Vladimira Cavojova

Slovak Academy of Sciences | SAV · Institute of Experimental Psychology

This paper examines the predictors of belief in the efficacy of complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) and its use, including cognitive factors (scientific reasoning, health literacy, locus of control), beliefs (holistic and magical health beliefs pseudoscientific beliefs, and trust in doctors), sociodemographic factors, and cancer diagnosis....

Background The present study explored moderators of the relation between environmental concerns and pro-environmental behaviour that could help close the green gap. Methods A sample of 500 individuals (250 women) participated in the study. Apart from socio-demographic characteristics, participants answered questions about their environmental conce...

The dataset comprises responses provided by 500 individuals (250 women) recruited by an external agency to be representative of the Slovak population concerning age and gender. Participants gave written consent to participate in the study by confirming that they are over 18 and have read all the information about the study before agreeing to partic...

Unlabelled: Scientific reasoning and trust in science are two facets of science understanding. This paper examines the contribution of science understanding, over and above analytic thinking, to the endorsement of conspiracy and pseudoscientific beliefs about COVID-19 and behavioral intentions to engage in the recommended preventive behavior. We e...

The main aim of this paper was to examine overconfidence in the domain of bullshit detection and the contributing factors that explain why some people have the blind spot about their own incompetence. To verify whether people's lack of metacognitive awareness of their bullshit detection abilities is the result of self-enhancement motivation, we exp...

The present study explored moderators of the relation between environmental concerns and pro-environmental behaviour that could help to close the green gap. A sample of 500 individuals (250 women) participated in the study. Apart from socio-demographic characteristics, participants answered questions about their environmental concerns and pro-envir...

The present study explored moderators of the relation between environmental concerns and pro-environmental behaviour that could help to close the green gap. A sample of 500 individuals (250 women) participated in the study. Apart from socio-demographic characteristics, participants answered questions about their environmental concerns and pro-envir...

Adolescents, as active online searchers, have easy access to health information. Much health information they encounter online is of poor quality and even contains potentially harmful health information. The ability to identify the quality of health messages disseminated via online technologies is needed in terms of health attitudes and behaviors....

The authors of the Integrated ScienceIntegrated science:MultidisciplinarityMultidisciplinarityandInterdisciplinarityInterdisciplinarityinHealthHealth were asked how you would see the future of your field 30 years later. This chapter presents the authors’ views on this subject in 2050. The Al-Samah danceDance. In the above poem, Hushang Ebtehaj says...

When it comes to healthHealth, people often hold beliefsBelief that are either unsupported or directly opposed by scientificScientific evidence, i.e., epistemically suspect beliefsEpistemically suspect beliefs (ESBs)(ESBEpistemically suspect beliefs (ESBs)). They prefer alternatives (e.g., homeopathy, healing by crystals, magnets, or herbsHerb) ove...

Current research suggests negative emotions are associated with conspiracy mentality. However, direct research on negative emotions and conspiracy mentality is scarce. If there was a relationship between negative emotions and conspiracy mentality, then emotional intelligence, as a capacity to recognize and regulate our own emotions and emotions of...

The study investigated antecedents of attitudes towards vaccines against COVID-19 and vaccination behaviour, and sought to identify areas where interventions aimed at increasing vaccination rates would be most effective. A sample of 500 Slovaks (250 women) responded to questions concerning their socio-demographic and personality characteristics, co...

The present study investigated the relationship between outward orientation and COVID-related prosocial behavior, including adherence to containment measures, caring for others and providing support, limiting one’s social life and responsible purchasing behavior. A sample of 500 Slovaks (250 women) aged between 18 and 86 (M = 44.32, SD = 15.66) par...

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted the need to examine factors related to questionable health behavior, such as avoiding recommended preventive guidelines. The aim of this paper was to explore whether the behavior reflecting active avoiding of preventive measures against COVID-19 (curfew regulations, hygiene, facial masks, and social distancing) was...

Rationale Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories can have severe consequences; it is therefore crucial to understand this phenomenon, in its similarities with general conspiracy belief, but also in how it is context-dependent. Objective The aim of this systematic review is to provide a comprehensive overview of the available research on COVID-19 c...

