The psychology of paranormal beliefs and experiences

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The psychology of paranormal beliefs and
experiences

• Lecture 2
• Dr. Christine Simmonds
• GLB 009

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What is parapsychology?
The scientific study of experiences which, if
they are as they seem to be, are in principle
outside the realm of human capabilities as
presently conceived by conventional scientists
Irwin, 1999
The survival hypothesis
Extrasensory perception (ESP)
Psychokinesis (PK)

• Telepathy
• Clairvoyance
• Precognition
• Retrocognition

• Micro PK
• Macro PK

• OBE
• NDE
• Communication
• from beyond the grave

?
(Psi)
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Levels of anomaly
Anomalous experiences a scientific explanation
cannot currently be applied
Paranormal experiences Fall outside of
scientific explanation and are associated with
the mind

cognition
Anomalous beliefs
Anomalous Experiences
perception
Anomalous sensory perceptions
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Spontaneous experiences in the general population
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Paranormal beliefsin the general population
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Types of Belief in the paranormal

• What is paranormal?
• Different types of questionnaire
• Sheep versus goats
• Open-mindedness versus dogmatism
• 4 Clusters of believer
• Traditional religious believer
• Tentative believer
• Sceptic
• New age type believer

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Theories of belief (and disbelief) I

• Social marginality hypothesis
• e.g. gender
• Attitudinal correlates
• Cognitive deficits
• Irrationality?
• Lack of critical thinking ?
• Psychopathology?
• Mental illness, narcissism, depression,
  authoritarianism
• Psychodynamic functions

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Two models of belief development
Encouragement of fantasy
Paranormal beliefs
Social context
Need for control
Childhood trauma
Childhood Fantasy
Paranormal Experience
Irwins (1993) model
Childhood trauma
Childhood fantasy
Paranormal Experience
Paranormal Belief
Lawrence et al.s (1995) model
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Need for control and psi

• ESP
• external locus of control
• But a recent study found that internal AND
  external l of c relate to paranormal beliefs
• externality of mental imagery and subjective
  impression of being psychic

PK Perceived control over random processes
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Theories of belief (and disbelief) II

• Personal experience
• Expectation and schemata
• Social context
• Internalisation and balancing theories
• Cognitive biases
• Neural structure/cognitive structure
• Personality
• E.g., self actualization, spirituality,
  schizotypy, boundary thinness, fantasy
  proneness, etc.

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Cognitive biases

• Tolerance of ambiguity
• The appreciation of oneself as the agent of a
  behaviour
• The tendency of individuals to see order in
  random configurations
• Misattribution of causation

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Apothenia/Pareidolia

• Humans have a tendency to perceive meaning in
  randomness
• apothenia
• Humans have a tendency to perceive defined
  shapes, such as faces where there are no such
  stimuli
• Pareidolia
• EVP
• Tea leaf reading

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• the ability to associate, and especially the
  tendency to prefer remote over
• close associations, is at the heart
• of creative, paranormal and delusional
• thinking (Brugger, 2001., p. 196)

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A neural substrate for paranormal
perception/cognition
Right hemisphere

• Left
• hemisphere

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Who reports anomalous experiences?

• Creative individuals
• Those with manic tendencies
• Extraverts
• Magical thinking
• Fantasy proneness
• Synaesthesia
• Dissociation
• Temporal lobe lability/those with epilepsy
• Absorption

• Emotional sensitivity
• Environmental sensitivity
• Rational and intuitive thinking
• Belief, experience and perceived ability
• Mixed handedness
• Recent research by Simmonds (2005) elevated SPEs
• Gender revisited
• Feminity/Androgyny?

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When do receptive paranormal experiences occur?

• Where they are expected e.g. role of
  beliefs/existing schemata
• Confusion between reality and imagination/sources
  e.g. hallucination
• Hallucination can result from extremely good
  imagination, such as an eidetic individual
• Altered states of consciousness e.g. hypnagogia,
  meditation, and paradoxically, stress
• 2/3 of experiences are associated with borderline
  states of consciousness
• Monotonous activity, sleeping, sitting or
  standing still

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1. Perception, memory and the role of expectation
Things are not always what they seem. Phaedrus
Fables IV. Ii.

• Beliefs and expectations can affect perception
• Wisemans séance room experiment
• Perception that it is still moving in spoon
  bending experiment
• Perceptual illusions
• Tiny muscle movements
• and apparent anomalies
• Attention is focused on one event at a time
• The brain is hypothesis-testing each experience
  and trying to categorize it based on prior
  experience

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1. Schemata, belief and explaining anomalies to
the self

• Mahers theory re schizophrenic delusions
• Anomalies are explained to the self, schemata are
  altered and new biases created which allow for
  anomalies. New experiences are interpreted with
  the adapted pro anomaly explanation schema

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2. Mixing sources/confusing reality with
imagination

• Imagination that is so realistic that it feels
  like a percept
• E.g., Absorption, eidetic imagery
• Hallucination
• Synaesthesia
• Misattributions of the source of experiences
• Hypochondriasis and paranormal experiences
• Greater awareness of the body and projection

• Imagination is characterised by
• Internal subjective space
• Derived from the self
• fewer sensory modalities involved
• fleeting and inconsistent
• under voluntary control
• private
• Perception is characterised by
• decision making
• reference to concrete reality
• external objective space
• defined and full of detail
• several sensory modalities
• constant quality
• Involuntary
• public

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Cryptoamnesia

• This is where one has read something, seen
  something or heard something but does not
  remember doing so
• The information influences a later experience,
  and seems to be impressive
• Contributes to some apparent past life
  experiences
• Channelling/mediumship experiences
• Particularly where one scores high on
  dissociation

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3. Many anomalies occur in the borderline/liminal
states/situations

• Under subdued lighting
• Many mediums
• UFO sightings (anomalous psychology)
• Autokinetic effect
• Between wakefulness and sleep
• E.g., common to hallucinate during hypnagogic
  state, but feel subjectively awake
• Attention is less focused
• increased suggestibility
• Dreams and imagination can sometimes be
  remembered as if they really happened
• Also seems conducive to genuine ESP performance.
• Where stimuli are ambiguous

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Boundaries in the mind and brain
Hypnagogia/dream
Awake alert

• Boundary permeability in the mind
• Related to sleep states such as hypnagogia
  (state)
• Personality (trait) such as positive schizotypy,
  Hartmanns thinner boundaries and transliminality
• Transliminality the hypothesised tendency for
  psychological material to cross thresholds into
  or out of consciousness Thalbourne and Houran

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Is paranormal cognition pathological?

• There is overlap, but also associated with
  positive mental health measures
• Adaptive factor which shares variance with both
  pathology and belief
• E.g., personality variable such as
  transliminality/boundary thinness