Dragan Popadić, Univerzitet u Beogradu

Psychological studies of extended cognition reveal numerous forms of thinking errors and even irrational thinking in people, leading to wrong conclusions, examples of which can be found in various superstitions and conspiracy theories. Not only do people have wrong beliefs because they think wrongly, but anthropological research has repeatedly observed and examples from psychology illustrate that the reverse is also true – sometimes people think wrongly because they are socially conditioned to have wrong beliefs. On a more basic level, one type of error in thinking manifests itself in relation to the facts themselves, whose existence or non-existence is judged on non-rational grounds. The assumption is that the “threshold of (unreasonable) disbelief” and the “threshold of (unreasonable) credulity” – to call them in such a way – depend not only on personal characteristics but also on the characteristics of dominant ideological beliefs. The “threshold of disbelief” and the “threshold of credulity” can also be found among scientists (psychologists) in their scientific practice. Levels of confidence in the data should be determined by the agreed-upon methodology of data collection and statistical procedures, but it is shown that both now and throughout the history of psychology, the acceptance of empirical evidence is significantly influenced by the theoretical, ideological, and metaphysical commitments of scientists. Some such cases led to the crisis of replicability, which first manifested in social psychology. The examples show that even in science it is difficult to get rid of the principle “If the facts do not agree with the theory, so much the worse for the facts”. In some cases, research quality control and replicability of the experimental procedure are solutions, but in some, more complicated situations, which will also be discussed, psychology has no choice but to rely on the so-called historical method rather than the paradigm of the natural sciences.