Education and paranormal beliefs.

[Admin]

There's a good feature in the current Skeptical Inquirer where Bryan Farha and Gary Steward Jr. analysed the beliefs of college students to see what effect education has on belief in the paranormal. Their results were compared to a similar Gallup poll conducted in 2001.

The thirteen dimensions of belief are shown in the table below. The 2001 Gallup results are in parentheses:

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Paranormal Dimension

Believe (%)

Not Sure (%)

Don't believe (%)

Psychic or spiritual healing or the power of the mind to heal the body.

56 (54)

26 (19)

18 (26)

ESP

28 (50)

39 (20)

33 (27)

That houses can be haunted.

40 (42)

25 (16)

34 (41)

That people on this earth are sometimes possessed by the devil.

40 (41)

28 (16)

31 (41)

Ghosts or that spirits of dead people can come back in certain places and situations.

39 (38)

27 (17)

34 (44)

Telepathy, or communication between minds without using the traditional five senses.

24 (36)

34 (26)

42 (35)

That extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past.

17 (33)

34 (27)

48 (38)

Clairvoyance, or the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future.

24 (32)

33 (23)

42 (45)

That people can hear from or communicate mentally with someone who has died.

16 (28)

29 (26)

54 (46)

Astrology, or the position of the stars and planets can affect people's lives.

17 (28)

26 (18)

57 (52)

Witches.

26 (26)

19 (15)

55 (59)

Reincarnation, that is, the rebirth of the soul in a new body after death.

14 (25)

28 (20)

57 (54)

Channeling, or allowing a "spirit being" to temporarily assume control of a human body during a trance.

10 (15)

29 (21)

61 (62)

_________________________________________________

These results are from the southwest central region of the US so due to cultural differences may not be a great match to belief in the UK but the data are interesting nonetheless.

I find the belief in spiritual healing (56%) to be far higher than I would have imagined, and the belief in physical mediumship (10%) slightly lower.

[Admin]

Further results showed that students' belief in the paranormal increases as their level of education increases:

_________________________________________________

Education level

Believers (%)

Freshmen

23

Sophomores

26

Juniors

27

Seniors

31

Graduate students

34

_________________________________________________

Also the area of study was looked at:

_________________________________________________

Area of Study

Believers (%)

Social sciences

31

Education

29

Humanities

26*

Business

26*

Sciences

25

Undecided

24

Fine arts

23*

_________________________________________________

*denotes a low number of participants in the study.

[Admin]

I think that many people expect intelligence levels/degree of education to be inversely proportional to paranormal beliefs, yet when studies like this one are done they show that erroneous beliefs tend to increase with increasing intelligence levels.

It seems paradoxical but to quote Michael Shermer, “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons”.

Of course, many beliefs are not formed for reasons of logic in the first place and they do not need to be logical to be appealing. People who hold erroneous beliefs often find ways of justifying their beliefs, although they are often relying on logical fallacies to do so.

This is why many people who have degrees and high IQs can believe that they can be healed with Reiki energy or that their future can be foreseen in the stars.

I find this quite interesting; however, there’s a lesson to be learned from it. We should not assume that those who hold these erroneous beliefs are stupid people – it’s more likely to be quite the opposite!

[Eddiesilence]

Interestingly, high levels of education and erroneous beliefs are linked with regard to other areas, such as history, and susceptibility to cult involvement.

American historian James Loewen, wrote a groundbreaking book called 'Lies My Teacher Told Me.' Loewen spent two years at the Smithsonian Institute, checking out what is taught in high-school level history. He discovered "an embarrassing amalgam of bland optimism, blind patriotism, and misinformation pure and simple."

This has lethal ramifications: Noam Chomsky found that better-educated Americans were far more likely to support the Vietnam War than the uneducated, and moreover, they would defend it using intellectual arguments based on the orthodoxy of myth and propaganda, masquerading as current affairs and news. Supporters of the Vietnam War were ordinarily 'well read', and they kept up with 'events' in the world by doing things like reading the newspapers and going to college. It is an obvious and disgraceful truth that the more one studies state-approved history, the stupider one gets. This leads us to the unsurprising observation that today, the better-educated American is more likely to be a Republican.

