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Ontological confusion reconsidered: Introducing the new Ontological Confusion Scale
Applied Cognitive Psychology. 2025. Vol. 39. No. 6. Article e70150.
Ontological confusion refers to a cognitive error involving the misclassification of entities across distinct ontological domains—physical, biological, mental, and moral. While previous research links it to paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs, existing measures—most notably the Core Knowledge Confusions (CKC) scale—suffer from conceptual ambiguity and cultural limitations. This paper introduces the Ontological Confusion Scale (OCS), designed to address these issues by evaluating seven types of ontological misclassification. Across two studies (N = 354 and N = 550), OCS demonstrates a robust unidimensional structure, high internal consistency, and strong convergent and discriminant validity. The scale predicts a range of unfounded beliefs, while outperforming CKC and belief in a just world in explaining unique variance. These findings support a broader view of ontological confusion as a general cognitive tendency underlying intuitive but erroneous reasoning across domains. OCS provides a reliable, culturally adaptable tool for research on belief formation and epistemic vulnerability.
Сорокин П. А., Bochaver A. A., Психология и право 2026 Т. 16 № 2 С. 118–131
Context and relevance. Information security for children and adolescents is currently a key subject of interdisciplinary research and practice. Data from Russian and international studies indicate a high prevalence of threats to the information security of minors, the main ones being cyberbullying, personal data theft, online pedophilia, involvement in destructive subcultures and movements, manipulation of minors ...
Added: July 7, 2026
Dvoeglazova M., Visual Cognition 2026 P. 1–16
Rectangularity can be an a priori constraint for the visual system to recover a 3D shape from a 2D image. Two psychophysical experiments (n = 16 each) were conducted to test whether observers are biased to perceive trihedral corners as rectangular and whether this bias is perceptual rather than a response bias. The results of ...
Added: July 6, 2026
Grebnev L., Вопросы философии 2025 № 6 С. 105–116
The relevance of the topic is related to the fact that after the complete abandonment of real values in the 1970s of the main means of international settlements - the US dollar – there is a growing feeling that money increasingly represents an illusory reality. The article begins with an analysis of the illusions associated ...
Added: July 6, 2026
М.: Институт консультативной психологии и консалтинга (ФПК-Институт), 2024.
The sixth volume of this year book on client-centered psychotherapy and person-centered approach, published by PCA Russia and the institute of counselling psychology and consulting (FPC institute) gathers the translations of Carl Rogers’ articles and his followers from Russia. They observe the peculiarities of client-centered psychotherapy and person-centered approach. The key components of Rogers’ triad ...
Added: July 6, 2026
Volkova N., Кочетков Н. В., Чикер В. А., Психологическая наука и образование 2026 Т. 31 № 3 С. 35–49
Context and relevance. Artificial intelligence is a technology with the potential to fundamentally transform all spheres of human life. Its rapid integration into everyday reality intensifies research dedicated to the psychology of using neural networks. However, the development of empirical research in the Russian scientific field is limited by the lack of validated psychodiagnostic tools that ...
Added: July 5, 2026
Хилинская О. С., Leykina A., Журнал клинического и прикладного психоанализа 2026 Т. VII № 2 С. 104–121
Questions of the interrelation of manifestations played out on the psychic stage and at the level of
the body have been the object of research in both psychiatry and psychoanalytic psychopathology
for a long time, since the time of Hippocrates. With the advent of psychoanalysis, a revolution took
place in the
fi
eld of psychosomatics, Freud brought something that would ...
Added: July 4, 2026
Imbault C., Slioussar N., Ivanenko A. et al., The Mental Lexicon 2026 P. 1–23
The study examines emotional responses to words representing a wide range of psychological valence and focuses on gender-related differences. We aimed to find out whether men and women differ in their emotional responses, and whether they can take the perspective of another gender. We used the slider paradigm (Warriner et al., 2017): participants saw a humanoid ...
