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Why did two great thinkers, Arthur Conan Doyle and Alfred Russel Wallace, believe in spiritualism and other paranormal claims? It was not because they lacked critical thinking skills but because they were not disposed to use those skills.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was a physician and a highly acclaimed writer. His famous character Sherlock Holmes was a shrewd detective with formidable powers of reasoning. Yet Conan Doyle showed dramatic lapses in his own critical thinking. He was a devoted convert to spiritualism, believing that living persons could contact the disembodied spirits of the dead through mediums. Furthermore, he believed that eight-inch-tall fairies inhabited the English countryside in Cottingley Glen. Likewise, Sir Alfred Russel Wallace had great intellectual achievements, codiscovering natural selection with Charles Darwin and publishing many innovative, well-reasoned articles. Yet, he too, believed in spiritualism and endorsed phrenology (the reading of character from bumps on the head), now considered a pseudoscience. How did two men with scientific training and great intellectual achievements come to believe such implausible claims?
It was not because they lacked the skills to think critically. Both had the ability to evaluate the quality of evidence and draw a sound conclusion (Bensley 1998). Rather, they were not motivated to use their skills to think critically about spiritualism and related paranormal claims. The problem was with their disposition to think critically-that is, the attitudes and traits that disposed them to use their critical thinking skills. To better understand their problem, I will first examine critical thinking dispositions and skills. Then, I will use this distinction to analyze the thinking of Conan Doyle and Wallace, comparing them to Charles Darwin, who did not fall prey to these false paranormal claims.
Critical Thinking Dispositions and Skills
Researchers have found that critical thinking skills can be usefully distinguished from dispositions. A critical thinking skills test like the "Tasks in Critical Thinking Test" (Tasks) measures an individual's inquiry and reasoning abilities (Educational Testing Service 1993). In contrast, a disposition measure like the "Need for Cognition Scale" (NFC) measures a person's tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful cognitive activity such as critical thinking (Cacioppo et al., 1984). Research has shown that people who have higher scores on the NFC tend to be more curious, open-minded,...