Belief in the Paranormal: A Review of the Empirical Literature

Both parapsychologists and skeptics have interests in investigating the nature of belief in the paranormal, albeit with somewhat different objectives in mind. Despite substantial variation across studies in the definition of the scope of paranormal belief, some degree of order can be imposed on the empirical literature by taking due account of the multidimensionality of paranormal belief. In this light, correlates of paranormal belief are surveyed in the domains of demographic variables, other beliefs and activities, cognitive variables, and personality. Particular emphasis is given to the need for a theory of the psychodynamic functions served by paranormal belief. According to Gallup poll data (Sobal & Emmons, 1982), the majority of the American population believes in one or more paranormal phenomena. The nature and the functions of these beliefs have been the subject of considerable speculation and empirical investigation by parapsychologists and skeptics alike, but as yet an explicit consensus view has failed to emerge. The objective of this paper is to review the relevant empirical literature in an endeavor to systematize the data and thereby facilitate further research on the topic. The term paranormal refers to hypothesized processes that in principle are “physically impossible” or outside the realm of human capabilities as presently conceived by conventional scientists (Thalbourne, 1982). In the present context, however, the authenticity of paranormal processes is not at issue. Whether or not psi processes actually exist, many people believe in phenomena such as ESP and PK. The scientific study of these paranor1 The author acknowledges with gratitude Michael Thalbourne’s constructive and incisive comments on the first draft of this paper. Preparation of the paper was supported by a much appreciated grant from the Parapsychology Foundation, Inc. Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 2 mal beliefs is legitimate irrespective of the ultimate resolution of the debate on the reality of the paranormal. Within the general terms of the above delineation of paranormality, there nevertheless remains a good deal of variation among researchers in what they take to be the scope of paranormal belief, ranging from narrow to all-encompassing. This variation is reflected in the currently available measures of paranormal belief. At the narrow end of the spectrum, one of the most basic operationalizations of paranormal belief is by way of the assessment of belief in ESP. Measures designed with this purpose often are termed “sheep-goat scales” because they originally were devised as a means of selecting as experimental participants people who had a strong conviction in the existence of ESP (sheep) and others who rejected any belief in ESP (goats). Commonly used sheep-goat scales are those of Bhadra (1966), Haraldssan (Thalbourne & Haraldsson, 1980), and Thalbourne (Thalbourne, 1981; Thalbourne & Haraldsson, 1980). Thalbourne’s current Australian Sheep-Goat Scale comprises 15 forced-choice (True/Uncertain/False) items, 11 of which address belief in and personal experience of ESP in general and of telepathy and precognition in particular; another two items concern belief in life after death and in contact with spirits of the dead, and two others (used only in the setting of an experimental psi test) concern beliefs about the possibility of eliciting ESP in the laboratory. Other measures of paranormal belief survey a greater range of parapsychological claims than ESP alone. Sheils and Berg’s (1977) questionnaire has five forced-choice (Agree/Uncertain/Disagree) statements expressing belief in telepathy, PK, precognition, astral projection (out-of-body experience), and psychic healing. At the broader end of the belief spectrum are researchers who deem the paranormal to encompass not only parapsychological claims but all manner of magical, superstitious; religious, supernatural, occult, and other notions such as UFOs, astrology, deja vu, the Loch Ness monster, angels, the unluckiness of walking under a ladder, haunted houses, communication with plants, witches, levitation, palmistry, voodoo, graphology, and reincarnation. It is debatable whether each of these beliefs falls within the purview of the paranormal as I have defined it above, but researchers interpret or apply the concept of paranormality in somewhat different ways. Inventories marked by this very broad perspective include Tobacyk’s Paranormal Belief Scale, or PBS (Tobacyk, 1988; Tobacyk & Milford, 1983), the Belief in the Paranormal Scale of Jones, Russell, and Nickel (1977), Otis and Alcock’s (1982) Extraordinary Belief Inventory, the Supernaturalism Scale of Randall and Desrosiers (1980), and the set of items used in the survey by Sobal and Emmons (1982). By way of illustration, responses to the 26 items of Tobacyk’s PBS are made on a 7-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree through uncertain to strongly agree; scores then are derived for the full scale and for seven separate Belief in the Paranormal 3 subscales that Tobacyk names traditional religious belief, psi belief, witchcraft, superstition, spiritualism, extraordinary life forms, and precognition. By use of these diverse measures, it has been possible to investigate empirically the bases of paranormal belief. This issue is of substantial interest, both to parapsychologists and to skeptics. For example, belief in ESP is reported to affect performance in laboratory ESP tasks: Believers tend to yield above-chance scores in these tasks, whereas disbelievers seemingly use ESP to obtain below-chance scores in a self-contradictory endeavor to demonstrate that psi does not exist (Lovitts, 1981; Palmer, 1971; Schmeidler & McConnell, 1958). Because of the intrinsic prospect of improved control of experimental ESP performance, this so-called sheep-goat effect has been the principal focus of much of the parapsychological investigation of paranormal belief. But the study of paranormal belief bears