Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

A field study examined how strongly the three categories of epistemically unwarranted beliefs: pseudoscience, conspiracist, and paranormal beliefs, can be predicted by cognitive ability in young participants from several European countries. Each type of beliefs was significantly and strongly correlated with the remaining two types of beliefs, but only weakly related with cognitive ability, suggesting a minor role of reasoning and problem solving processes for forming and holding unwarranted beliefs. However, a role of cognitive ability for rejecting unwarranted beliefs was stronger in males than in females.