Reasoning In Believers in the Paranormal - Essay Example

Reasoning in Believers in the Paranormal By Emma Lawrence and Emmanuelle Peters (Critical review) ‘Reasoning in Believers in the Paranormal’ is a very technical article on the subject. Although the facts presented are backed by rigorous researches conducted by various scholars, there was nothing new that was presented in it. The experiments mentioned in the article only prove that people with paranormal beliefs have a certain bias referred to as the domain-specificity of reasoning. The only positive review that can possibly be given to this article is that it supports previous studies on the subject. For this study, a total of 174 people from the Society of Psychical Research completed a questionnaire for the research methodology. This questionnaire contained two major sections; deductive reasoning and delusional-ideation. The research method was very intelligent with a slight manipulation of the data, only to get things in line, other than that, it is an absolutely brilliant addition to the study of paranormal beliefs. Although this study is wonderful in its own regards but the research process only included those individual who had only a belief in the paranormal, not an experience. This can put a question mark on the usefulness of this study because majority of the people only believe in paranormal as a mere belief. They believe in such activities (paranormal) because sometimes they cannot explain a certain event. And in order to justify it, they ‘believe’ that something paranormal must have interfered. This is belief or support to something without a proof (probably the absence of proof is the proof itself). It has already been proven that people who have faith in such things and beliefs have certain cognitive ‘deficits’ (Irwin, 1993, 2008; Irwin & Watt, 2007; Wiseman & Watt, 2006), which is why this article only endorses such studies and provides nothing ‘unpredictable’. The study by Lawrence and Peters suggests that perhaps the reasoning abnormalities are the major reasons why people believe in paranormal. And interestingly, the mechanism behind this belief-system is the dissociation between experience and the belief itself that drives people to relate unexplainable events with paranormal phenomena. And such beliefs grow at the evaluative stage of the process, rather than the perceptual one. This finding is quite in accordance with the study findings by Gilovich (1991), Martin (1998) and Watt (1990/1991), which suggest a consequence for believing in paranormal is misunderstanding probabilities. Probability for any event is a very objective phenomenon and there is no objectivity or perception behind it. This also supports the study under consideration that the belief in the paranormal is an evaluative thought process and not a mere perceptual one. Another psychology experiment conducted by Hergovich and Arendasy (2004) also supports the conclusions drawn from this article. They conducted a study to establish the relationship (the nature of the relationship) between critical thinking and the belief in the paranormal, 180 students from various study departments (computer science, psychology and arts) were given to complete two part scale questionnaire; the Paranormal Belief Scale (Tobacyk & Milford, 1983) and paranormal experience scale. One half of the students completed the Cornell Critical Thinking Test (Ennis & Millmann, 1985) and the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (Watson & Glaser, 2002). Looking at the bigger picture of the results of this study, there is no correlation between critical thinking and the belief or experience of paranormal. But on a finer level, reasoning had a much more significant impact on paranormal belief mark. This also endorses the study of the article under consideration that belief in paranormal has more to do with the evaluation process of the believer (believer of paranormal) and not the perception. Despite the fact that the conclusion to the article is not very different from the rest of the studies in this departments, there is one thing mentioned in the article that stands out (this is not the experiment for the article but only a reference) which is on schizotypy. The aspect that has been critiqued in this article is on the finding that the American literature is somewhat oriented towards categorizing delineated people as schizo taxon – something that has to do with the genetics of the person (carrying the schizo genes) (Lenzen-Weger, 1993; Meehl, 1990). It is a very vivid conclusion reported in the article (that many will agree with) that this categorization and its separate diagnosis are a bit odd in theory. A personality tagged as schizo, emerged out of categorical conceptualization of mental illness. There is a slight contradiction in what has been proposed in this article regarding the deficiency in reasoning for delusional people (who believe in paranormal) and the study proposed by Wierzbicki (1985). The article under consideration proposes that delusional people represent certain biases in reasoning that are specific and not general in nature. The article mentions Kemp et al. (1997) as a reference. Whereas studies proposed by the likes of Wierzbicki (1985) state that people who believe in paranormal generally make errors in syllogistic reasoning and show a ‘general’ (not specific) cognitive ability. Tobacyk (1984) as well as Messer & Griggs (1989) also agree with such findings in their studies. They proposed that college students who firmly believed in paranormal activities score lesser marks than the students who don’t believe in such phenomena. All of these findings points to the generalization and not specificity. Even more so there are studies that go beyond simple generalization of establishing the above mentioned relationship between cognitive ability and paranormal beliefs. There are studies that have developed strong correlation between paranormal beliefs and low probabilistic reasoning (Musch & Ehrenberg, 2002). The study conducted by Musch and Ehrenberg (2002) is particularly interesting as it establishes the generalization once more. They conducted the experiments and found that the general cognitive ability was the main factor responsible for the relationship between belief in paranormal and probability reasoning. When they controlled the cognitive ability of their samples, the relationship (correlation) between the paranormal beliefs and probability reasoning vanished. But again, the relationship between cognitive ability and paranormal belief was considerably high. The comparison this article gives about the biological and cognitive levels is very useful as it clears some confusion. The article has shown how both studies and their findings converge to the same point. Usually schizotypal and delusional people are considered under separate headings, when in fact studies show considerable similarities between the two kinds. Studies conducted by Colbert and Peters (2002) found that people who scored high on Peters et al. Delusions Inventory (PDI; Peters et al., 1999b; in press) and those who were clinically delusional, both exhibited the same jump-to-conclusion style of reasoning (Garety et al., 1991). Moreover other studies mentioned also reinforce the idea on the probabilistic reasoning (also mentioned above) that belief in paranormal activities and delusional behaviour is usually a result of not acknowledging the chance, probability or coincidence, paranormal seems the easiest justification (French, 1992). This finding is very critical because such syndromes have long been associated with