British researchers have scoured forty years of professional literature to determine what typifies people who believe in ghosts, mind reading, clairvoyance and so on.

People who are themselves skeptical about paranormal phenomena, will thus think theirs of people who fully believe in them. But in what ways do the two groups differ from each other? That investigated Charlotte Dean and colleagues from the University of Hertfordshire in England.

Dean and her team did not conduct their own research for this. Instead, they collected as many studies as possible on the subject from the past forty years. They took a critical look at them to determine what general conclusions you could draw from them. A lot of them just don’t seem to exist.

Missing items

Initially, the researchers found 475 potentially relevant studies in four databases with scientific articles. They eventually included 71 of these in their overview, in which a total of almost 21,000 test subjects took part.

That may sound like quite a number. However, it seems that the researchers have by no means been able to uncover all studies into belief in the paranormal. “Only half of the articles on my resume that I thought were relevant to this topic were included,” says Chris French, Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Goldsmiths College at the University of London. “That makes me wonder how many relevant articles from other labs have been left out.”

Recognize faces

As for the articles that have been studied, a number of characteristics emerge that ‘believers’ seem to share with each other. For example, they often seem to be intuitive thinkers: they think “fast, guided by their emotions”.

They are also more inclined than skeptics to confirmation bias (‘confirmation bias’)† That is, they value information that confirms their ideas more than information that doesn’t. They are also more likely to dismiss evidence that contradicts their ideas. Furthermore, they more often have a tendency to incorrectly recognize faces in pictures.

Conflicting studies

According to a majority of the studies reviewed, the believers also have difficulty with reasoning that involves randomness. For example, one study asked subjects what the most likely outcome is if you flip a coin six times. Is that (1) heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, heads, (2) heads, heads, heads, heads, tails, tails, 3) heads, tails, heads, heads, tails, tails, or 4) are all three outcomes equally likely? Believers in the paranormal are more likely to get that sort of question wrong than skeptics.

Another point is ‘conditional reasoning’. “In doing so, someone has to draw a conclusion from a conditional sentence,” explains Dean. “For example: if today is Monday, I have to go to work. The studies we looked at suggest that skeptics perform better at these reasoning tasks than people who believe in the paranormal.”

However, for the vast majority of traits that might distinguish paranormal believers from skeptics, the studies contradict each other: one finds a connection, the other does not. “That’s also what I would expect,” says French. “Fairly consistent evidence for the prevalence of some cognitive impairments among believers than among skeptics, meager or no evidence for others.”

especially students

While Dean and colleagues rate most of the studies reviewed as “well done,” they also highlight a number of flaws. For example, more than two-thirds of the test subjects were students (often even psychology students). It is then always questionable whether the results provide a good picture of the entire population. Also, many scientists do not discuss the limitations of their research in the article they have published about it.

However, the quality of the studies has increased noticeably over the decades, Dean and her team note. That’s not surprising, says French. “The replication crisis in psychology has made us much more aware of questionable research practices and how to avoid them.”

moving objects

French himself notes that much of the research on the subject has been done by skeptical psychologists (like himself) who looked for abnormalities among people who believe in the paranormal. “Little research has been done into the possibility that skeptics also suffer from certain cognitive biases† For example, would they tend not to believe what they see with their own eyes?”

For example, suppose you show them an object that appears to be moving because someone is exerting telekinetic forces on it, the psychologist continues. “It then seems reasonable to doubt whether telekinesis really exists. But might some skeptics deny seeing the object move at all? Who knows, those kinds of studies might paint a different picture than this new study.”