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PSYA4 ANOMALISTIC 1

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ANOMALISTIC PSYCHOLOGY

PSYA4 Section B

Pseudoscience and the scientific status of parapsychology.

‘Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence’

-‐ Carl Sagan

While anomalistic psychology is a branch of mainstream scientific psychology that tries to uncover the reasons why people have anomalous experiences and beliefs (such as precognition and extra-‐sensory perception), parapsychology is dedicated to proving that these supernatural forces exist. Parapsychology is accused of being pseudoscientific – using the trappings of science to appear trustworthy, whilst being inherently biased, and lacking in scientific rigour.

The claims made by parapsychology truly are extraordinary, and if accepted, must overturn science completely. It is therefore necessary to critically evaluate the evidence, and accept it only if it meets the highest standards of quality and integrity, and not let bias or wishful thinking cloud our judgment.

Real science has a deservedly privileged position in our society – we trust it. This is because of the high standards of evidence that science requires: objectivity, replicability, falsifiability and so on. Pseudoscience is research that superficially looks ‘scientific’ but in reality fails to meet the tough standards of science. Findings from pseudoscientific research should not be trusted to the same extent – the social implications of doing so include a breakdown in the public faith in genuine science.

The dividing line between science and pseudoscience is debatable, but Lilienfeld (2005) proposed a list of features that characterise pseudosciences such as astrology and creationism.

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(ESP, including Ganzfeld) and paranormal action (psychokinesis)

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Parapsychology may exhibit some of these features:

“… an emphasis on confirmation rather than refutation …” Many (if not most) researchers in parapsychology are actively seeking to prove that the effects they are interested in really do exist (‘an emphasis on confirmation rather than refutation’ in Lilienfeld’s characterisation’).

− While this is not a fatal flaw (compare medical researchers who really believe that a particular compound will lead to a successful new drug), it does mean that they should always be careful to ensure that their bias does not affect their research.

Science should be value-‐free, with results that are independent of who is doing the research. Unfortunately, in parapsychology the bias of the researcher is consistently found to affect the outcome of the research. Significant findings by parapsychologists are never replicated by sceptical observers.

Daryl Bem (2010) published findings in the mainstream Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Participants were asked to select which of two pictures they preferred. After they had made their choice, an unpleasant, subliminal image was flashed up over one of the pictures. Bem found that people preferred the one which did not have the unpleasant subliminal picture, suggesting that they were using information from the future to influence their decision. However, an attempt at replication of this study by Richie, French and Wiseman found no effect.

The replication has not yet been published, which speaks to the issue of publication bias – negative findings don’t get published.

“…a tendency to invoke ad hoc hypotheses …” In pseudoscience, an ad hoc hypothesis (an explanation ‘after the fact’) is made up to explain away uncomfortable findings.

For example, parapsychology researchers argue that the presence of sceptical researchers or onlookers disrupts the psi abilities under examination.

“…use of impressive-‐sounding jargon whose primary purpose is to lend claims a façade of scientific respectability …” One charge levelled against parapsychology is that it uses vague-‐yet-‐impressive-‐sounding jargon, such as “energy fields” “psi” and “vibration”. However, the same could be said for many other research fields, including mainstream psychology! (‘schema’, anyone?)

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“…absence of ‘connectivity’, that is, a failure to build on existing scientific knowledge …” A more serious criticism is that it lacks connectivity with other fields, with many of its claims running counter to the evidence from mainstream science, which is a much more extensive and well-‐validated body of research (Alcock, 1981).

Parsimony Since the central claim of parapsychology is so extraordinary – that we have mental abilities that operate outside the known laws of nature – we really ought to rule out all other possible explanations for a phenomenon, before we accept the supernatural one.

• This is the principle of parsimony, also known as Occam’s Razor – all other things being equal, the simplest explanation or hypothesis, the one that requires the fewest new assumptions, is the one that we should accept.

Positive findings from parapsychology research can often be explained by other, non-‐supernatural, factors:

• Fraud: from the researcher or the participant. • Researcher bias: wishful thinking and unconscious prejudice

can influence findings. • Poorly-‐controlled experiments: for example, sensory leakage. • Publication bias: positive findings will sometimes be expected

purely by chance – these are the ones that get published.

The Project Alpha conjurers fooled parapsychologists for two years Even if the researchers are honest, their findings can be skewed by fraud on the part of the participants, and there are persistent suggestions that research in parapsychology laboratories is not conducted to sufficiently high standards.

In the 1980s, conjurer, sceptic and professional debunker James Randi deployed two trained conjurers (stage magicians), posing as ‘genuine’ psychics, to a parapsychology lab at Washington University. For more than two years, the pair fooled researchers into thinking they had psychic powers, when in fact they were merely performing standard, well-‐known conjuring tricks.

The deception was not detected, suggesting that the researchers in that laboratory were either unable or unwilling to look for alternative explanations for the so-‐called paranormal phenomena that they were studying. They were not sufficiently critical, and this is unacceptable in science.

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On a positive note, the embarrassment caused by Project Alpha lead to raised standards for parapsychology research, including recruiting conjurers to oversee experiments.

The case for the defence: parapsychology is no worse than other branches of science. While the arguments that parapsychology contains pseudoscientific elements are compelling, there is not enough evidence to condemn the whole field.

In fact, on a number of criteria measuring pseudoscience, Mousseau (2003) found that publications in fringe journals were no more pseudoscientific than those in mainstream journals, which displayed similar levels of self-‐citation, self-‐correction and other pseudoscientific features.

In conclusion, it can be argued that, when parapsychology is done well, it is not necessarily any more pseudoscientific than other fields.

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Methodological issues relating to the study of paranormal cognition and paranormal action.