Added: July 2, 2026
Khestanov R., Логос 2026 Т. 36 № 3 С. 1–19
The article proposes an affective theory of social order, taking as its starting point the phenomenon of "Spanish shame" (ispanski styd) – the vicarious embarrassment experienced by a bystander witnessing another person's social failure. Tracing three competing etymological accounts of the expression, the author argues that the uncertainty of its origin is not a defect ...
Added: July 1, 2026
Shilmanskaya A., Leontiev D., Культурно-историческая психология 2026 Т. 22 № 2 С. 86–97
Context and relevance. The issue of personality changes has become a significant trend in personality research over the past decade. Traditional approaches to assessing the effectiveness of psychotherapeutic work are based on comparing measurement results before and after intervention. Objective. To test the visual “Trajectory” method for assessing the perceived trajectory of individual development and to verify its ...
Added: July 1, 2026
Васильчук М. С., Шаньков Ф. М., Chumakova M. et al., Psychology. Journal of the Higher School of Economics 2021 Vol. 18 No. 2 P. 247–258
The 2019 Coronavirus disease outbreak leads to negative psychological outcomes not only for healthcare workers and patients, but also for the general public. S. Hobfoll’s Conservation of Resources theory is one of the most applicable models for conceptualizing and evaluating natural and social catastrophes and their impact. A web-based screening has been conducted at the ...
Added: June 30, 2026
Luzhnova K., Психологические исследования: электронный научный журнал 2025 Vol. 19 No. 107 P. 1–18
This systematic review aims to synthesize and analyze current research on the characteristics of category learning in children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) within the framework of the COVIS model, which posits competition between explicit (verbal) and implicit (nonverbal) categorization systems. The review includes 40 empirical studies published between 1981 and 2025, selected according to ...
Added: June 30, 2026
М.: ИСАА МГУ имени М.В. Ломоносова, 2023.
Издание представляет собой сборник материалов I Международной научно-образовательной конференция «Пейсиковские чтения: проблемы современного академического востоковедения», проведённой 21 апреля 2023 года в ИСАА МГУ имени М.В. Ломоносова. В книге представлены работы сотрудников Института и приглашённых специалистов из ряда ведущих институтов России и зарубежных стран
Сборник в электронном виде можно скачать по ссылке http://iranistika.iling-ran.ru/Sbornik/ ...
Added: June 30, 2026
Микляева А. В., Samoilov O., Социальная психология и общество 2024 Т. 15 № 4 С. 154–171
Objective. The analysis of social beliefs and the foundations for moral choice as predictors of the civic identity of adolescents. Background. Despite the expressed interest of researchers in the patterns of formation of civic identity in adolescence, at this stage there is no unambiguous data on the influence of social beliefs and foundations for moral ...
Added: February 4, 2026
Toribio-Florez D., Altenmüller M., Douglas K. et al., European Journal of Social Psychology 2025 Vol. 55 No. 7 P. 1252–1269
Conspiracy beliefs have been linked to perceptions of collective victimhood. We adopt an individual perspective on victimhood by investigating the relationship between conspiracy beliefs and the individual disposition to perceive and react to injustice as a victim (i.e., victim justice sensitivity; VJS). Data from two German samples (Ns = 370,373) indicated a positive association between ...
Added: June 23, 2025
Maksimenko A., Загладина А. Р., Дейнека О. С., Психология и право 2025 Т. 15 № 3 С. 224–239
Context and relevance. In the context of the persistent spread of corrupt practices, which pose a threat both to the functioning of state institutions and to public trust, there is an increasing need to analyze not only institutional, legal, and economic, but also psychological factors that contribute to their reproduction. In recent years, growing attention in ...
Added: October 2, 2024
Gallyamova A., Komyaginskaya E., Grigoryev D., Personality and Individual Differences 2024 Vol. 230 Article 112780
This meta-analysis examines the relationship between paranormal beliefs and Core Knowledge Confusions (CKC), a concept introduced by Lindeman and Aarnio (2007) to explore the link between ontological errors and belief in the paranormal. The CKC, which uses metaphor classification to assess ontological confusion, suggests that cognitive processes organize information into ontologies, and our interpretation of ...
