Limited not lazy: a quasi-experimental secondary analysis of evidence quality evaluations by those who hold implausible beliefs

Evidence-based scientific thinking and decision-making in everyday life

In today's knowledge economy, it is critical to make decisions based on high-quality evidence. Science-related decision-making is thought to rely on a complex interplay of reasoning skills, cognitive styles, attitudes, and motivations toward information. By investigating the relationship between individual differences and behaviors related to evidence-based decision-making, our aim was to better understand how adults engage with scientific information in everyday life. First, we used a data-driven exploratory approach to identify four latent factors in a large set of measures related to cognitive skills and epistemic attitudes. The resulting structure suggests that key factors include curiosity and positive attitudes toward science, prosociality, cognitive skills, and openmindedness to new information. Second, we investigated whether these factors predicted behavior in a naturalistic decision-making task. In the task, participants were introduced to a real science-related petition and were asked to read six online articles related to the petition, which varied in scientific quality, while deciding how to vote. We demonstrate that curiosity and positive science attitudes, cognitive flexibility, prosociality and emotional states, were related to engaging with information and discernment of evidence reliability. We further found that that social authority is a powerful cue for source credibility, even above the actual quality and relevance of the sources. Our results highlight that individual motivating factors toward information engagement, like curiosity, and social factors such as social authority are important drivers of how adults judge the credibility of everyday sources of scientific information.

Thinking false and slow: Implausible beliefs and the Cognitive Reflection Test

Why do people believe implausible claims like conspiracy theories, pseudoscience, and fake news? Past studies using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) suggest that implausible beliefs may result from an unwillingness to effortfully process information (i.e., cognitive miserliness). Our analysis (N = 664) tests this account by comparing CRT performance (total score, number and proportion of incorrect intuitive responses, and completion time) for endorsers and non-endorsers of implausible claims. Our results show that endorsers performed worse than non-endorsers on the CRT, but they took significantly longer to answer the questions and did not make proportionally more intuitive mistakes. Endorsers therefore appear to process information effortfully but nonetheless score lower on the CRT. Poorer overall CRT performance may not necessarily indicate that those who endorse implausible beliefs have a more reflexive, intuitive, or non-analytical cognitive style than non-endorsers.

Some pupils should know better (because there is better knowledge than opinion). Interim findings from an empirical study of pupils’ and teachers’ understandings of knowledge and big questions in Religious Education

In this paper, we draw on interim findings of our research project on Religious Education (RE), knowledge and big questions. We have found Miranda Fricker’s concept of epistemic injustice useful in our analysis—that is, the notion that a person can be wronged “specifically in their capacity as a knower (Fricker 2007, 1). In interviews with Key Stage 3 pupils (aged 12–14) we found that for many pupils, their capacity to know was hindered by the prioritisation of respect for opinion. Where opinion is considered something not to be questioned, this seems to be a key indicator of epistemic disadvantage while some pupils valued and could employ criticality when considering knowledge claims (including opinions). Epistemic advantage in this way exacerbates epistemic injustice, broadening a gap between the epistemic haves and have-nots. This research is part of a larger project where we attempt to answer the question: ‘Does Religious Education have a distinctive contribution to make to the development of epistemic literacy?’. We begin with our account of epistemic literacy underpinned by Young’s powerful knowledge (Young and Muller 2010) and contextualise our data with discourses about knowledge and school education. We focus largely on the emergent theme of (respect for) opinions and we argue that the prioritisation of respect in RE is (for some pupils) a barrier to knowledge. We go on to explore why this matters for individuals, society and RE.