Paranormal cognition: ESP, including Ganzfeld. Paranormal abilities are known as psi, and include paranormal cognition abilities such as extra-‐sensory perception (ESP) – the ability to perceive things without using the ordinary sensory channels. While several research groups have claimed to find evidence for ESP, in the form of above chance performance in remote viewing (clairvoyance) experiments, any such effects have been tiny, and the findings remain controversial.

The Ganzfeld method If ESP does exist, it apparently is a weak and fragile ability, which is easily drowned out by ‘noise’ from the other senses.

For this reason, the Ganzfeld procedure was developed (Honorton, 1974) to induce a state of sensory deprivation, which is supposedly more conducive to psi (such a state is certainly conducive to altered consciousness – hallucinations, etc.).

The Ganzfeld (‘total field’) is produced by covering the eyes with half ping-‐pong balls to filter the light, white noise playing in the ears, and a nice comfy chair to lie back in. Immersed in the Ganzfeld, the participant is then tasked with receiving mental images transmitted by a sender in another location. Zener cards are commonly used, and the receiver typically selects from one of four options, leading to a chance performance level of 25% correct.

Issue 1: Have the findings been replicated? Honorton (1978) reviewed the available literature, and reported that performance was significantly better than chance in 23 of 42 (55%) studies using the Ganzfeld method. It may not sound much, but it’s a significant replication rate.

However, the same studies were evaluated much more critically by Ray Hyman (1985) who argued that some of the studies which had been counted as successful replications should not have been. For example, one study reported 12 individual experiments, only one of which was significant, yet was counted as a

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‘successful replication’ in Honorton’s review. Hyman’s estimate of the replication rate for those studies was only 30%.

• Hyman was also concerned about other features of the research. He pointed to flaws in the design and procedures, such as how ‘hits’ were measured and failure to randomise properly.

The ensuing collaboration between Hyman and Honorton (1986) was a fine example of science in action, in spirit and in practice. They published a joint paper which emphasised that more stringent standards were needed to settle the issue, and they outlined what needed to be done, including

• Strict precautions against sensory leakage • Stricter procedures for randomisation • Better practice in using statistical tests • Safeguarding against rejecting findings from unsuccessful

‘pilot’ tests (which could lead to publication bias) • Sufficient reporting detail to ensure accurate replication.

Their collaboration led to the development of the autoganzfeld method, an automated set-‐up which minimised the possibility of investigator effects.

There is still no consensus on the reliability of Ganzfeld research, and most mainstream psychologists do not accept that the ability has been successfully demonstrated.

Issue 2: Meta-‐analysis The reports by Honorton and Hyman were published as review articles, that is, they gave a broad overview of the relevant literature. A more formalised type of systematic review is the meta-‐analysis, which gathers the available published evidence on a particular topic and combines the findings to produce a statistical measure of the overall effect size.

A meta-‐analysis of Ganzfeld studies was performed by Milton and Wiseman (1999). They combined data from 30 separate studies published over a 10 year period. They did not find an overall statistical effect in favour of ESP.

Although meta-‐analysis is a powerful tool, there are many complexities and pitfalls

• The file-‐drawer effect suggests that meta-‐analysis will always overestimate the size of an effect, because studies that show no effects do not get published. Sophisticated statistical

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techniques are available to account for this effect size, but it is really speculative.

Issue 3: bias on the part of the investigator and/or the participant Investigator effects and demand characteristics are the plagues of psychology research, casting doubt on the reliability and validity of findings.

An inescapable truth about psi research that casts doubt on its claim to scientific objectivity is that researchers who are believers report positive results, while those who are sceptics find nothing.

• One explanation could be that the experimenters’ bias causes them to overlook errors in procedure when these lead to a confirmation of their prediction. This could be overcome by stricter control of procedures. It is interesting to note that when procedures have been tightened, significant results have tended to decrease (Blackmore, 1995).

• An alternative explanation is that hostility emanating from the sceptical researcher interferes with the participants’ ability. This is a potentially insurmountable problem, since it means that sceptical researchers are effectively barred from having an opinion on the subject.

Dalton (1997) reported that certain traits of the participant were also linked with improved performance, including knowledge of the procedure, prior experience as a lab participant, meditation practice and feeling/perceiving personality traits. The effects of such confounding variables are not yet fully understood.

Issue 4: Fraud While the practitioners of pseudoscience may genuinely believe that their research is scientific, fraudsters are intentionally cheating (although they may justify it to themselves).

Again, fraud is not unique to parapsychology, but it is arguably more of a problem than in other disciplines of science because:

− Researchers have a great deal of emotional investment in their subject – they want it to be real.

− They are studying effects and mechanisms that (if they exist at all) are subtle and not at all well-‐understood. It is therefore more difficult to detect cheating.

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S. G. Soal’s fraud took forty years to be revealed … Soal’s findings on extra-‐sensory perception from the 1930s and 40s were considered to be the strongest evidence for psi abilities by many observers. The transmission of mental images from a remote sender to a receiver apparently demonstrated telepathic communication under tightly-‐controlled conditions. Although the fraud had been suspected for some time, the data were so carefully faked that the deception was not proved until the 1980s.

Walter J. Levy was caught red-‐handed … The psi ability of animals (anpsi) was investigated in the 1970s by Walter J. Levy, who used an automated procedure to record the apparently precognitive activities of rats and gerbils.

This method gave his findings enhanced credibility, as it seemed more objective, and less vulnerable to researcher bias.

Unfortunately, however, Levy was caught fiddling with the equipment (he doctored it so that it would record ‘hits’ but not ‘misses’) by a colleague, and admitted the fraud.

This case (possibly somewhat unfairly) gave the entire discipline of parapsychology a bad name.

