Mind reading and the ability to predict the future are not skills people generally associate with the human race. Yet, research shows many people genuinely believe in the existence of psychic powers.
You would think that instances of proven psychic fraud over the years would weaken the credibility of psychic claims. There have been historical cases, such as Lajos Pap, the Hungarian spiritualist medium, who was found to be faking animal appearances at seances. And then more recently, self described psychic James Hydrick was revealed as a trickster. Hydrick confessed his paranormal demonstrations were tricks learned in prison.
A recent report may help to shed some light on why people continue to believe in psychic powers. The study tested believers and sceptics with the same level of education and academic performance and found that people who believe in psychic powers think less analytically. This means that they tend to interpret the world from a subjective personal perspective and fail to consider information critically.
Believers also often view psychic claims as confirmatory evidence — regardless of their evidential basis. The case of Chris Robinson, who refers to himself as a “dream detective”, demonstrates this.
Robinson claims to have foreseen terrorist attacks, disasters and celebrity deaths. His assertions derive from limited and questionable evidence. Tests conducted by Gary Schwartz at the University of Arizona provided support for Robinson’s ability, however, other researchers using similar methods failed to confirm Schwartz’s conclusion.
A survey of belief in conspiracy theories, the remote associates test (e.g. which one word is related to all of the following?: falling, actor, dust*), and a test of logic (e.g. fill in the blank spaces: “escape, scape, cape, _ _ _**). On all these tests, the sceptics outperformed the believers (statistically speaking, the effect sizes varied from small to large across the different measures). This was despite the fact that the believers scored as highly as the sceptics on “need for cognition” suggesting their poorer analytical performance wasn’t due to low motivation.
The results don’t prove that relatively poor analytical thinking skills cause people to become believers in psychic phenomena, but they are certainly consistent with the idea that a lack of these skills may leave people more prone to developing such beliefs, for example by undermining their ability to scrutinise whether last night’s dream really did predict today’s events (unlike a sceptic, a believer might not take into account all their dreams that didn’t appear to foretell the future, nor realise that the dream was influenced by the same past events that also shaped the future).
A lack of analytical skills might be especially pertinent for people who are in regular contact with others who endorse the idea of psychic phenomena. Indeed, 70 per cent of believers said their beliefs were in line with those held by their friends and family.
