Abstract
One of the essential components of science literacy is the ability to think and evaluate“critically” scientific claim and evidence. To think critically requires deliberativeand controlled cognitive process which needs much cognitive efforts people often relyon heuristic (sometimes biased) processing, so that previous investigations showed that people were susceptible to pseudoscientific claims such as ESP and homeopathy. Previous research also showed that “sheep” (those who believed in the paranormal) tended to make faulty logical or probabilistic judgments than “goat” (those who didn’t believe in it), however, general cognitive ability was not associated with the belief. Present article reviewed investigations on differences between sheep and goat in terms of their cognitive ability, cognitive biases, thinking skills and dispositions including critical thinking, and on the instructional effects of critical thinking training on the belief. Finally, the paper proposes possible directions of futureresearch, including: the need to build a process model of belief acquisition and persistence, to address the issue of domain-generality vs. domain-specificity, and to develop prescriptive methods to prevent contagion from faulty assertions.