Blackmore blew the whistle on bad practice at the Sargent Lab Most people do not find it easy to accept evidence that challenges their beliefs. A rare exception is Susan Blakemore, who believed in the paranormal as the result of her own anomalous experiences, and worked for many years as a parapsychologist before becoming disillusioned by lack of progress and bad practice (pseudoscience and fraud) in the discipline. She is now a leading figure in anomalistic psychology.

She visited the laboratory of Carl Sargent in Cambridge, where they had used the Ganzfeld procedure to investigate ESP. She found serious errors in the protocol, which cast doubt on the findings. Whether the errors were evidence of deliberate fraud or not is unclear – Sargent refused to make his data available for public scrutiny, and left the field of parapsychology soon afterwards.

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Paranormal action: psychokinesis While some psi researchers have looked for evidence of an alternative method of perceiving things (ESP), others have been trying to prove the power of mind over matter – psychokinesis, or causing things to move by thought alone.

• Macro-‐PK refers to effects visible to the naked eye (e.g. spoon-‐bending)

• Micro-‐PK refers to influence that can’t be directly observed, but only indirectly measured through effects on statistical distributions, etc.

• Psychic healing can be thought of as another form of PK, sometimes called bio-‐PK.

Many of the same controversies that were relevant to the Ganzfeld studies are equally applicable here – publication bias, experimenter effects, and the challenges of meta-‐analysis. In addition, the procedures used to measure the micro-‐PK effects have been controversial.

Issue 1: the use of loaded dice in early PK studies. Early micro-‐PK research looked at whether participants were able to influence the throw of a dice to a particular outcome (e.g. . The methodology of these studies was questioned, as they were not designed to control for loaded or biased dice (weighted so as to be more likely to land on a particular face).

For example, in one study by J. B. Rhine subjects were always asked to influence the score of a pair of dice to be above 7. The significant result he obtained could have been due to a loaded dice, so he ran the experiment again with other target values. He found the same positive result, suggesting that biased dice could not explain the findings.

A meta-‐analysis of dice studies by Radin and Ferrari (1991) suggested that results remained above chance even when these effects were accounted for, although they did note that the higher the quality of the study, the weaker the reported effect.

Issue 2: meta-‐analyses of random event studies A supposedly more objective measure of PK effects comes from studies using a random event generator (REG) or random number generator which the participant is instructed to influence by directing their mental effort at some physical manifestation of the randomizer, such as a pair of lightbulbs (Schmidt, 1969). Proponents of the technique argue that it effectively prevents fraud.

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Findings from REG/RNG studies of psychokinesis remain controversial. Researchers performing meta-‐analyses of random event studies have come to very different conclusions:

1. Radin and Nelson (1989) found a small but highly significant effect size across 832 studies, leading them to conclude that this was evidence for a genuine psychic effect.

2. Steinkamp et al (2002) found no effect in their analysis of 499 published RNG studies.

3. Bosch et al (2006) found a small but significant effect, but argued that publication bias was likely to be the most parsimonious explanation.

The different conclusions reached by different researchers demonstrate that researcher bias can undermine the objectivity of scientific research.

One point to remember is that we are dealing with tiny effects, making it more likely that error can creep in to the data. (Of course, if psi abilities were real and powerful, we wouldn’t need such convoluted procedures to try to detect them.)

Another point is that discarding the null hypothesis – acknowledging the effect – does not mean that we have to accept the paranormal explanation. There are alternative explanations that are more parsimonious.

The situation is difficult for both ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ in psi research, and will remain so until a definitive proof arrives one way or another.

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Explanations for anomalous experience.

Introduction Unlike parapsychologists, anomalistic psychologists are interested in finding rational explanations for supposedly supernatural experiences. We look at three types of explanation:

• The role of coincidence and probability misjudgments in anomalous experience.

• Explanations of superstition and magical thinking. • Personality factors underlying anomalous experience.

There are many factors that make it more likely that people will experience paranormal activity. People who experience strange perceptions (seeing a ghost, having a ‘precognitive’ dream) may interpret them as paranormal. Some people (‘sheep’) are more inclined to accept paranormal explanations than others (‘goats’).

Explanations of coincidence and magical thinking link with the cognitive and evolutionary perspectives in psychology, while superstition adds some interesting research from a behaviourist perspective.

Background According to the theory of evolution by natural selection, heritable traits (whether physical or behavioural) that increase reproductive fitness will be passed down through the generations, while maladaptive ones will be lost, leading to the gradual change (evolution) of the characteristics of the whole population. In the distant past, the predecessors to modern humans faced a multitude of survival challenges – finding food, finding a mate, avoiding predators and enemies. Human cognitive capabilities evolved to meet those challenges.

• The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness is the time and place where most of the natural selection that made modern humans what they are took place.

• The human EEA is generally agreed to be the Pleistocene period (beginning about 1.8 million years ago). The earliest fully modern human fossil remains (Homo), found in sub-‐Saharan Africa, date from this period.


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The pressures faced by people in the EEA, who lived in small groups as hunter-‐gatherers, were very different from the ones we face now. Some psychologists suggest that the mismatch between the challenges that we are adapted for, and the ones that we have to face in the modern world can explain a great deal about modern human unhappiness and suffering.

The misapplication of our evolved problem solving abilities certainly provides a compelling explanation for some aspects of paranormal belief, (although, as ever, such explanations are hard to test).


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The role of coincidence and probability judgements in anomalous experience.

A cognitive-‐evolutionary explanation of why we attach significance to coincidences. A coincidence is any conjunction of unrelated events that a human interprets as unlikely.

• I was just thinking of X, and then the phone rang and it was him.

Because the conjunction seems unlikely, we are tempted to look for an explanation – a causal connection between them.

• Maybe X somehow ‘knew’ I was thinking of him – I must be telepathic.

For some reason, we don’t tend to find the explanation, ‘oh it was just random chance’ very satisfying. We don’t like randomness – we look for a pattern.

