Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Science denial is a pressing social problem, contributing toinactivity in the face of climate change, or to a resurgencein outbreaks of preventable diseases. Cognitive factors are asignificant driver of science denial, in addition to social fac-tors such as political ideology. Biases pertaining to judgmentsof contingency (i.e., inferring causal relationships where noneexist) have been associated with misbeliefs, such as belief inthe paranormal and conspiracy theories. Here, we examinewhether contingency biases likewise predict science denial.We show that (a) various tasks used to study relevant biases doin fact load on a single latent ‘contingency illusion’ factor; (b)this contingency illusion bias is associated with increased sci-ence denial; (c) the contingency illusion bias mediates the re-lationship between intuitive (vs. analytic) cognitive style andscience denial; and (d) this holds even when accounting forpolitical ideology.