Added: June 24, 2024
Grigoryev D., Gallyamova A., The Spanish Journal of Psychology 2023 Vol. 26 P. 1–14
Even though wide access to any warranted information in the modern age, the problem of unfounded belief is still relevant, since these beliefs often lead to negative consequences (e.g., vaccination refusal, homeopathic treatment, etc.). The aim of this study was testing the relationship of social worldviews with paranormal beliefs and conspiracy beliefs. We assumed dimensionality ...
Added: April 18, 2023
Vereshchagina N., Вестник Пермского национального исследовательского политехнического университета. Культура, история, философия, право 2018 № 1 С. 11–18
The article covers the methods of making extraterrestrial images. The image of an alien was formed in the XIX century which is proved by the evolution of Sci-Fi stories, references to the contacts with the forms of alien life in media and the first scientific projects of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (Johann C.F. Gauss, Joseph ...
Added: September 21, 2022
Kiral Ucar G., Donat M., Bartholomaeus J. et al., Current Psychology 2022 Vol. 41 P. 8400–8409
The purpose of this study was to understand the complex relationships between belief in a just world (BJW), perceived control, perceived risk to self and others, and hopelessness among a globally diverse sample during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic. The just-world hypothesis suggests that people need to believe in a just world in ...
Added: April 29, 2022
Nartova-Bochaver S. K., Donat M., Rüprich C., Frontiers in Psychology 2019 Vol. 10 P. 1739-1–1739-12
In a cross-sectional study with N = 627 individuals (Mage = 22.8, SDage = 7.3, 147 males, 480 females, 106 non-religious, 456 religious), we investigated personal belief in a just world (BJW) as a resource for undergraduates’ subjective well-being and expected a positive relation between both constructs due to recent studies. We not only aimed at replicating but also extending ...
Added: July 12, 2019
Nartova-Bochaver S. K., Вестник Омского университета. Серия: Психология 2018 № 4 С. 35–42
The relationship between the friendliness of the home environment and the belief in a just world was studied. The sample consisted of 404 respondents (mean age 20.3 years; 91 males). Multi-scale questionnaires were used: Functionality of the home environment, Relevance of the home environment, Home attachment, Belief in a just world. It is shown that, ...
Added: December 28, 2018
Nevryuev A. N., Gulevich O., Некрасова Е. А., Психологический журнал 2018 Т. 39 № 4 С. 17–26
Исследуются психологические факторы, которые предсказывают отношение к различным формам участия России в гражданской войне в Сирии. Жители России (N = 595) заполняли опросники для измерения веры в справедливый мир, национализма, патриотизма, общей социальной установки по отношению к войне и отношения к различным способам участия
России в Сирийском конфликте. Результаты исследования показали, что вера в справедливый
мир предсказывала ...
Added: December 13, 2018
Адамян А. А., Nartova-Bochaver S. K., Шмитт М., Психологический журнал 2018 Т. 32 № 4 С. 105–116
The German Justice Sensitivity Inventory was validated in a Russian sample (N = 1002, Mage = 22.3, SD = 6.3; 769 female). Justice sensitivity is a trait describing the extent to which a person is tolerant or sensitive to cases of injustice in everyday life and, as a result, is ready to act in order ...
Added: December 15, 2017
Nartova-Bochaver Sofya, Donat M., Astanina N. et al., Social justice research 2018 Vol. 31 No. 1 P. 61–84
In a questionnaire study Russian versions of the General and Personal Belief in a Just World (BJW) Scales were validated. Results from exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis showed that the Personal BJW Scale could be empirically differentiated from the General BJW Scale; however, both scales correlated positively. Good internal consistencies of both scales were demonstrated. ...
Added: December 15, 2017