Precognition: Science meets Alice in Wonderland, part 2

Part 1 of this article discussed Daryl Bem’s studies on precognition and the failure of subsequent studies to replicate his results. This second part discusses reasons for the incompatibility of parapsychology with modern science and possible reasons why interest in this field persists in spite of its continued failure to establish its validity. Belief in the paranormal is commonly associated with magical thinking and mystical belief. Many parapsychologists seem to be motivated by a desire to establish the reality of a nonmaterial dimension of existence, and in particular that of the human soul. 

  Alcock (1987) has argued that there are two main views on what psychic phenomena (psi) might represent if real. One view is that psi will ultimately turn out to be something physical that will eventually be incorporated into an expanded version of the worldview of normal science. Other phenomena that were once regarded as inexplicable, such as the ability of bats to navigate in the dark, or of birds to navigate over thousands of miles, have eventually been explained in physical terms acceptable to modern science. In this view, psi will eventually be shown not to be ‘paranormal’ at all.

Philosophical implications of precognition were explored in the film "Minority Report"

  The other view is that psi is a manifestation of a nonphysical dimension of existence. In this view, psi represents a “radically different relationship between consciousness and the physical world” than is accepted as possible by modern science (Alcock, 1987). Therefore, disputes about psi represent a clash between two conflicting views about reality. The monistic materialistic view currently accepted in neuroscience regards mind as an emergent manifestation of brain processes. The view of many parapsychologists is the dualistic one that regards mind as at least partially independent of the brain. Parapsychology originally developed in the nineteenth century out of attempts to scientifically validate the concept of survival of consciousness/personality after bodily death, and this subject is still researched by parapsychologists today.

According to a survey 56% of parapsychologists believed that the results of parapsychological research indicate a non-material basis of life or thought, whilst 43% disagreed, and 1% had no opinion (Akers, 1987). This finding indicates that although there is diversity in what parapsychologists believe, the majority of parapsychologists do believe in a non-material dimension of reality, and hence believe in mind-body dualism. Many people feel that the existence of psi has important spiritual implications. According to Kennedy (2005), paranormal experiences are similar to mystical ones in that they result in an increased sense of meaning in life, interconnectedness, and spirituality. A survey of people who believe they have had paranormal or transcendent experiences found that 72% agreed that as a result of these experiences they believed that a higher power was watching over them.

Research has found that paranormal belief and experience, as well as mystical experience, are positively correlated with a number of psychological characteristics including absorption, magical ideation, fantasy proneness, creative personality, and manic experience (Thalbourne & Storm, 2012). The researchers argue that underlying all these tendencies is a psychological trait known as transliminality, “the tendency for psychological material (imagery, ideation, affect, and perception) to cross thresholds into or out of consciousness.” In other words, both paranormal and mystical beliefs are related to a propensity for imagination and fantasy.

Transliminality has also been used to explain why a substantial minority of scientists hold religious beliefs in spite of their commitment to empiricism (MacPherson & Kelly, 2011). MacPherson and Kelly found that religious scientists were higher than non-religious scientists in both self-rated creativity and in magical thinking, indicating greater acceptance of unconventional views of reality. Transliminality might be a factor in why parapsychologists persist in investigating paranormal phenomena in spite of the weight of evidence against psi. Alcock (1987) has criticised parapsychology as being incompatible with modern science because of its “anything goes, anything is possible” attitude. No speculation seems too wild for psi researchers. There seems to be no constraints on how psi is supposed to operate – it can work forwards or backwards in time, across thousands of miles of distance, or even between animals and objects. Psi operates like wishful thinking and no skill or knowledge is needed to make it work. Therefore, parapsychology might be attractive to people who are naturally prone to transliminality themselves. As noted in part 1, at least some parapsychologists believe that an experimenter’s attitudes to psi can have a paranormal effect on their participants’ results (the “experimenter effect”). This is an outright appeal to magical thinking to explain inconsistencies in research findings. Kennedy (2005) has argued that psi is difficult to replicate because of its ‘capricious’ and uncontrollable nature. This hardly seems indistinguishable from saying that psi only occurs when God or some higher power decides so. From an empirical perspective, a phenomenon that cannot be predicted or replicated lies beyond the realms of science.  

Some people have argued that although science has been successful in giving us greater control over our environment, it cannot provide a sense of meaning and purpose in life that has been traditionally provided through religion and spirituality (Kennedy, 2005). Although not all parapsychologists see psi as an indicator of a nonmaterial dimension of reality, spiritual motives do seem to be important for many of these investigators. This would seem to present a problem. A person seeking purpose, meaning in life and self-transcendence is hardly likely to find much help from parapsychology. Recent failed attempts to replicate Bem’s findings on precognition reflect a broader and repeated failure of the field to demonstrate the existence of psi, let alone that mind exists independently of the brain. Over a hundred years ago Frederic Myers argued that the duty of psychical researchers was “the expansion of science herself.” However, parapsychology seems to be incompatible with what is generally considered science and seems more akin to a fruitless form of mysticism. Sam Harris has argued that people can experience self-transcendence without necessarily believing in a non-material dimension of reality. This is an area that could be investigated empirically. Scientific research grounded in evidence is far more likely to produce insights into the nature of the relationship between consciousness and reality than the magical “anything goes” approach of parapsychology.    

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.  

This article also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

References

Akers, C. (1987). Parapsychology is science, but its findings are inconclusive. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(4), 566-568.

Alcock, J. E. (1987). Parapsychology: Science of the anomalous or search for the soul? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10 (4), 263-291 DOI: 10.1017/S0140525X00054467

Kennedy, J. E. (2005). Personality and motivation to believe, misbelieve, and disbelieve in paranormal phenomena. Journal of Parapsychology, 69(2), 263-291.

