If you’ve ever felt a spooky presence or seen something moving out of the corner of your eye, you may be tempted to attribute it to the paranormal. The adjective paranormal is used to describe events that are outside the scope of scientific explanation and is often applied to ghosts, UFO sightings and other unexplained phenomenon.
There’s a lot of research out there about paranormal beliefs and experiences, but the findings are mixed and inconsistent. The broad consensus is that the paranormal includes any phenomenon that violates the basic limiting principles of current scientific understanding, including things like hauntings, psychokinesis and telepathy. Surveys consistently show that a large proportion of the population believes in some paranormal activity.
Some of the research suggests that a person’s inclination to believe in the paranormal is related to their emotional responses to the experience and their ability to make attributions. Other research indicates that a person’s paranormal beliefs are linked to cognitive style and functioning. For example, Gianotti et al. [158] found a relationship between paranormal belief and the ability to find rare word-pairs; participants were presented with pairs of words (40 semantically indirectly related and 40 semantically unrelated), and asked to state whether one of the two words was “paranormal.” Believers made more rare associations than sceptics.
Other studies have looked at links between paranormal belief and memory and executive function. The results have been inconsistent, but some of the work shows that a person’s paranormal beliefs predict false memory responses. However, Dudley et al. [169] failed to replicate this finding.