Hyperdopaminergicity (Gary et al., 1991), therefore giving strong support that both biological and purely psychological (cognitive) studies both give parallel conclusions. The article mentions certain experiments and findings on probabilistic tasks and reasoning which are very informative but there have been much simpler studies on the same subject – studies by the likes of Blackmore and Troscianko (1985). In fact, they were the first ones to test the probabilistic reasoning skills of paranormal believers. They’re experiment included two groups; paranormal believers and non-believers, who were questioned about a random string of numbers shown to them earlier, coin toss test (whether the outcome of 20 tosses was biased or unbiased) and decisions based on sampling (where red and blue samples were used). Results indicated that randomness string test showed no difference between the groups but there were differences in the probabilistic reasoning and sampling tests. People, who somehow believed in extra sensory perception, made more errors in their judgements both in coin toss and sampling-decision tests. This study is in direct confirmation of jumping-to-conclusion strategy that psi-believers use. Such individuals usually look for reasons out of the scope of reality. They look for casual relationships when there isn’t any and try to include supernatural in the reasoning equation. Blackmore and Troscianko (1985) named this habit of undermining chance/probability as ‘chance undermine shift’ and suggested that people who engage in ignoring chance may even strengthen their belief in supernatural even though there is no proof for the supernatural to exist. The article mentions the findings of Ross & Anderson (1982) who concluded about the ‘normal confirmation bias’, that psi believers are more prone to this behaviour in comparison with non-believers. This finding somewhat supports the study conducted by Bressan (2002) who explained in his study that paranormal believers require less objective evidence to establish a cause and effect relationship. It can also be interpreted as; psi believers are more prone to misperceiving meaning (relatedness) in random noise. This only endorses the study presented in the article that people who believe in paranormal cheery pick their reasons and evidence and ignore those which contradict their beliefs or perceptions. Same is the case with Bressan (2002) study which says that psi believers make their own (wrongful meanings) out of random events (cherry picking or ‘normal confirmation bias’). The above mentioned behaviour is also recognized as ‘representativeness heuristic’. The representativeness heuristic is a cognitive convention related to subjective probability. This can be an excellent explanation of ‘normal confirmation bias’ as it gives an insight of a psi believer. Representative heuristic is the phenomenon by which a psi believer judges an event on the basis of its resemblance with either the entire representation or some salient features of its parent population or by the way that particular event occurred (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972; Tversky & Kahneman, 1982). In the former incident where there is a match of representativeness, psi believers recognise and consider the category prototype while in the latter incident where the salient features strike the psi believer wrongfully perceives as outcome with some previous process. Russell Jones’s study (1980) fits perfectly with the above sequence of findings (ignoring the timeline). He showed that both believers and non-believers of psi exhibited emotional arousal when they read counter-attitudinal content but the psi believers showed more ‘selective bias’ when it came to recalling the information. They were able to recall more content corresponding to their beliefs. It has been established that the findings of the study conducted in the article only supports previous studies in this regard but there is slightly technical addition to this series of studies on paranormal beliefs that this article contributes. From the experiment, it was evident that people with delusional ideation performed poorly on deductive reasoning tasks than people who had less stronger beliefs in paranormal. But the reason behind this can be implied from the experimental process; the reasoning abnormalities exhibited by delusion prone individuals suggests that the problem (assuming that low deductive reasoning score is a problem) was not due to the holding on to the delusional beliefs but it was due to the formation of such beliefs. There is one interesting revelation in this article which might seem a little odd but it definitely clears the point. The participants of the study who had experience of paranormal did not show much relation between their experience of paranormal and reasoning-abnormalities. This seem strange because people who strongly believe in paranormal showed abnormalities in their reasoning, the pattern would suggest that people who have had the experience of paranormal must exhibit stronger characteristics of the presumable effects of the phenomenon but it wasn’t the case. This all concludes one thing that belief is not a simple thing; it is a process of interpretation and can have more intense effects on its holder than the experience of the belief itself. The conclusion of the article is the same as the studies before; people who believed in paranormal showed more delusional ideation and scored less on deductive reasoning during the experiment but the story doesn’t end there. The conclusion again confirms the ‘representativeness heuristic’ as people who had paranormal beliefs did not show such behaviour with the questions that were congruent with their beliefs. The approach and methodology of the study has been very satisfactory and convincing. Despite the fact that much research has already been done in this subject, this study added some fine technical aspects regarding belief in the paranormal. The quantitative design of the study was technically sound as 174 people were incorporated in the study. Qualitative study was planned with exceptional presentation as an abstract was provided before anything that gave the idea even to the people who didn’t know anything about the previous studies in this regards. The way two variables (within-participants and one in between-participant) were used really helped in shaping the statistics of the study. The results and all the calculations were very clearly coded and there was very less complexity and ambiguity. Almost no problems were faced in this study except for the fact that data was shaped in a way to make the findings more accurate and feasible. The methods used, the data incorporated, the variables induced in the study, all have been very useful and productive as the findings of the study confirms previous studies in this discipline. There are hardly any other interpretations of the study as the conclusions are quite clear. And if the conclusions of the study are proven wrong, then it can create serious problems as belief in paranormal can become a trend to follow. Probably the study doesn’t need to be replicated as it checked all the marks of a research study. But there is always room for improvement; using a bigger sample can be a good idea. The study is very important for the subject of psychology and is a great addition to the previous research. Anyone who is interested in the paranormal can benefit from this study. Works Cited A. Hergovich, M. Arendasy (2005). Critical thinking ability and belief in the paranormal. 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