on other issues too. An understanding of the bases of these beliefs might help to account for the experience encountered by many parapsychologists of mental conflict over the evidence they obtain in support of the existence of paranormal processes (Inglis, 1986; McConnell & Clark, 1980). Additionally, research on belief, and thence disbelief, in the paranormal may throw some light on the belligerence of the response of many critics to parapsychology (Irwin, 1989). Indeed, McClenon (1982) reports that among members of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the level of disbelief in ESP is statistically related to the view that parapsychological research is not a legitimate scientific undertaking. From the skeptical viewpoint, paranormal belief also may be a factor in people’s misinterpretation of normal events as paranormal occurrences (Ayeroff & Abelson, 1976; Benassi, Sweeney, & Drevno, 1979; Jones & Russell, 1980; Singer & Benassi, 1981) and in the selective discounting of information not compatible with a paranormal interpretation (Russell & Jones, 1980; Singer & Benassi, 1981). There has even been a proposal to use the level of paranormal belief in the general population as an index of social dislocation and of the inadequacy of the U.S.’s program of science education (Singer & Benassi, 1981). Thus, advancements in the scientific understanding of paranormal beliefs potentially could have some wide-ranging implications. In any event, the nature of paranormal belief should be of interest in its own right to any professional student of human behavior. Before considering the results of empirical research on paranormal belief, some preliminary comments are appropriate on methodological matters. 2 Tobacyk’s labels for some of the PBS subscales are contentious and potentially misleading. Michael Thalbourne (personal communication, September 9, 1991) suggests that the “psi belief” subscale actually is a measure of belief in PK and that the “spiritualism” subscale might better have been named “mind-body dualism.” Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 4 GENERAL METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES One methodological issue that arises in this field of research concerns the dimensions of paranormal belief. As noted above, the designated scope of paranormal belief varies substantially across the available assessment instruments. There nevertheless is a tendency for some researchers to assume that all the questionnaires on paranormal belief are essentially measuring the same thing; in other words, there may be an assumption, often implicit, of the unidimensionality of paranormal belief. A rather insidious form of this assumption occurs when an author makes a bald statement about a feature of paranormal belief and then documents the claim with a parenthetical reference to a finding on superstitious beliefs, for example. The implication is that what is known about one instance of paranormal belief necessarily applies to them all. This type of gratuitous assumption is most common among skeptical commentators who act as if belief in ESP, belief in God, and belief in the unluckiness of the number 13 all are tarred with the same brush. One must be careful, therefore, to avoid taking at face value any sweeping generalization about paranormal belief that is founded on data for a limited range of these beliefs. Several factorial analyses suggest that paranormal belief is in fact multidimensional. Admittedly, as yet there is limited agreement on the number, identity, and orthogonality of the underlying dimensions. A small study by Sullivan (1982) reported two factors, one of “general superstitious belief” that encompassed ESP, astrology, UFOs, hauntings, biorhythms, and Tarot readings and the other an “orthogonal religious factor” reflecting items on God, evolution, and spirit possession. Three underlying factors were noted by Sobal and Emmons (1982), namely, belief in psychic phenomena, religious beliefs, and belief in the existence of “other beings” such as the Loch Ness monster and ghosts. Clarke (1991) also identified three independent dimensions more or less equivalent to those of Sobal and Emmons: traditional religious belief, psi-related belief, and belief in extraordinary life forms. Other studies suggest even greater differentiation of paranormal beliefs. Factor analyses by Tobacyk (1988; Tobacyk & Milford, 1983) yielded seven independent dimensions: traditional religious belief, psi belief, witchcraft, spiritualism, superstition, extraordinary life forms, and precognition. An Australian survey by Grimmer and White (1990) produced seven factors that they named popular science, obscure unbelief, traditional religion, alternative treatments, paratherapies, functional psi, and structural psi. Jones, Russell, and Nickel (1977) identified eight factors; one major factor pertained to supernaturalism and occultism and another to psychic phenomena, but otherwise individual factors seemed too heterogeneous to be characterized with any confidence, and in any event, they each accounted for small portions of the total variance. The disagreement between different factor analyses should be considered in light of the fact that the number of factors to emerge from these Belief in the Paranormal 5 analyses does depend in part on the range of items included in the research instrument. To take a simplistic example, a factor of religious paranormal belief probably would be apparent only if the investigator had seen fit to add a number of questions on religious belief to the initial pool of potential test items. Readers who object to the designation of socially condoned traditional religious beliefs as “paranormal” will at least have the satisfaction of noting the frequency with which religious beliefs are differenttiated from other factors in the above analyses. Be that as it may, under the broadest interpretation of the scope of paranormal belief, the domain nevertheless does emerge as multidimensional. Notwithstanding the fact of positive intercorrelations between