“Humboldt reloaded” is a cross-faculty teaching program for undergraduate research experiences established in 2011 at the University of Hohenheim, Stuttgart, Germany. The overall goal is to provide students with the opportunity to experience and conduct research at a very early stage in the undergraduate curriculum. The program is named after the educational reformer Wilhelm von Humboldt, the founder of the modern German university, who advocated the unity of research and teaching and the development of critical thinking skills (the Humboldtian education ideal).

This chapter examines how critical thinking and a dual-process theory of thinking are related to endorsement of unsubstantiated knowledge claims. Rejecting unsubstantiated claims, such as psychological misconceptions and pseudoscience, is associated with being more inclined and better able to think critically. In dual-process theory terms, people who endorse more unsubstantiated claims tend to rely more on intuitive thinking and less on rational-analytic thinking. Helping people to resist making a rapid, intuitive response to unsubstantiated claims and instead to take a slower, more rational, critical thinking approach can help them reject such claims.