The present study examined how argument type (science based vs. personal case based), belief consistency (belief consistent vs. inconsistent) and reading goals (read to evaluate vs. read to learn) influence comprehension and trustworthiness evaluations for claim-conflicting multiple texts. Undergraduates read four conflicting texts about the…

Information can change: science advances, newspapers retract claims, and reccomendations shift. Successfully navigating the world requires updating and changing beliefs, a process that is sensitive to a person's motivation to change their beliefs as well as the credibility of the source providing the new information. Here, we report three studies…

Are the many crises of higher education real, or are they in the eye of the beholder? They are evidently something of both: The crises to which we are characteristically alerted are manifestations in the real of the world and indicate much about our scholars' perceptions and even their values. To say this, however, invites the question: can we…

Previous research has shown that motivation, epistemic beliefs, and perceived social support each have an effect on the way students engage in their learning and can promote a deep approach. The first aim of this study was to measure and compare these effects. Some authors have argued that epistemic beliefs and perceived social support do not have…

This study examined the relationship between pre-service teachers' epistemological views and their assessment conceptions, as well as how epistemological beliefs and their components contribute to the variation in their assessment conceptions. Utilizing a quantitative descriptive correlational research design, data were collected from 197…

How do people come to opposite causal judgments about societal problems, such as whether a public health policy reduced COVID-19 cases? The current research tests an understudied cognitive mechanism in which people may agree about what "actually" happened (e.g., that a public health policy was implemented and COVID-19 cases declined),…

Causal reasoning is a fundamental cognitive ability that enables individuals to learn about the complex interactions in the world around them. However, the mechanisms that underpin causal reasoning are not well understood. For example, it remains unresolved whether children's causal inferences are best explained by Bayesian inference or…

Past research suggests that an uncritical or 'lazy' style of evaluating evidence may play a role in the development and maintenance of implausible beliefs. We examine this possibility by using a quasi-experimental design to compare how low- and high-quality evidence is evaluated by those who do and do not endorse implausible claims. Seven studies…

Controversial scientific issues, or socioscientific issues (SSIs), demand the consideration of more than scientific content when constructing decisions. The Justification for Knowing framework (JFK) was developed to categorize the information sources drawn upon when making SSI decisions within the academic domain of natural sciences. These…

Often, the evidence we observe is consistent with more than one explanation. How do learners discriminate among candidate causes? The current studies examine whether counterfactuals help 5-year olds (N = 120) select between competing hypotheses and compares the effectiveness of these prompts to a related scaffold. In Experiment 1, counterfactuals…

Summary We explored (i) whether narratives can influence viewers' evaluations toward alcohol through evaluative learning and (ii) compared predictions from dual-process and single-process models of evaluative learning. In study 1, participants had to read vignettes, while they were exposed to TV show excerpts in study 2. Both studies (n[subscript…

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of religious education on Turkish children's "reality status" judgements, reasoning processes and "intercessory beliefs for problem solving." The participants consist of 51 children, 27 of whom are enrolled in a public kindergarten that provides secular education and 24 in…

Judgments of learning (JOLs) play a fundamental role in helping learners regulate their study strategies but are susceptible to various kinds of illusions and biases. These can potentially impair learning efficiency, and hence understanding the mechanisms underlying the formation of JOLs is important. Many studies have suggested that both…

Prior research on epistemic beliefs, that is, individuals' views about knowledge and knowing, has mainly focused either on individuals' professed beliefs (as reported in questionnaires) or on their enacted beliefs (as indicated during task processing). However, little is known about the relation between professed and enacted epistemic beliefs. The…

Research on belief in conspiracy theories identified many predictors but often failed to investigate them together. In the present study, we tested how the most important predictors of beliefs in conspiracy theories explain endorsing COVID-19 and non-COVID-19 conspiracy theories and conspiracy mentality. Apart from these three measures of…