Grants and Contributions:

Grant or Award spanning more than one fiscal year. (2017-2018 to 2022-2023)

People form and revise their beliefs about the world based on evidence they gather (e.g., through their own observations, conversations with other people, and the news media). Sometimes, though, people hold beliefs that seem to be contrary to the evidence available to them. Scholars and policy makers have underscored the urgency of better understanding conditions that foster the growth of evidence-inconsistent beliefs (e.g., conspiracy theories about the cause of the Zika virus, denial of climate change) in a digitally-connected world. Recent research in cognitive psychology suggests that such “epistemic irrationality” (beliefs that contradict the available evidence) stems, not from a lack of intelligence, but rather from a failure to voluntarily engage analytic thinking processes (e.g., logical or statistical reasoning). The proposed research has three objectives to further our understanding of the cognitive processes underlying epistemic irrationality. First, a collection of cognitive tasks will be developed that measure the engagement and execution of various fundamental processes that serve as “building blocks” in the formation and revision of beliefs (e.g., generation of hypotheses, evaluation of the diagnostic value of individual pieces of evidence, combination of all the evidence to arrive at an overall belief assessment, updating of existing beliefs in light of new evidence). These tasks will allow assessment of whether systematic differences between people in their inclination to engage in analytic thinking are restricted to specific underlying cognitive processes or are more global in nature. Second, these tasks will then be used to test the effectiveness of a “rationality checklist” that encourages greater engagement of analytic thinking, by prompting people to evaluate and adopt alternative thinking strategies that could be brought to bear in assessing a target belief in light of the available evidence. Third, findings from completion of the first two objectives will be applied to more complex real-world beliefs and evidence-gathering processes, such as those used to evaluate the validity of a claim (e.g., that cellphone radiation is a health hazard) through an internet search for available evidence. The proposed research will contribute to emerging theories of cognition that distinguish reasoning processes that operate at the algorithmic (e.g., execution of learned rules) and reflective (e.g., epistemic regulation) levels. Findings from the proposed research could be applied to the development of more effective public communications, for example by government service organizations, that are better attuned to how people can arrive at evidence-inconsistent beliefs (e.g., that produce resistance to evidence-supported policies and programs).