Pattern detection is a cognitive ability with an obvious survival advantage. A rustling in the long grass is probably just the wind, but it might indicate the presence of a hungry lion. If you correctly detect that the pattern indicates a lion, and run before you get eaten – congratulations! You survive!

But consider the case where you’re not sure …

• If you accept a false positive/type 1 error (run when there is no lion) the worst case scenario is that you get out of breath.

• If you accept a false negative (stay put when there is a lion, because 9 times out of 10 there isn’t one) then you will be cat food.

The cost of accepting a false negative is so high that evolution will favour brains that err on the side of caution, and see patterns where there are none. Many apparently paranormal events could just be coincidences, with a pattern imposed on them as a result of our inborn, evolved, adaptive tendency to look for patterns wherever possible. The genes that get passed down through the generations will be the ones that make the bearer safe, healthy and attractive, not necessarily ones that make them always right!


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Evidence showing cognitive bias to probability misjudgement in humans. Whether or not we believe a coincidence is remarkable, and therefore worthy of an explanation, depends on how probable we think it is. To meet somebody whose birthday is on the same day as your own is subjectively more remarkable than to meet someone whose birthday is merely in the same month.

The problem is that human intuition is terrible when it comes to probabilities.

When people are asked to estimate the number of individuals you would need to assemble in the same room so that there was a >50% chance of two of them sharing the exact same birthday, estimates are often far higher than the real number, which is just 23. This is known as the ‘Birthday Paradox’.

• One explanation for this comes from the egocentric bias. We think about the problem as though we were estimating the probability that someone would share our specific birthday, when in fact the problem only requires that any two birthdays match.

Misjudgement of probability makes us seek a supernatural explanation for ordinary coincidences. Our blindness to coincidence is further demonstrated by considering precognitive dreaming – when dreams appear to predict the future.

Richard Wiseman gives the example of the Aberfan mining disaster in Wales in the 1960s. 139 schoolchildren and 5 of their teachers were killed when heavy rain caused the collapse of the steep hillside above them, which had been piled high with waste from the coal-‐mining industry.

A psychiatrist with an interest in the paranormal – John Barker – collected reports of dreams which appeared to have predicted the tragedy. He received 60 reports of such dreams, including one from the parents of a child who had been killed there.

Some of the dreams reported were quite striking in their accuracy, and it is hard to accept the explanation that they were coincidence. However, once one takes into consideration the sheer numbers involved, we can see that coincidence is not so unlikely after all. There were around 50 million people in Britain at that time, each of whom has around 4 dreams a night with multiple themes in each, and the dream could have occurred on any night prior to the tragedy.

• The law of truly large numbers predicts that ‘…with a large enough sample, any outrageous thing is likely to happen.’ (Diaconis and Mosteller, 1989).


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Paranormal believers may be even worse at judging probabilty than the rest of us People who have high levels of belief in the paranormal may be even worse at judging probability and coincidence than the rest of us.

Blackmore and Troscianko (1985) reported that ‘sheep’ performed worse on a variety of probability estimation tasks than ‘goats’. In one experiment, they asked schoolgirl participants to judge whether samples with varying proportions of boys and girls came from biased or unbiased distributions. They found that goats were much better at detecting which samples showed bias. They concluded that an inability to judge that something may be due to chance could lead the sheep to look for paranormal explanations for coincidences.

• The schoolgirl sample used for that study is unlikely to be representative of the whole population, but they reported other findings that supported this. Sheep of all ages demonstrated poorer understanding of the odds of different outcomes in a coin-‐flipping scenario.

Musch and Ehrenberg (2002) also found higher error rates in probabilistic reasoning among sheep, but they concluded that these were associated with differences in general cognitive ability, which they operationalized as final examination performance in their sample of 123 university undergraduates.

• The idea that sheep have lower cognitive ability than goats is controversial. Some studies have found no such effect (e.g. Irwin and Watt), while other evidence suggests that differences only manifest when the tasks relate to the paranormal (e.g. Wierzbiecki, 1985).


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Explanations of superstition and magical thinking.

Magical thinking refers to beliefs about connections between things, where no connection is physically possible.

The two major features of magical thinking are called:

• The Law of Contagion • The Law of Similarity

The law of contagion The law of contagion states that things which have been in contact with something with certain physical or psychological properties retain something of those properties. It could underlie many forms of paranormal belief, such as haunted houses and superstitious lucky charms.

Examples

• Students were asked to wear a clean cardigan that had once belonged to the murderer Fred West – they refused (Bruce Hood).

• Psychic detectives believe that they can find a missing loved one by holding an object that belonged to them.

• Rozin et al (1990) asked students to eat turd-‐shaped chocolate and drink from a glass of water that had a sterilized dead cockroach in it: 90% refused.

The Law of Contagion has an evolutionary explanation: contagious diseases are those spread by close contact with an infected person or noxious substance (vomit, mucus, faeces). It would be adaptive to avoid touching something that had been in contact with a diseased person. This has lead to an evolved intuition, or instinct that psychological and physical properties can pass between people and objects.

This instinct is driven by one of our most powerful emotions – disgust (limbic system). Our disgust response leads us to make Type 1 Errors – we recoil from things that are actually harmless, and make illusory connections between things. Our ancestors had no idea about bacteria, viruses, toxins etc. – but they usually managed to avoid them, survive and reproduce. Better safe than sorry!


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Disgust reactions are extremely difficult to overcome by reason. This appears to be especially true of people with very right-‐wing political beliefs (Montague et al 2014). Magical thinking is also associated with mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). OCD often manifests as obsessive irrational thoughts and compulsions relating to cleanliness and hygiene, but other forms of magical thinking may be heightened in this disorder too.

