Counterintuitive Pseudoscience Propagates by Exploiting the Mind's Communication Evaluation Mechanisms

Believers in pseudoscience present lower evidential criteria

Previous studies have proposed that low evidential criteria or proneness to jump to conclusions influences the formation of paranormal beliefs. We investigated whether the low evidential criteria hypothesis for paranormal beliefs extends to a conceptually distinct type of unwarranted beliefs: those related to pseudoscience. We presented individuals varying in their endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs with two hypothesis testing tasks. In the beads task, the participants were asked to decide from which of two jars containing different proportions of colored beads they were collecting samples. In the mouse trap task, they were asked to guess which rule determined whether a participant-controlled mouse obtained a piece of cheese or was trapped. In both cases, the volunteers were free to decide when to stop collecting evidence before completing the tasks. Our results indicate that, compared to skeptics, individuals presenting stronger endorsement of pseudoscientific beliefs tend to require less evidence before coming to a conclusion in hypothesis testing situations.