The ability to distinguish bullshit from factual, but less appealing, information is becoming a crucial skill in present-day society. The aim of this paper was to extend the research conducted by Pennycook et al. (Judgment and Decision Making, 10(6), 549–563, 2015) by developing and validating the General Bullshit Receptivity Scale (GBRS), designed...

One of the appeals of conspiracy theories in times of crises is that they provide someone to blame for what has happened. Thereby, they increase distrust, negative feelings, and hostility toward implicated actors, whether those are powerful social outgroups or one’s own government representatives. Two studies reported here examine associations of C...

Background Complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is popular among the general population and patients with various diseases, but our understanding of the predictors of CAM use for the population of women with or without cancer diagnosis is still quite limited. This paper examines predictors of attitudes toward and use of CAM, including cogni...

While well-being is known to be mainly predicted by relatively stable personality traits and demographic factors, under circumstances of the current COVID-19 pandemic, the role of these predictors may be attenuated, and more situational factors may come into play. In the present study, we examined those relatively stable predictors of well-being al...

The main aim of this paper was to examine the consistency of experts (N = 71) in evaluation in high-stakes real-life decision-making, and how their consistency relates to other psychological constructs such as cognitive reflection and overconfidence. A pool of top Slovak experts was assembled, and the AHP method for eliciting policy priorities was...

Purpose: The study investigated antecedents of attitudes towards vaccines against COVID-19 and vaccination behaviour, and sought to identify areas where interventions aimed at increasing vaccination rates would be most effective. Methods: A sample of 500 Slovaks (250 women) responded to questions concerning their socio-demographic and personality c...

In this paper, we explored the scientific literacy of a general sample of the Slovak adult population and examined factors that might help or inhibit scientific reasoning, namely the content of the problems. In doing so, we also verified the assumption that when faced with real-life scientific problems, people do not necessarily apply decontextuali...

Purpose This study aims to investigate how congruence between the image of a successful entrepreneur and one’s own gender-role orientation affects entrepreneurial intentions (EI). Design/methodology/approach A total of 552 working-age adults (49.5% women) answered questions on gender-role orientation, perception of a successful entrepreneur, EI, a...

This paper focuses on the science understanding (scientific reasoning and trust in science) and analytic thinking and their role in: 1) having less conspiracy and pseudoscientific beliefs about COVID-19, and 2) behavioral intentions in line with scientific consensus (i.e. following evidence-based guidelines and vaccination intentions). We examined...

Current research on bullshit has shifted its focus from the recipient of bullshit to the producer of bullshit; this trend being reflected in the new Bullshitting frequency scale (Littrell et al., 2020) measuring persuasive and evasive bullshitting. The aim of our study was to validate the scale on the Slovak population and to examine the relationsh...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.584424.].

Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories can have severe consequences; it is therefore crucial to understand this phenomenon. We present a narrative synthesis of COVID-19 conspiracy belief research from 85 international articles, identified and appraised through a systematic review. We identify a number of significant antecedents of COVID-19 conspira...

In this paper, we present a research proposal for a dissertation thesis. The main aim is to experimentally verify the effectiveness of an intervention that increases scientific reasoning to reduce epistemically unfounded beliefs (EUB) and disin-formation. The most common EUBs are conspiracy, pseudo-scientific and paranormal beliefs. Scientific reas...

One of the appeals of conspiracy theories in times of crises, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, is that they provide a scapegoat – someone to blame for what has happened. By doing this, they increase distrust, negative feelings, and even hostility toward implicated actors, whether those are powerful social outgroups or one’s own government representat...

Confirmation bias is often used as an umbrella term for many related phenomena. Information searches, evidence interpretation, and memory recall are the three main components of the thinking process involved in hypothesis testing most relevant to investigations of confirmation bias; yet these have rarely been explored using a unified paradigm. Ther...

Societal crises and stressful events are associated with an upsurge of conspiracy beliefs that may help people to tackle feelings of lack of control. In our study (N = 783), we examined whether people with higher feelings of anxiety and lack of control early in the COVID‐19 pandemic endorse more conspiracy theories. Our results show that a higher p...

