Scientific entities like X-rays and black holes defy firsthand observation and everyday intuition, yet most people outside the scientific community still believe in their existence. Upon what kind of epistemic foundations do such beliefs rest? The present study explored this question by comparing students’ scientific beliefs to their supernatural beliefs along four dimensions of epistemic impor...

Following Anthony Downs’s classic economic analysis of democracy, it has been widely noted that most voters lack the incentive to be well-informed. Recent empirical work, however, suggests further political partisans can display selectively lazy or biased reasoning. Unfortunately, knowledge seems exacerbate, rather than mitigate, these tendencies. In this paper, I build on observations construc...

The relationships among beliefs about volunteerism, volunteering intention, volunteering behavior, and purpose in life were examined in this study. A total of 5,946 participants completed a series of scales, including the Revised Personal Functions of Volunteerism Scale, Volunteering Intention Scale, and Purpose in Life Scale. The results showed that participants whose purpose in life had diffe...

Children can recover beliefs from knowledge of an agent’s actions and desires, or desires from her actions and beliefs. However, both beliefs and desires are sometimes unknown and underdetermined by agents’ actions. Here we ask how emotional expressions might support mental-state inferences that are otherwise ambiguous given agents’ actions. We present two experiments, showing that children (me...

Games with imperfect information often feature multiple equilibria, which depend on beliefs off the equilibrium path. Standard selection criteria such as passive beliefs, symmetric beliefs or wary beliefs rest on ad hoc restrictions on beliefs. We propose a new selection criterion that imposes no restrictions on beliefs: we select the action profile that is supported in equilibrium by the large...