The Law of Similarity The Law of Similarity states that things that resemble each other are causally connected in some way that can’t be explained scientifically. This could underlie paranormal beliefs such as homoeopathic medicine and voodoo magic.

Examples

• Homoeopathic “medicine” is based on principles of similarity (‘like cures like’).

• Voodoo dolls are given the shape of a real person. • Prayer offerings in some cultures are made in the shape

of an injured body part.

Explanation

The law of similarity can be seen in the way that people attribute healing properties to placebo pills, based on the associations of particular colours.

De Craen et al. (1996) reviewed 6 studies in the BMJ on beliefs about the effectiveness of different pills. They found evidence for magical thinking.

• Red, Orange & Yellow – Stimulant • Blue & Green – Sedative • Red – cardio-‐vascular, blood (Law of Similarity) • Orange -‐ Skin


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Explanations of superstition.

Superstition is one type of magical thinking. Superstitions are beliefs, often to do with luck, that link particular behaviours or occurrences with particular outcomes, even though no natural causal relationship between them can be determined. Superstitions can range from culturally-‐shared to the personal and idiosyncratic (Jahoda). As well as the evolutionary explanations of magical thinking outlined above, research into superstition comes from behaviourist and cognitive perspectives:

A behaviourist explanation of personal superstition in pigeons and people. The behaviourist explanation of superstition is that it arises from operant conditioning, that is, reward-‐based learning. If we perform an action, and get a reward, we are likely to repeat that action in the hope of obtaining another reward. The more such reinforcement we get, the more likely we are to repeat the action, even if there is no causal connection between the action and the reward (i.e. it is just coincidence).

B. F. Skinner (1948) placed pigeons in ‘Skinner boxes’ and set a mechanism to release food pellets every 15 seconds, regardless of what the birds did. He observed the birds, and found that some of them started to exhibit strange, stereotyped behaviour patterns, such as hopping and turning. These behaviours increased if the food pellets were withheld. Skinner believed that these behaviours were analogous to human superstition. He concluded that superstition could be explained by erroneous learning.

Wagner and Morris (1987) performed a similar experiment with children, who were presented with a mechanical clown that dispensed marbles from its mouth. Although the marbles were dispensed at random, the children were led to believe that they could influence the machine to release more. Once again, this led to the emergence of superstitious rituals.

Ono reported similar findings in adults. Participants were presented with an apparatus consisting of levers, lights and a points tracker. There was no connection between these, and points accrued randomly, but the participants were instructed to score as many points as possible. They too developed stereotypic behaviours – the result of misreading a coincidence as a causal connection.

The behaviourist approach doesn’t really explain why worthless superstitions persist – other psychological mechanisms need to be invoked, such as confirmation bias.


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Why superstition is rife among sportsmen, students and gamblers – the role of control Certain professions and groups profess more superstition than others, including sportsmen, gamblers, students and actors. What all of these groups have in common is a real or perceived low level of control over the outcome of their efforts.

Gamblers in particular are renowned for the intricacy of their superstitious beliefs and behaviours, attempts to exert control over what is fundamentally a matter of chance.

• The gambler’s fallacy is one of many cognitive biases that are associated with this group. It refers to the belief that the outcome of previous independent events (e.g. coin flips) will influence the next one (‘tails is bound to come up next – there’s been six heads in a row’). They disregard the fact that the flips are independent – the coin has no memory.

Research supports the idea that superstition is associated with lack of control

Whitson and Galitsky (2008) asked people to recall a situation where they had either had complete control, or had lacked control. They were then presented with scenarios involving superstitious beliefs. Participants who had been asked to remember the low-‐control scenario showed an increase in superstitious thinking, measured as their perception of a connection between the superstitious behaviour and the outcome in the scenario.

• This series of experiments also tested other consequences of perceived control, including illusory image perception, willingness to see conspiracies, tendency to see patterns in random data (e.g. stock market fluctuations). The findings lend support to the idea that illusory pattern detection – the tendency to make type I errors –is an important common factor underlying many types of cognitive distortion.

Dudley (1999) gave students unsolvable anagram puzzles, and found that the level of superstitious thinking increased. When students who had been exposed to such puzzles were then presented with puzzles that could be solved, performance was better among those who had increased superstition.

This suggests that superstition may be valuable in situations where we lack control, as we can attribute our failures to external forces, and not become disheartened by them.


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Personality factors underlying anomalous experience

Personality factors are the (mostly) permanent features of someone’s character. Certain types of personality have been linked with increased likelihood of belief in the paranormal.

Schizotypy A person who has a schizotypal personality is likely to be withdrawn, to hold odd or eccentric beliefs, and to experience unusual perceptions.

• Schizotypal personality disorder is a psychiatric, clinical condition which is diagnosed when the person’s schizotypal traits interfere with their functioning.

• A person diagnosed with schizotypal personality disorder may be at greater risk of developing schizophrenia, and the two conditions share many similarities. However, schizotypy is generally less severe, less disabling and a more permanent feature of personality than schizophrenia.

One of the key diagnostic features of schizotypy is odd beliefs and magical thinking, and this includes paranormal beliefs.

Irwin and Green (1999) looked at the links between schizotypy and paranormal belief. They found that the schizotypal trait that seems to link most strongly to paranormal belief is unusual experiences – having perceptual experiences that others don’t share (e.g. hallucinations). The paranormal belief is the schizotypal person’s interpretation of their own strange experiences.

However, not all schizotypal people, or people who experience inexplicable, anomalous events, attribute those events to paranormal forces. Moreover, plenty of people without observable psychopathology hold paranormal beliefs.

Fantasy-‐proneness Another personality type that has been associated with belief in the paranormal is fantasy-‐proneness.

