Zusammenfassung der Ressource
Anomalistic Psychology
- Anomalous Experience: Experience that is irregular and does not fit into existing explanations
- Pseudoscience
- Lacks falsifiability
- not able to prove a hypothesis wrong
- Jealous phenomena: phenomena disappears as sceptics are present
- Occam's Razor: if there are two competing explanations, the simpler one is used
- Not Objective
- Lacks replicability
- Example: Ganzfeld study
- Failure to replicate
studies, especially by
non-believers
- Lacks theory to
explain the effects
- did not give any
theoretical
explanations
- Example: how does ESP happen
- Burden of proof
- supporters argues that the burden of proof is not theirs
even if it should lie with them instead of the sceptics
- Lacks ability to change
- the same explanation is used even if
people fails to find support for it
- Evaluation
- Paranormal research is not
the only pseudoscience.
Example: Freud's theory
- Mousseau: Compared articles in
peer-reviewed parapsychology
journals. She found43% produced
empirical data and 24% used the
experimental method which
suggests that mainstream research
are more scientific. However, she
found evidence of selective
reporting/ file-drawer effect
- The American Association
for the Advancement of
Science (AAAS) allowed
Parapsychological
Association (PA) to be an
affiliated member in 1969.
- Credible research may
lead to valuable
discoveries. Example:
Acupuncture is now a
valuable therapy as it
has demonstrated
replicable results
- ESP (extrasensory perception): the
perception of objects or events without any
of the known physical senses being involved.
- Honorton: (Ganzfeld
technique) The receiver is
isolated in a red-lit room
with halved table-tennis
balls taped over their eyes
and earphones playing
white noise. The sender is
in another room and
chooses one of four images
randomly to send
telepathically. The receiver
is asked to select the target
images from several other
and the judge records that
data.
- Researcher Bias: Wooffitt found that
sceptic researchers are less
encouraging than researchers who are
believers. This is known as the
sheep-goat effect.
- Hyman: re-analysed Honorton's analysis of 28 Ganzfeld
studies which showed that performance was significantly
above chance. He found that the results are not
significant
- File-drawer effect: Some researchers file away
studies with negative outcomes, this leads to a
publication bias
- Lack of control: The receiver may be able to
hear the stimuli. Also, the first image chosen
may be not random.
- Autoganzfeld technique: The researcher must state whether
the study was pilot or not before starting the study. The
images should be chosen by a computer instead of the sender
- Fraudulent research (E.g. Sargent)
- Jealous Phenonmena
- Psychokinesis (PK)
- Macro-PK
- Wiseman and Greening
- Micro-PK: affecting the results of
something that cannot be seen with
the naked eyes without touching it
physically, a statistical test is usually
needed to determine whether there
is a change or not
- Helmut Schmidt: Random
Events Generator (REG), E.g.
electronic coin flipper,
Participants are told to
influence REG by coming up
with more heads than tails
or vice versa
- Radin and Nelson: Positive results may be due to the small sample size
- Ecological validity: REG is not appropriate to study PK
- Explanations for anomalous experience
- Coincidence
- Illusion of causality: When two events
happen at about the same time, people
wrongly assumed causal relationship
between them
- Illusion of control: people feel they
control things when they are not
- Whitson and Galinsky: Found
reduced reduced control led
participants to detect
patterns when there were
none and form illusory
correlations between
unrelated events
- General Cognitive Ability: intelligence is lower in believers (sheep) than sceptics (goats)
- Gray: Believers have
significantly lower academic
results than sceptics
- Evans: New Scientist readers are
assumed to have high cognitive ability
as they are mainly scientists and
engineers. When they were
questioned, 67% regarded ESP as an
"established fact" or "likely possibility"
- Wiseman and Watt: Found that sheep
and goat only differ in terms of
syllogistic reasoning rather than
cognitive ability
- Probability Judgement: the likelihood of an event occurring
- Repetition avoidance:
consecutive repetitions in a
true series of random
numbers that people may
underestimate probability
are less likely to produce
- Brugger et al: Found that sheep avoid
producing repetitions more than goats
- Questions about probability
- Birthday Paradox: 23 random
people have a 50/50 chance of
having the same birthday
- Blackmore and
Troscianko: asked
participants various
questions about
birthday party paradox
and found that more
goats than sheep got
this right
- Conjunction fallacy
- conjunction vignettes:
descriptions of occasions
where two events co-occur
- Rogers et al: Tested probability judgements by giving
participants 16 conjunction vignettes and ask them to
indicate the probability of such events co-occurring. They
found that sheep made more conjunction errors than
goats.