COVID-19 conspiracy theories emerged almost immediately after the beginning of the pandemic, and the number of believers does not appear to decline. Believing in these theories can negatively affect adherence to safety guidelines and vaccination intentions, potentially endangering the lives of many. Thus, one part in successfully fighting the pande...

Belief in astrology remains strong even today, and one of the explanations why some people endorse paranormal explanations is the individual differences in analytical thinking. Therefore, the main aim of this paper was to determine the effects of priming an analytical or intuitive thinking style on the credulity of participants. In two experiments...

We examined whether scientific reasoning is associated with health-related beliefs and behaviors over and above general analytic thinking ability in the general public (N = 783, aged 18–84). Health-related beliefs included: anti-vaccination attitudes, COVID-19 conspiracy beliefs, and generic health-related epistemically suspect beliefs. Scientific...

This paper presents the application of expert decision methods for the formulation and prioritization of the long-term economic, social and environmental policies in the Slovak Republic. The Partnership Agreement for the Slovak Republic (PA) is an underlying strategy for investments from the European Structural and Investment Funds (ESIF) in the pe...

We examined whether scientific reasoning predicts health-related beliefs and behaviors over and above the general analytic thinking ability in general public (N = 783, aged between 18 – 84 years). Health-related beliefs included: the anti-vaccination attitudes, conspiracy beliefs related to the COVID-19 disease, and some generic epistemically suspe...

Threatening events (hurricanes, disease outbreaks, famines) are associated with an upsurge of conspiracy beliefs that provide people with simple explanations to tackle the feelings of anxiety and lack of control. In our study (N = 783), conducted shortly after the first cases of COVID-19 were identified in our country, we examined whether people wi...

Background: While previous research has shown that trust in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) is linked with other unfounded beliefs (e.g. paranormal phenomena or pharmaceutical conspiracies) and that analytic thinking can help alter these beliefs, the role of the ability to evaluate evidence as a protective factor has not been establis...

This paper examines whether scientific‐reasoning skills predict people's susceptibility to epistemically suspect beliefs and cognitive biases. We used the recently developed Scientific‐Reasoning Scale (SRS; Drummond & Fischhoff, 2017) because it measures the ability to read and evaluate scientific evidence. Alongside the SRS, 317 participants aged...

A recent study (Pennycook et al., 2015) found that the propensity to judge randomly generated, syntactically correct (i.e., bullshit) statements as profound was associated with a variety of conceptually relevant variables (e.g., intuitive cognitive style, supernatural beliefs). Besides generalizing these findings to a different cultural setting, we...

In real debates, we often don’t think about the validity of the arguments from the strictly logical point of view and we often disagree even before we hear the particular argument. This chapter deals with confirmation bias in reasoning about controversial issues (in this case abortions) and it examines the effect of values (pro-life, pro-choice, ne...

The study explores whether people are more inclined to accept a conclusion that confirms their prior beliefs and reject one they personally object to even when both follow the same logic. Most of the prior research in this area has relied on the informal reasoning paradigm; in this study, however, we applied a formal reasoning paradigm to distingui...

Is the most defining feature of bullshit its obscuring form or content unconcerned with the truth? We modified 24 definitions in: the form (to impress); the content (to mislead); both form and content. We asked 234 Ps to evaluate statements for truthfulness, understandability and likeability. Contrary to our expectations, the results showed that pe...

Relatively little is known about actual cognitive skills and thinking dispositions of teachers, despite their possible importance. In the current paper we examined two predictions related to rational performance of teachers. First, we expected that more experienced teachers have more rational thinking dispositions, are more cognitively reflective a...

„Nič neprekvapí ľudí viac ako zdravý rozum a jasné jednanie.“ Stefan Zweig Na Slovensku je dostatok odborných publikácií, ktoré sa zaoberajú myslením. Je však málo takých, ktoré by zrozumiteľne a na základe dôkazov pomáhali aplikovať metódy vedeckého myslenia v každodennom živote. Kolektív autorov ponúka túto „príručku zdravého rozumu“ nielen š...

This study examined whether participants will show optimism about common events, yet show pessimism about rare events (regardless of their desirability), and whether there is a relationship between optimism and overconfidence, conceptualized (Shepperd et al., 2013) as unrealistic absolute optimism. 136 pedagogy students completed a questionnaire wi...