Fantasy-‐prone individuals may spend half their waking life in daydreams. Wilson and Barber (1983) identified a fantasy-‐prone personality type (FPP), which includes traits such as hypnotic


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suggestibility, imaginativeness, belief in psychic abilities, and, not surprisingly, a proneness to fantasising.

Some research has shown a link between fantasy-‐proneness and paranormal experience, in particular, with regards to claims of alien abduction.

Using biographical analysis, Bartholemew et al (1991) found that abductees and contactees showed typical characteristics of fantasy-‐proneness. They performed a content analysis on the biographies of 152 people who claimed to have experienced alien abduction, looking for examples of the FPP characteristics identified by Wilson and Barber. They found that 132 of the sample had one or more of the traits of fantasy-‐proneness.

There is a potential for researcher bias with this method, as they have to interpret the text to judge whether individual statements match the FPP traits.

A further problem with relating the FPP to anomalous experience is that several of its defining characteristics relate to belief in the paranormal. It is therefore hardly surprising that people who meet the criteria display high levels of paranormal belief. It is a circular argument.

Moreover, it is arguable whether the FPP really exists as a distinct personality type. Individuals can be fantasy prone – have very active imaginations and a rich fantasy life – without losing the ability to distinguish their fantasies from reality. FPP is not well-‐differentiated from other personality traits, including schizotypy, absorption and dissociation.

• Dissociation is a trait that has been consistently associated with anomalous experience. It refers to the disruption of a person’s consciousness leading to feelings of being separate from oneself and/or the world. It is associated with traumatic experiences, and, as with FPP, it is associated with hypnotic susceptibility.

Some people have a greater need for control than others The knowledge that we are in control of our lives and environments gives us great confidence and security as we go about our lives.

Dag (1999) found that belief in the paranormal was higher among those with a high internal locus of control (Rotter, 1954).


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− A possible explanation for this is that those with a high internal LoC have a greater need for control in general than externals (who may be more accepting of the idea that some things just can’t be explained).

Need for control can be associated with a low tolerance for ambiguity.

Blackmore and Troscianko (1985) compared ‘sheep’ and ‘goats’ in a lab experiment measuring perceptions of control over external events.

Participants were presented with a computerised coin-‐flipping task, and instructed to make the coin fall on heads or tails by pushing a button. The button influenced the outcome, but only on half the trials. Believers reported much higher levels of perceived control over the outcome than non-‐believers, suggesting that they have a tendency to overestimate their influence on external events, which may stem from a cognitive or emotional need to feel in control.

Another interesting finding from this study was that sheep actually estimated their own scores to be lower than goats did. This was found to be because they were not able to give an accurate estimate of chance performance, and provides further support for the idea that probability judgment is impaired in paranormal believers.

The need for control comes from childhood trauma Emotional functions are associated with the psychodynamic approach. This approach sees paranormal belief as a strategy adopted by an individual as a reaction to childhood trauma.

People who have suffered traumatic childhoods may show high levels of:

• dissociation – this involves ‘losing oneself’, for example, feeling disconnected from oneself, losing track of time, and amnesia

• fantasy proneness – spending a large proportion of time in daydreams and fantasies.

People who show these traits are more likely to also hold paranormal beliefs than others. In this case, the emotional function being served could be

• protection from distressing thoughts and memories.


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• comfort derived from the belief that inexplicable events have a meaning.

• sense of control over events (e.g. belief that one can predict the future).

Perkins and Allen (2006) compared scores on two questionnaires, the revised paranormal belief scale (which measures belief in the paranormal) and the assessing environments II questionnaire (a retrospective questionnaire which measures experience of physical abuse in childhood). They found that individuals who reported more childhood abuse were more likely to hold paranormal beliefs, in particular, beliefs relating to control over the world – for example they were more likely than others to believe that they had extraordinary personal abilities such as ESP, but not more likely to believe in extraterrestrial life forms. This supports the link between childhood trauma and later belief, and the idea that such belief has an emotional function.

• The methodology of this study can be questioned – there is some evidence that believers in the paranormal are more prone to memory distortions than others (e.g. Wiseman), and this may apply to their memories of their own childhoods, rendering their responses to the retrospective assessing environments questionnaire unreliable.

Evaluation of personality factors. It is clear that there is not yet a scientific consensus on the link between personality and anomalous experience. Personality, cognitive and other psychological factors intertwine, and it may be more helpful to understand anomalous experiences by looking at individual cognitive and biological factors, rather than overall personality types.

French and Wilson (2006) argue that memory is the common factor underlying the correlation between fantasy-‐proneness, dissociativity and paranormal experience.


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Research into exceptional experience : psychic healing.

Psychic healing refers to any healing that is achieved by mystical or supernatural means. Examples include:

• Therapeutic touch – this is really a form of psychokinesis, where it is believed that the practitioner can influence health outcomes by manipulating energy fields around the patient.

• Intercessory prayer – this is the belief that directed prayer to a higher power can influence specific health outcomes. If this is true, we should be able to measure and compare the outcomes for patients who have been prayed for, and those who have not.

Fraud in medical research is ethically and morally unacceptable. Medical research has incredibly strict standards of evidence and proof – if they get it wrong, people may die. The ethical implications of research into psychic healing are huge – people’s health, and even lives, are at stake.

A study by Cha et al (2001) in the Journal of Reproductive Medicine has been particularly controversial. It purported to show a significant positive effect of prayer on in-‐vitro fertilisation success rates. However, it was withdrawn by the journal, following concerns about the ethics and procedures. Cha was later found guilty of plagiarism, and a co-‐author, Wirth, was imprisoned for fraud.

Research into the effectiveness of intercessory prayer/. Research on intercessory prayer (praying for a patient’s recovery) has had mixed conclusions. There are many case reports of recovery after psychic intervention, but it is simply not possible to draw scientific conclusions from such reports, as there are so many confounding factors that could influence the result (coincidence, placebo effect, bias, lack of control etc.).