- Blackmore and Troscianko:
suggests that paranormal
experiences are a kind of
"cognitive illusion" resulting from
a failure to accurately judge
probability
- Evaluation
- Not all research has found a difference between sheeps and goats in terms of their
probably judgements. This may be due to the difference in the way "belief" is
determined.
- As research evidence are mainly correlation, it only
suggests that there is a link but not a causal relationship
- Musch and Ehrenberg: controlled for differences in general
cognitive ability and found this reduced the performance
difference between believers and non-believerson probability
judgement tasks to zero
- Kahnerman and Tversky: suggest that
people use various heuristics (strategies to
solve problems), for example
representativeness
- Superstitious behaviour and Magical thinking
- Superstitious behaviour
- Type 1 and 2 errors
- It is better to erroneously assume
causality between unrelated events
that co-occur than occasionally miss
a genuine one.This behaviour is
adaptive
- Behaviourist explanation
- Skinner: Proposed that superstitions develop through operant
conditioning where an accidental stimulus-response link is learnt
and negative reinforcement where anxiety is reduced when the
behaviour is repeated
- Illusion of control
- Whitson and Galinsky: ask participants to recall situations in
their lives. One group was asked to recall situations where they
felt in control while the other recall those where they felt a lack of
control. They were then given a story involving a superstitious
behaviour and asked to judge how much this affected the
eventual outcome of the meeting. Participants who had been
made to ell less in control were more likely to believe that the
superstitious behaviour affected the eventual outcome.
- Evaluation
- Staddon and Simmelhag: repeated
Skinner's experiment and found
superstitious behaviour unrelated to
food reward.
- Matute: humans did learn to press a
button despite no actual
effectiveness
- Damisch et al : illusion of control increases self-efficacy
- Magical thinking
- Freud: identified magical
thinking as a form of childlike
thought where inner feelings
are projected onto the outer
world.
- Dual Processing theory: two ways of thinking, adult
thinking which is logical and child thinking which lacks
internal logic
- Animism: Piaget: children ascribe feelings
to physical objects
- Nominal realism: children have
difficulty separating the name of things
from the things themselves.
- Lack of contagion: things having been in contact
continue to act on each other even after physical contact
ceases.
- Nemeroff and Rozin: suggests that our evolved
fear of contagion is adaptive
- Evaluation
- Pronin et al: experimental support with voodoo dolls, participants felt more responsible if they had bad thoughts
- Rosenthal and Jacobsen: self-fulfilling prophecy; may act like a placebo and provide positive expectations
- associated with mental disorders, for example, schizophrenia, and OCD
- Avoid "depression realism" as lack of magical thinking linked to low dopamine levels
- Vamos: real-work application; increases willingness to donate organs for transplant
- Personality factors
- Eysenck (behavourist)
- Extraversion and
Introverts: Extraversion is
the need of external
stimulation to bring up to
optimal level of
performance while
introverts is the need of
peace and quiet to bring up
to optimal level of
performance
- Research studies
- Peltzer: suggests that extraversion is
associated with paranormal beliefs but not
neuroticism and psychoticism
- Honorton: carried out a
meta-analysis of 60
studies reliant
extraversion to ESP and
found overall there is a
correlation. This may be
due to extraverts being
able to respond to new
stimuli bette, thus are
more open to
paranormal
experiences.
