytic thinking and worldview variables (Study 2, N = 397). Probabilistic reasoning biases, analytic thinking, religious faith, and political liberalism consistently predicted various epistemically suspect beliefs, whereas the effect of syllogistic belief bias was largely restricted to pseudoscientific beliefs. Further research will be needed to examine the role the biased evaluation of evidence plays in the endorsement of epistemically suspect beliefs.

Keywords:

• Epistemically suspect beliefs
• probabilistic reasoning biases
• belief bias in syllogistic reasoning
• analytic thinking
• individual differences

Acknowledgment

Study 2 presented here is based on the author’s unpublished dissertation thesis. I am indebted to Veronika Hrapková for her help with the data collection for Study 1 of the present research. I would also like to thank Vladimíra Čavojová and three additional anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on an earlier draft of this paper. The data for Study 2 are publicly available at: https://osf.io/h9zts/

Disclosure statement

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Notes

1 However, ESBs are also associated with instrumental rationality, as the endorsement of such beliefs may sometimes lead directly to actions that thwart our goals (Stanovich, 2016).

2 Two attention check questions were included in the study. One was mixed in with the gambler’s fallacy items and was constructed to resemble these tasks, but unlike the real items it did not involve a catch but required a very simple unambiguous correct response. The second one simply instructed participants to select the option “I completely agree” to check if they were paying attention.

3 Three attention check questions were included in the study. Two of them were mixed in with the heuristics and biases problems and were constructed to resemble these tasks, but unlike the real items there was no catch involved just a very simple unambiguous correct response. The third one was presented among numeracy problems and simply instructed participants to select the option “none of the above”, thereby showing they had read the item.

4 Adopting the stricter criterion of answering all three attention check questions correctly would have led to the exclusion of a further 43 participants. However, excluding these participants would not have changed any of the main results presented in the mediation models predicting the endorsement of paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific beliefs (see below).

5 The preliminary exploration suggested that the ten items excluded after the psychometric analysis presented in Study 1 had consistently low loadings on their three respective factors in this sample, therefore, only 28 items were retained for the subsequent analyses pertaining to the endorsement of ESBs.

6 Another approach for testing the role of two cognitive bias predictors in the endorsement of paranormal, conspiracy, and pseudoscientific beliefs would be to conduct parallel mediation analyses with analytic thinking as the predictor of the three types of ESB along with belief bias in syllogistic reasoning and probabilistic reasoning biases as mediators of this relationship. These analyses are not included in the main manuscript, as the use of mediation analyses might give the readers a false impression about the causality of the associations presented here (mediation models could indicate causal relationships between the predictor, mediator, and outcome variables that cannot be established given the present cross-sectional design). However, for interested readers, the mediation analyses are included in Section G of the Supplementary Material. It is important to note that the results of the supplementary analyses are qualitatively no different from those presented below.

7 The author would like to thank Shira Elqayam for this point.

Additional information

Funding

This study was supported by the scientific grant agency of the Ministry of Education, Science, Research and Sport of the Slovak Republic as part of VEGA 2/0053/21: “Examining unfounded beliefs about controversial social issues”.