Belief bias is the tendency to be influenced by the believability of the conclusion when attempting to solve syllogistic reasoning problem. This type of problems is considered as reflection of major critical thinking skill - i.e. putting aside one's prior knowledge and reason from new premises. The paper presents results of a study with 597 future...

The aim in this paper was to explore the cognitive abilities of students of pedagogical faculty and their relationship with academic achievement and whether their cognitive abilities are related more to the traditional didactic test (reflecting learned, crystallized abilities) or to the measure of tacit knowledge (extra-class low-effort activities...

There are several available measures that can help us to distinguish between two general types of processing, usually known as intuitive and deliberative. In the current study we examined two of them, Rationality-Experiantility Inventory and Preference for Intuition/Deliberation Scale in Slovak sample of 860 working adults and students (Study 1). I...

Intuition is usually seen as fast, automatic, high processing capacity, yet only few studies focused directly on the connection with the amount of information search. In this paper we present two studies examining two different domains (financial and recruiting) and employing different manipulations (time stress and instruction). The main aim of bo...

What is rationality and what comprises rational behaviour of humans is in the centre of heated debate in judgement and decision making literature. Recently, Stanovich proposed a new tripartite model of human mind with an emphasis on “reflective mind” – our ability to reflect our goals and motives, which enables us to decide, when to act upon “intui...

A new tri-partite model of rational thinking (Stanovich, 2011) allows for assessing various aspects of rational decision making. Because of assumed multi-faceted nature of rationality, it is necessary to establish which measuring paradigms are best suited to assess it. 531 participants (31% men,), with mean age of 27.61 (SD=7.8) took part in the pr...

In this study we tried to replicate the unconscious thought advantage (UTA), which states that complex decisions are better handled by unconscious thinking. We designed an experiment in e-prime using similar material as the original study (choosing between four different apartments, each described by 12 attributes). A total of 73 participants (52 w...

How emotions influence decision making is an important question because emotions are present not only in the most important decisions in the life. The previous research concentrated rather on the role of negative emotions and that is why the goal of the paper is to counterpoint the role played by positive emotions in decision making from the positi...

Niektoré úlohy využívané pri výskume racionality možno formulovať rôznymi relatívne ekvivalentnými spôsobmi a získať pri tom odlišné výsledky. Takto získané odlišnosti poukazujú na všeobecné alebo špecifické zákonitosti fungovania mysle, ktoré môžu prispievať k vzniku určitých zaujatostí. Vo výskume bola použitá Wasonova selekčná úloha v štyroch ve...

Research concerning mindreading has dealt extensively with its (in)dependence on executive functions. However, surprisingly few studies focused on direct relationship of mindreading with intelligence, although it has been proposed that high level mindreading in older children and adults is dependent on general cognitive skills. In the study reporte...

The aim of the two studies presented here was to validate the Slovak version of the Basic Empathy Scale (BES, Jolliffe, Farrington, 2006), which reflected on conceptual changes of empathy by measuring both its affective and cognitive components. The first study (n = 429) confirmed the two correlated factor model of the Slovak adaptation of BES as c...

Although peer status has been extensively studied especially with regard to prosocial behavior, the results are mixed. Current study focuses on popularity and friendship, and their associations to social behavior (prosocial vs. antisocial) and social cognition (mindreading and empathy). 335 preadolescents (Mage = 13.3) participated in the study and...

Social understanding is usually conceptualized as consisting of understanding emotions (i.e., empathy) and understanding the other's mental states (i.e., theory of mind or mindrcading). Both these facets of social understanding are hypothesized to be related to prosocial orientation. The purpose of the presented study is, therefore, to examine whet...

Majority of studies concerning the Theory of Mind (ToM) explored development of ToM in pre-school children or in subjects with hypothesized ToM disorder (such as autism, schizophrenia, etc.). Ambition of the project VEGA No. 1/0541/09 is to focus on interactional strategies of preadolescents with family members and peers in the context of empathy a...

The present article deals with the psychological construct of curiosity and introduces the Curiosity Exploration Inventory (CEI) devised by the American authors Kashdan, Rose and Fincham (2004). The CEI originated as reaction to unsatisfactory methods measuring curiosity. The article refers to several foreign studies concerning curiosity and result...