The gold standard of medical research is the double-‐blinded randomised controlled trial (RCT), used to test a new treatment against a control, which will be an existing treatment or a placebo (a fake treatment – a sugar pill).

• Double-‐blinded means that neither the researcher nor the patient know who is getting the real treatment, and who is getting the sugar pill.


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• Randomised means that patients are assigned to the treatment or control groups arbitrarily – they are not chosen to be in one or another as this could introduce a source of bias.

RCT research into the efficacy of intercessory prayer has not produced positive results. The largest and best-‐controlled studies available have shown no benefit for intercessory prayer.

A large RCT study, of 1800 patients recovering from heart surgery was conducted by Benson et al (2006). The patients were randomly allocated to one of three groups:

1 -‐ told they might receive prayers for their recovery, and did receive prayers.

2 -‐ told they might receive prayers, but did not have people assigned to pray for them.

3 -‐ told they definitely would receive prayers, and people were assigned to pray for them.

The researchers found no difference in outcomes between the prayed-‐for and non-‐prayed-‐for patients.

This was also the conclusion reached by Krucoff with the MANTRA studies, which tested 4 different therapies.

Discussion

If there is an effect of prayer on recovery, it is clearly too complex to be found in scientific research. If prayer does have an effect, it is subtle, and difficult (if not impossible) to control for.

The strict procedures of randomised controlled trials are necessary, because medicine is a complex thing. Many diseases are self-‐limiting – they get better naturally, whatever you do. Just because you took a particular herb before you got better, doesn’t mean that it was the herb that made you better – it could have been coincidence! An RCT helps to control for these effects.

• People who believe in the paranormal have been shown to be worse judges of probability and coincidence than others, so it is possible that this biases their reports of the effectiveness of psychic healing.

Another ‘problem’ for research, is the placebo effect. People will often get better quicker if they think they are getting a treatment,


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even if there are no active ingredients in the pill you give them. Although this is in itself an astonishing demonstration of the power of mind over matter, and something that physicians are keen to research further, it also creates a problem for researchers who need to find a baseline against which to measure the effects of treatment.

Therapeutic touch practitioners can’t even tell if a hand is near them. Experiments don’t have to be big RCTs to produce important findings, however:

9-‐year-‐old Emily Rosa published an elegant study of therapeutic touch. Practitioners of TT claim to be manipulating energy fields that they perceive without touching.

Rosa designed a study to test, very simply, whether TT practitioners could even detect a human hand when it was present, but shielded from view. The practitioners placed both hands, palms facing upright, beneath an opaque screen. The experimenter then placed her hand a few centimetres above either the right or left hand. All the practitioner had to do, was say which hand the experimenter’s hand was closest to.

The results, which have been replicated, were negative – the practitioners did not score above chance (guessing) levels. This makes it hard to believe their claims that they can detect and manipulate subtle energy fields! The benefits of therapeutic touch, a vivid and dramatic procedure, seem likely to be placebo.


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Research into exceptional experience : near death and out-‐of-‐body experiences.

In an out of body experience (OoBE), consciousness seems to become separated from the body. The world may be perceived as though from a point outside the physical body (observer perspective).

• 15-‐20% of people experience an OoBE at some stage in their lives.

• Personality factors such as hypnotic susceptibility and fantasy-‐proneness make you more likely to experience an OoBE, as do medical conditions such as epilepsy.

• OoBEs an be deliberately induced with drugs, hypnosis or cortical stimulation.

The OoBE can be explained as an illusion of consciousness The OoBE is often interpreted as a spiritual experience by the person who has it, but Blackmore suggests that it is better interpreted as a combination of hallucination and imagery resulting from a breakdown in our brain’s normal integration of sensory information.

Disturbances at the temporoparietal junction could explain how the illusion arises. One biological explanation for OoBE is that it arises from dysfunction of a brain area called the temporoparietal junction (TPJ). This area is responsible for the integration of information from the different senses, about our body and its relation to the world, leading to the illusion of a unitary consciousness – the self image.

When it breaks down, we may perceive the different components of our ‘self’ independently, giving us the impression that our mind and body are separated.

Blanke and colleagues (2004) used neuroimaging techniqes (such as fMRI) to study the neural correlates of OoBEs in 6 neurological patients who experienced OoBEs and autoscopic phenomena (seeing the body from outside). They found that the temporoparietal junction was damaged in all but one of these patients, suggesting that this area is important for the maintenance of our normal self-‐image.


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Blanke has also reported that OoBEs can be reliably induced with cortical electrical stimulation of the TPJ of a patient with epilepsy.

This is reliable evidence that biological changes can cause this form of anomalous experience, although it cannot rule out that other factors are involved.

NDEs are common and culturally specific Near death experiences (NDEs) are a type of OoBE that happens during a health crisis, for example, resuscitation following cardiac arrest. Patients’ reports include the main features of the OoBE, with additional common features including feelings of peace and well-‐being, and the sensation of moving though a tunnel.

• Interaction with spiritual figures may be reported, and it is noteworthy that these are culturally-‐specific (Christians may see Jesus, for example).

Such reports are often taken, by the patients and their supporters, as proof of an afterlife, which they have been privileged to glimpse and then return from. However, sceptical researchers maintain that all the features of the NDE can be explained as resulting from biological factors.

One study, Parnia et al (2001), compared the experiences of cardiac survivors. 11% of these reported an NDE. The only physiological difference between those who experienced NDE and those who did not, was that the NDE group were found to have much higher systemic oxygen levels than the rest. However, this finding should be interpreted with caution, as the sample was only 4 people.