such factors, the multidimensionality of paranormal belief indicates that a correlate reported for global paranormal belief might not necessarily apply for each factorial dimension of the domain. In this light, all possible effort should be made to be precise in specifying the facets of paranormal belief that have any nominated characteristic. Many empirical reports in the literature unfortunately are formulated as findings on undifferentiated paranormal belief. In seeking to draw generalizations about global or specific paranormal beliefs, some cognizance might also be taken of the era in which the research was undertaken. For example, a good deal of research into superstitious beliefs was conducted in the period between World Wars I and II (e.g., Dudycha, 1933; Emme, 1940; Gilliland, 1930; Ter Keurst, 1939; Wagner, 1928). But the level and pattern of adherence to paranormal beliefs in a given society may change over time (Kennedy, 1939; Levitt, 1952; Randall, 1990; Tupper & Williams, 1986), and it is therefore uncertain that the correlates of superstitiousness identified in the early research still are applicable. A further methodological difficulty in studying paranormal belief is that the data may depend to some degree on the context of their measurement. For example, there are indications that the format of the survey questionnaire can influence respondents’ acknowledgment of some of their paranormal beliefs. According to Gray (1990a), respondents give lower estimates of the extent of their paranormal belief when anomalous phenomena in which they believe are merely to be checked on a list than when they are asked to indicate the degree of belief in each phenomenon in turn. Schmeidler (1985, p. 2) and Grey (1988) similarly remark that inclusion or exclusion of a “don’t know” or “uncertain” response option can substantially affect the level of paranormal belief evidenced by a questionnaire. That is, if respondents are prevented from checking an agnostic option, they have to declare either a belief or a disbelief, and thus the evident level of belief or disbelief can be inflated. Attitudes of the investigator or test administrator are another pertinent contextual factor. In two studies, Layton and Turnbull (1975) found participants’ ESP belief scores varied with the experimenter’s expressed attitude toward the evidence for ESP. Much the same effect was obtained by Crandall (1985). Further, Fishbein and Raven (1967) note their measure of Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research 6 belief in ESP could be manipulated differentially by prior presentation to subjects of an article promoting either the existence of phenomena explicable only in terms of ESP or the methodological inadequacy of ESP experiments. These studies suggest that the measurement of paranormal belief can be subject to the demand characteristics of the test situation. It is not that such interventions necessarily change participants’ paranormal beliefs, but rather that there is an effect on the participants’ preparedness to admit to the beliefs (Irwin, 1985). Such manipulations might not be explicit nor even intentional. Indeed, the operation of unintended experimenter effects may help to account for some occasional disparities between results obtained on paranormal belief by parapsychologists and those reported by skeptics (Irwin, 1991b). The influence of a skeptical perspective on research into paranormal belief might be felt in another important respect. Much of the skeptical research on the topic seems to have had the implicit objective of demonstrating that believers in the paranormal are grossly deficient in intelligence, personality, education, and social standing. This underlying motivation is evidenced most clearly in the skeptics’ selection of variables to correlate with level of paranormal belief. Although any statistically significant data thus generated may still be very informative, the net effect of the skeptical orientation may be to bias the collective empirical literature in a negative direction. It can be argued, of course, that if believers are highly intelligent, well-educated, well-adjusted people from stable social environments, even the skeptics’ data would surely testify to this. But the fact remains that there has been a relative neglect of research into paranormal believers’ potential positive attributes such as creativity and empathy, for example. A review of the principal factors that seem to bear upon the level of the individual’s belief in the paranormal follows. Demographic variables, other belief systems, cognitive variables, and dimensions of personality are reviewed in turn. It should be noted that in this review, I have adopted in most instances a policy of citing null results only when these form a substantial proportion of the available data on a given relationship. Null results are of course useful in the collective estimation of the extent of a relationship, but they are not informative for the determination of the direction of the relationship. This review is concerned not with a metaanalysis of each specific relationship in the literature, but rather with the presence of consistencies and patterns in reported relationships. DEMOGRAPHIC CORRELATES Interest in demographic correlates of paranormal belief has been prompted primarily by the social marginality hypothesis. According to Bainbridge (1978) and Wuthnow (1976), people most susceptible to paranormal belief are members of socially marginal groups, that is, groups such as the poorly educated or the unemployed that possess characteristics or roles that rank low among dominant social values. The deprivation and Belief in the Paranormal 7 alienation associated with marginal status in society is held to encourage such people to appeal to magical and religious beliefs, presumably because these beliefs bring various compensations to the lives of their adherents. Under the social marginality hypothesis, the demographic correlates of paranormal belief should be those that represent indices of social marginality.