- Evaluation
- Wolfradt: suggests that
only forms of psi
correlate positively with
an external locus of
control while some
negatively
- Davies and
Kirbky: proposed
that there is a
relationship
between internal
locus of control
and paranormal
belief
- Groth-Marnat and Pegden:
Internal locus of control is
related to superstition while
external locus of control is
related to spirituality and
precognition
- Neuroticism: high levels of negative
effect, e.g. depression and anxiety
- Williams: tested nearly 300 Welsh
school children and found a significant
correlation of +.32 between
neuroticism and paranormal beliefs,
but not between paranormal beliefs
and either extraversion or psychoticism
- Evaluation: Wieman and Watt:
focus on just the superstition
sub-scale of the Paranormal
Belief Scale and found that
neuroticism only relates to
bad-luck and does not explain all
paranormal beliefs
- Psychoticism/Socialization: associate
with liability to have a psychotic
episode and aggression
- Evaluation: Francis: tested 20000 UK children
aged 13-15 and found that increase in
psychoticism correlate with unconventional
paranormal beliefs
- More imaginative personlaity
- Fantasy proneness: difficulty in separating
reality from fantasy, absorbed in a fantasy
- Wiseman et al: (mock
séance) one actor suggests
that a table was levitating
even though it was't, more
believers than
non-believers reported
that the table had moved
- Suggestibility: the inclination to accept the suggestion of
the others. People who are more suggestive are more
easily hypnotised
- Hergovich: linked suggestibility to
paranormal belief as some involve
deception (E.g. Uri Geller) and found a
positive correlation between suggestibility
and paranormal belief
- Creative personality
- Thalbourne: meta-analysis of
relevant studies and found a
correlation between creative and
paranormal beliefs
- False memories: memories that did not happen but
feels as if it is real
- Clancy et al: found that people who claimed to have experienced
an alien abduction were found to be ore susceptible to false
memories
- French and Wilson: Gave 100 participants a questionnaire which contains 4/5 real
and 1/5 fictitious statements. They found that 36% claim to have seen the
fictitious and these people score higher on paranormal belief and experience
- Research into exceptional experiences
- Psychic Healing: the ability to cause positive
changes in physical well-being without the use
of known medical techniques or effects
- Explanations
- Energy fields re-aligned by, for example, therapeutic touch (TT)
- Reduction of anxiety through
psychological support
- Placebo effect: expectations of
benefit created by success
stories which could be due to
spontaneous recovery
- Evaluation
- Lyvers et al: no evidence for psychic healing, believers improved more
- Benson et al: No placebo effect for prayers for cardiac recovery
- Research studies
- With et al: tested participants treated with TT or no touch and
found that the former recovered faster
- Evaluation: Wirth's results haven't been replicated and was subsequently convicted of criminal fraud
- Psychic mediumship: where a medium uses
psychic abilities to carry out readings
- Explanations
- Clues help medium produce accurate information
without psychic abilities
- Schwartz et al: accuracy of medium statements are about 80%
- Evaluation: O'Keefe and
Wiseman: 5 mediums gave
reading to 5 sitters producing 25
statements which were created
by sitters as having little
relevance
- Out- of body experiences: the sensation of being
awake and seeing your body from a location
outside your physical body
- Explanations
- Paranormal: mind and body separates
- Biological: sensory disturbances
- Evaluation: Alvarado: found no evidence of parasomatic body having physically moved
- Research studies: Blanke et al: stimulation of the
temporal-parietal junction of the brain resulted in OOBEs
- Evaluation: difficult to study OOBEs scientifically as they occur unpredictably and artificially-induced OOBEs are not seen as equivalent
- Near-death experience: occur when someone is close
to death and also fainting or simply in stressful or
threatening situations
- REM intrusions due to hypoxia
disrupt integration of sensory
information
- Jansen: ketamine can produce symptoms of NDEs and
ketamine has same effect as glutamate
- Evaluation
- Investigator bias may affect data collected
- Early studies are poorly controlled
- Nelson et al: NDE group are more likely to experience REM intrusions