The bird’s eye view One common feature of OoBEs and NDEs is the sense that one is viewing proceedings from a point outside ones own body (observer perspective), including the sensation of watching oneself from outside. Observer perspective can be induced using virtual reality (Blanke, 2007).There have been reports that people are able to see things during an OoBE/NDE that they could not have seen from their physical location (veridical information), but there is no decisive evidence that this has ever happened.

• The most famous of such claims, that of Maria and the tennis shoe, has been shown to be most likely fabricated.


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Temporal lobe functioning The temporal lobes are areas of the brain’s cerebral cortex that lie on each side of the brain. They have several functions, and are involved in hearing, understanding speech, recall memory and high level processing including recognition (e.g. FFA) and comprehension (understanding). They are involved in extracting semantic relations (the meaning of things).

Damage to the temporal lobes can have profound consequences for memory, perception and understanding. Abnormal temporal lobe functioning has been associated with out-‐of-‐body Michael Persinger argues that the temporal lobes are more sensitive to external electromagnetism than other parts of the brain, because their electrical output is normally lower. External electromagnetic activity may affect brain activity, and some people may be more susceptible to this than others, leading them to experience odd sensations and perception.

The ‘God Helmet’ was developed by Persinger. It uses transcranial magnetic stimulation of the temporal lobes (Persinger, 1995). With it, it is possible to artificially induce out-‐of-‐body, mystical, and other anomalous experiences in normal participants.

However, attempts to replicate this research under double-‐blinded conditions (neither the participants not the experimenter know whether the helmet is active) have so far failed (e.g. Granqvist et al, 2005). It is possible that participants’ expectations and/or demand characteristics influenced the initial reports.

Biological explanations of OoBE/NDE are reductionist A charge often levelled at biological explanations of paranormal phenomena is that they are reductionist, which they are. One of the stated aims of science is to break down phenomena to their smallest parts and produce reductionist explanations. The question is whether such reduction is inappropriate for psychological phenomena, perhaps because it neglects other, important levels of explanation.


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Research into exceptional experience : psychic mediumship

Communication with the dead fulfils an emotional need for many A psychic medium is someone who claims to be able to communicate with the dead, in the ‘spirit world’.

Throughout history, a variety of ingenious methods have been proposed to allow communication with the spirit world, including table-‐turning and Ouija boards.

Someone who has been bereaved may seek the services of a medium, in an attempt to communicate with their dead loved one. In such circumstances, deliberate fraud is ethically indefensible, as it exploits people who are vulnerable.

Nonetheless, the history of research in psychic mediumship is largely the history of uncovering frauds.

Research into the abilities of psychic mediums. One research study (Schwartz et al, 2001) claimed to have proved that mediums could contact the dead. In this study, two mediums read for five sitters who were sat behind an opaque screen. The medium asked a series of ‘yes/no’ questions, and produced statements which the sitters judged for accuracy. The sitters claimed that 80% of the mediums’ statements were accurate.

However, Wiseman and O’Keefe (2001) strongly criticised the methods used :

ψ The mediums’ statements were not judged ‘blind’, therefore the judging could have been biased.

ψ Sensory leakage (information transfer through non-‐paranormal means) was not adequately controlled.

ψ An inadequate control group was used.

O’Keefe and Wiseman devised a procedure to test mediums taking account of the above problems.

Five mediums were recruited through the Spiritualist Nationalist Union.

5 male ‘sitters’ were recruited from staff and students in a British university aged 25 -‐30 who did not know each other.


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Mediums and sitters did not meet and sat in adjacent rooms.

Each medium was instructed to contact the spirits to give each of the five sitters a reading. The sitters blind-‐judged both statements that had been intended for them and statements that were intended for other sitters.

Under this methodology, no evidence for psychic abilities was found.

Cold reading According to sceptics such as Wiseman, the apparent abilities of psychic mediums are best explained by cold reading – a set of skills known to stage magicians that give the impression that they know more than is possible. These include broad statements that could apply to anybody, yet seem quite specific, known as Barnum statements.

In Wiseman and O’Keeffe’s study, the most accurate of the five mediums made the most general statements whilst the only one that made highly specific statements was judged to be the least accurate.

Believers are quite willing to be fooled by cold reading and other tricks.

Wiseman, Smith and Wiseman (1995) tested how believers and non-‐believers recalled the events of a séance (a session with a medium who appears to contact the spirits of the dead). The ‘medium’ was played by an actor, and no paranormal events occurred. The experimenter introduced the misleading suggestion that the table had moved. One third of participants reported the movement, and this tendency was stronger for believers.

This could be explained in terms of cognitive schema – memories may be distorted to fit in with an existing schema (e.g. Brewer and Treyens). Believers are more susceptible to false memories that confirm their existing ideas.

Other research has also concluded that false memories are more prevalent among believers in the paranormal.

Self deception Other research focuses on the mediums themselves – are they knowingly committing fraud, or do they genuinely believe in their abilities?


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Self-‐deception – the art of lying to oneself – is to some extent is a human universal. Evolutionary theorists such as Robert Trivers have suggested that self-‐deception is something we have evolved so that we can better fool other people’s deception-‐detection devices by appearing to be honest. Self-‐deception also makes us happier and more confident, and therefore we appear more attractive and trustworthy.

It is clear that many paranormal practitioners are convinced of their own abilities.

Patricia Putt, a psychic medium, was one of the brave souls to accept James Randi’s million-‐dollar challenge, in 2008. She performed readings for 10 anonymous volunteers, who were then asked to select which reading they thought applied to them. Not one of the volunteers selected the reading that had been intended for them. Putt declared herself “gobsmacked” by the result, suggesting that she was convinced of her own abilities.

• In a later interview, she retreated to the standard psychics’ get-‐out clause, claiming that the hostile conditions of the experiment had interfered with her psychic ability.

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