Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Studies on epistemically suspect beliefs (ESB) have suggested that individual’s analytic cognition suppresses un-warranted beliefs, however, our previous studies also showed that an inhibitory effect of analytic cognition was higher amongWesterners than Easterners. Rather, intuitive cognition was a common predictor of beliefs between two cultures. Among sev-eral cultural differences in cognitive style, we suspect that tendency towards dialectic thinking, i.e., tolerance for contradictionmay contribute cultural differences on ESB. The present study aimed to explore this possibility and investigated the associationbetween beliefs and other cognitive measures including individual’s cognitive abilities, thinking dispositions, personality traitsand propensity towards dialectic thinking. The results showed that the ESB resulted from our intuitive cognition for the mostpart, and that the effect of culture diminished whilst controlling individual’s tendency towards dialectic thinking and style ofcausal cognition. The cultural difference in a relationship between beliefs and cognitive style was discussed.