It stands to reason that propaganda is primarily aimed at those who vote, and particularly at the middle classes and the wealthy - they can offer something to the state. But what's the point in propagandising poor black people in ghettoes? And why would we try to convince Palestinians that their lives are different to their reality? What can the underclasses provide to elites? They have no money, and a very harsh lifestyle, which you just can't disabuse them of. Therefore we have predatory elites, and blowback in the form of the Battle of Seattle, the Weather Underground and the Black Panthers, Hamas and Hizbollah.

Educated stupidity could perhaps be avoided with the introduction of courses in critical thinking. It is notable that the USA (and the UK) did not, and does not, include such courses as a standard part of the high school curriculum. It was obvious to our forefathers; Thomas Jefferson stated that critical thinking should be an intrinsic part of everyone's schooling, in order 'to teach a person to know the ways of the human heart so well that they couldn't be cheated or fooled.'

But sadly, Jefferson is not honoured by anything as crude as actually following his advice. Instead, he is remembered by having things like streets, lecture theatres, and Bill Clinton named after him...

[Nucular]

I remember someone telling me an anecdote about joining Mensa, thinking he'd find a bunch of likeminded intelligent sceptics. He actually said he'd never come across as many weird beliefs in room ever in his life! Everyone had their own convoluted conspiracy theory, there were people who believed in alien abduction, crystal healing, the works. Everyone was so incredibly clever they just couldn't conceive they could ever be mistaken about something!

Though obviously just an anecdote, it serves to illustrate something I really think - scepticism just isn't about intelligence, it's about honesty - the ability to actually consider that you, yourself, might just believe something for reasons other than the evidence which is there to support it. And having the wherewithal, once you've made the realisation, to do something about it, even if it's painful.

Doesn't matter how clever you are, if you're not thinking critically, you can still be wrong. Intelligence, as I think Shermer also wrote, is orthogonal to accuracy.

[Jocky]

John, you wrote:

I find the belief in spiritual healing (56%) to be far higher than I would have imagined

I wonder if that's due to the way the question was phrased in the survey?

The power of the mind to heal the body could be taken to mean The power of one's own mind to influence healing in one's own body. In other words, it could be referring to the placebo effect, which although it is not fully understood is an observable fact.

I imagine that the survey question was intended to mean something like The power of a supposedly 'psychic' mind to influence healing in other people's bodies. But that's not what it actually said.

This illustrates a problem with getting down to brass tacks with smart people - they are tend to be very good at pedantic dissection of a statement, but this can sometimes obscure the underlying meaning. Of course, arguments should be judged on what they actually say and not on what they meant to say - but so should the results of opinion surveys.

Maybe quite a few of that 56% were engaging in (rather counter-productive) semantic pedantry ... or is that just me judging others by my own fondness for such things ...

[Nucular]

Jocky, very good point. I think I might have answered 'yes' to that one myself! Obviously the psychic/spiritual bit is a turn off for people who're interpreting the second part in that way - but in a survey like this it's all-important in the design that people shouldn't have to interpret anything. The questions should be clear and unequivocal, and if people start making "ah, I think they're driving at this" judgments it destroys the whole face validity.

The rest seem okay in that respect, except maybe the 'witches' one - do I believe that there are people called witches, or do I believe that those people have any kind of supernatural power whatsoever?

[Jocky]

Yes, "Witches" doesn't mean a lot on its own. It leaves so much to the interpretation of the reader that the responses become meaningless.

I also think that extraterrestrial beings have visited Earth at some time in the past seems a bit out of place. Everything else on the list refers to phenomena which allegedly exist 'here and now' and could in most cases be tested; whereas the hypothetical UFO visit could have been any time, maybe billions of years ago. There is no way to locate real tangible evidence (as opposed to von Daniken-style pseudo-evidence) either for or against such a visit.

I suspect what they were getting at is "Do you believe all those geeks out there who claim to have been raped by aliens", but that is not what it actually says ...

[Admin]

You're right Jocky. The question posed was: "Psychic or spiritual healing or the power of the mind to heal the body."

It's 3 questions in one and the "power of the mind" part probably boosted the result quite a bit.

It's common knowledge that 'positive thinking' helps people to recover from things like cancer. It's not true, but many people believe it to be.

[Hazen]

To quote GTA:
'Why is Liberty city so crowded? Because the midwest is full of retards'