This study examines the extent to which masculine and feminine gender role orientations predict self-reported anomalous experiences, belief, ability and fear once relevant correlates including biological sex are controlled for. The extent to which rational versus intuitive thinking style preference mediates these relationships is also examined. Path analysis (n=332) found heightened femininity directly predicts stronger intuitive preference plus more anomalous experiences, belief and fear with, additionally, intuitive preference mediating several gender role-paranormality relationships. By comparison, heightened masculinity directly predicts both thinking styles plus lower anomalous fear. The latter relationship is also shaped by the nature of mediators with (a) more anomalous experiences and belief leading to more anomalous fear and (b) either heightened rationality else more anomalous ability leading to, conversely, less anomalous fear. The extent to which findings support a gender (or social) role account of adult paranormality, together with methodological limitations and ideas for future research, is discussed.
Although people typically prefer simpler explanations to complex ones, there are cases where complex explanations have strong appeal (e.g., conspiracy theories). Here we consider two aspects of complex explanations: descriptiveness (the likelihood of the individual data points) and co-explanation (the likelihood of the specific subset of data under consideration). We consider whether people prefer explanations that are high in descriptiveness vs. co-explanation. Moreover, we consider whether people who endorse conspiracy theories prefer explanations for either quality. In a medical diagnosis task, participants make binary choices between two fictional disease variants: one higher in descriptiveness versus another higher in co-explanation. Overall, participants displayed a weak preference for descriptiveness. This preference, however, did not vary across increasing levels of descriptiveness. Moreover, such preferences were unrelated to conspiracy mentality. Thus, both explanatory virtues may play a role in the appeal of complex explanations.
People who strongly endorse conspiracy theories typically exhibit biases in domain-general reasoning. We describe an overfitting hypothesis, according to which (a) such theories overfit conspiracy-related data at the expense of wider generalisability, and (b) reasoning biases reflect, at least in part, the need to reduce the resulting dissonance between the conspiracy theory and wider data. This hypothesis implies that reasoning biases should be more closely associated with belief in implausible conspiracy theories (e.g., the moon landing was faked) than with more plausible ones (e.g., the Russian Federation orchestrated the attack on Sergei Skripal). In two pre-registered studies, we found that endorsement of implausible conspiracy theories, but not plausible ones, was associated with reduced information sampling in an information-foraging task and with less reflective reasoning. Thus, the relationship between belief in conspiracy theories and reasoning is not homogeneous, and reasoning is not linked specifically to the “conspiracy” aspect of conspiracy theories. Instead, it may reflect an adaptive response to the tension between implausible theories and other beliefs and data.
People sometimes fail to learn the correct structure of the world, which can lead to outlandish, even conspiratorial, beliefs. Little research, however, has considered how these beliefs are learnt. In associative learning, blocking occurs when people learn less about a novel cue in the presence of another causally predictive cue. Here, blocking was demonstrated in a conspiratorial context. In the task, participants were told of a foreign politician and of a possible conspiracy: this politician has allegedly been poisoned at a given location. Participants then learned about a set of location-illness pairings, with the conspiracy-congruent location paired with somewhere novel to establish if learning about this second location was blocked. Learning about this novel location was blocked by the conspiratorial description and, on aggregate, participants endorsed this conspiracy theory. There was, however, no evidence that conspiracy theorists were more likely to demonstrate blocking in general.
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