Critical abilities, graduate education (Biology vs. English), and belief in unsubstantiated phenomena.

Abstract
Graduate students in Biology and English were asked to read one of three abstracts that made a particular claim. For example, one of the abstracts concerned decreases in the incidence of dental caries in a population that had fluoride in the water. The abstracts differed in their apparent scientific relevance, but an important feature of all of them was that they did not contain crucial, comparative, or control group type information. Our measure of critical abilities assessed how readily the responders recognized that crucial information was missing. Although Biology students in general required fewer cues, they did not perform significantly differently from the English students on the less scientific texts. We found a statistically significant relationship between performance on the critical abilities measure and strength of belief in paranormal phenomena. We suggest that part of the reason why otherwise well-educated people endorse belief in unsubstantiated phenomena is a result of their critical ability skills being relatively domain specific.

This publication has 5 references indexed in Scilit: