Why People Believe in Spirits, God and Magic (The Paranormal)

Paranormal activity: Do Catholics believe in ghosts?

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Since people have been people, experts figure, they have believed in the supernatural, from gods to ghosts and now every sort of monster in between. For example, very few people believe in faeries and elves these days. But as belief in faeries faded, other beliefs, such as belief in UFOs, emerged to take their place.

At one point people didn't understand why the sun rose and set each day, so they suggested that a chariot pulled the sun across the heavens.

Before modern scientific explanations of germ theory, explained Radford, who writes the "Bad Science" column for LiveScience , people didn't understand how diseases could travel from one person to another. Which raises the bigger question: With science having answered so many questions in the past couple centuries, why do paranormal beliefs remain so strong?

Belief in supernatural beings is totally natural – and false

Sometimes the belief in curses crosses paths with religion, as was the case in when televangelist John Hagee whose endorsement was solicited and received by presidential hopeful John McCain blamed Hurricane Katrina on God's wrath for a gay parade that had been scheduled for the Monday of the storm's arrival. Another study, of U.

Believers were the least likely to buy into the paranormal.

Cronk, the psychologist, did a small survey of 80 college students and found no connection between religiosity and paranormal belief. But a study in Canada did find a correlation between religious beliefs and paranormal beliefs, Cronk notes.

He figures that among other explanations, Canadians may not have the same belief systems as U. Those people less susceptible to that method of forming beliefs may still end up being highly religious if they were raised in a religious family. Mencken, the Baylor sociologist, says sacrifice and stigma for holding ideas outside the group norm keep the paranormal at bay among the highly religious.

He has two papers forthcoming that are based on a national survey of 1, people. The first, to be published in the journal Sociology of Religion in , reveals this:. A third group, which he calls naturalists, do not hold supernatural views, Christian or paranormal. Another study to published in December in the Review of Religious Research , shows that those who go to church "are much less likely to consult horoscopes, visit psychics, purchase New Age items," and so on, Mencken said.

Profiling the typical Bigfoot believer turns out to be as challenging as determining the scientific methodology of a psychic, however. Belief in the paranormal — from astrology to communicating with the dead — increases during college, rising from 23 percent among freshmen to 31 percent in seniors and 34 percent among graduate students.

Bader, the sociologist at Baylor, and his colleagues teamed up with the Gallup organization to conduct a national survey of 1, people in and found nearly 30 percent think it is possible to influence the physical world through the mind alone another 30 percent were undecided on that point. More than 20 percent figure it's possible to communicate with the dead. Nearly 40 percent believe in haunted houses. Asked if " creatures such as Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster will one day be discovered by science," In a remote Himalayan village, on the other hand, belief in Bigfoot's cousin, the yeti, is seen by some as a sign of ignorance.

Today's ubiquitous and often one-sided, promotional coverage of the paranormal, both on the Internet and TV, perpetuate myths and folklore as well or better than any ancient storyteller. Scientists are left with an impossible task: You can prove a rock is there. You can't prove that Bigfoot or a ghost or the god of thunder is not there. Bigfoot paraphernalia purveyors and cash-cow psychics know this well.

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Or, in the case of the unsupportive DNA testing on Bigfoot last week, the top proponent, Tom Biscardi who recently produced a film about Bigfoot and might be said to have an interest in garnering press coverage , simply dodged the mythbusting bullet by claiming the DNA samples might have been contaminated. Regarding the chupacabra "sighting" last week in Cuero, Texas: Recent psychological research has found a surprising relationship between these types of personal convictions; espousal of conspiracy theories, pseudo-science and belief in the paranormal turn out to be highly correlated with one another.

What could explain these findings? In fact, a new study explored this very question and suggests that the answer may indeed lie in the way we think about things, or, more precisely, the way in which we fail to think about things. The research team designed a number of clever experiments to test their hypothesis.

After providing their date of birth, participants received a personality description that matched their astral theme. These are statements that could ring true for nearly anyone e. Participants were then asked to evaluate how accurate they thought this description was. The cognitive reflection test is a very short three-item test that essentially measures whether you are more of an intuitive or reflective thinker. Yet, this is also the wrong answer.

More reflective thinkers tend to suppress this automatic and intuitive answer and are more suspicious of the first thing that comes to mind. The researchers found that although both intuitive and reflective thinkers somewhat recognized the statements as being descriptive of their personality, reflective thinkers were much less likely to recognize the Barnum statements as correct. This relationship persisted after controlling for any prior differences in paranormal beliefs. To test this assertion more directly, the researchers conducted another experiment.

In the second experiment, a different group of students were studied, but this time they were told that the purpose of the study was to examine telepathy i. This time, the experimenters asked participants directly whether they thought the event was simply a result of luck, probability or a non-scientific explanation such as extrasensory perception ESP. For example, consider the following two statements; A Linda can predict the future and B Linda can predict the future and also read your mind. Recent research has shown that people who espouse paranormal and conspiratorial beliefs are much more susceptible to the conjunction-fallacy.

For example, consider the fact that people often endorse multiple or contradictory conspiracy theories about the same event, where belief in one conspiracy serves as evidence for belief in another.

Yet, the likelihood that two or many different conspiratorial explanations about world events are all true at the same time is increasingly unlikely. Why kill the magic? Not everything needs to be explained by science.

Yet misinformation of this kind can be harmful.

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