MacPherson, J. S., & Kelly, S. W. (2011). Creativity and positive schizotypy influence the conflict between science and religion. Personality and Individual Differences, 50 (4) DOI: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.11.002

Thalbourne, M. A., & Storm, L. (2012). Has the Sheep-Goat Variable Had Its Day? Testing Transliminality as a Psi Predictor. Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 12(1), 69-80. 

Precognition: Science meets Alice in Wonderland, part 1

In 2011, Daryl Bem, who has the distinction of being both a respected social psychologist and an investigator into the paranormal, published a remarkable paper describing a series of experiments which he claimed provided evidence that people can be influenced by events before they have happened. In other words, precognition really exists and people have the ability to “feel the future.” This paper, which was published in the top tier publication Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, naturally provoked an enormous amount of controversy because it violates the common-sense view of causality that a cause always precedes its effect and never the other way around. Multiple attempts to replicate Bem’s findings have failed, suggesting that his results were due to methodological shortcomings rather than a breakthrough discovery about the nature of reality. Individual differences in personality traits associated with magical thinking may help explain why interest in parapsychology persists in spite of repeated failures to establish any credible evidence of the existence of psi.

Bem’s (2011) experiments involved taking a number of classic psychological procedures, such as priming, and ‘time-reversing’ them, so that the effects preceded the cause. For example, in two studies of retroactive facilitation of recall, participants were presented with a list of words and then asked to recall as many of the words as possible. Afterwards, they were asked to study a selected subgroup of these words. Bem found that participants were more likely to recall words that appeared in the list they subsequently studied. This reverses more usual priming procedures where people are exposed to a group of words that later appears in a list they are asked to recall.

  Imagine the implications for students taking an exam if Bem’s claim that studying material after being tested on it could retroactively improve one’s performance is true. They would be advised to carefully study the material after sitting the exam, focusing on finding answers to the questions they had just seen. One could test this experimentally by having participants sit a test they have not prepared for, and then providing half the participants with answers to the questions and asking them to study them carefully. The control group could be asked to study unrelated material. If the precognition hypothesis is true, the participants who study the answers after the test would be expected to do better.

  Bem actually introduces the concept of retroactive facilitation of recall by quoting the White Queen from Through the Looking Glass, who notes that people in her country can recall the future as well as the past. After reviewing the results of his nine studies he again quotes the White Queen’s famous statement about believing “impossible things before breakfast”.

Lewis Carroll anticipated Daryl Bem by over a century. Was this precognition?

  Bem claimed that the retroactive facilitation of recall experiments produced the largest effects of all the studies he ran and would therefore be the easiest to replicate. Two papers (Galak, LeBoeuf, Nelson, & Simmons, 2012; Ritchie, Wiseman, & French, 2012) have since been published reporting attempts to replicate these experiments. Together these two papers report the results of 10 separate experiments using Bem’s methods with a much larger combined sample. Only one of the ten experiments produced a significant result, although the authors (Galak, et al., 2012) report that when the results of their seven experiments were combined the overall effect size was close to zero. Additionally, Galak et al. performed a meta-analysis of all known published and unpublished attempts (comprising over 4,000 participants) to replicate Bem’s retroactive facilitation of recall studies. The overall average effect size was not significantly different from zero. Interestingly, studies conducted by experimenters who expected to get significant results did have a significant effect size, whereas those conducted by experimenters who did not expect to get significant results did not. Parapsychologists are familiar with this tendency for experimental results to match the biases of the experimenter and refer to it as the “experimenter effect” (Alcock, 1987). Amazingly, some parapsychologists actually claim this is due to a paranormal influence of the experimenter on the results! Furthermore, the effects reported by Bem were significantly larger than in any of the replication studies. Perhaps Bem has more paranormal power than other researchers? Ritchie et al. (2012) concluded from their failure to replicate that Bem’s findings were most likely due to methodological artefacts rather than a real paranormal effect. Referring to Bem’s allusion to Alice in Wonderland they suggested that psychologists do not “venture too far down the rabbit hole just yet.”

  Methodological artefacts that might have favourably biased Bem’s results have been carefully examined in detail here. I won’t go into detail about these, but will briefly note that there are signs that Bem may have massaged his data to make the results appear more favourable. For example, in more than one of the reported studies he changed the procedure mid-course without providing an adequate explanation for doing so. Normally, a change of procedure would be reported as a separate study. So it appears that Bem may have combined the results of initially separate studies after examining the data in order to present a statistically significant result. This falls short of outright faking of data but also falls short of rigorous and disciplined scientific investigation. An independent statistical analysis of Bem’s results found that the number of significant results he achieved was “abnormally high” considering the small size of the effects found (Francis, 2012). The author argued that Bem’s results have been selectively reported (that is, non-significant findings appear to have gone unreported) and therefore we cannot draw any scientifically useful conclusions from his paper. Francis concluded that the standards and practices of experimental psychology need to be raised to prevent misleading and biased findings from being published.

  The pattern that emerges here has been a common one in the history of parapsychology. A researcher publishes what appear to be revolutionary findings that if true would require that our current understanding of the universe be altered. Hardnosed scientists are understandably reluctant to revise well accepted notions about reality, so attempts at replication of the results are demanded, and these attempts invariably fail. Bem’s paper is not the first one making paranormal claims to be published in a prestigious journal. In 1974, physicists Targ and Puthoff published research evidence for remote viewing, the ability to observe events at a distance by non-sensory means, in Nature. However, this research was later discredited when independent researchers were unable to replicate it and found serious flaws in the remote viewing procedure that could account for the results (Alcock, 1987). In fact, over century of research in parapsychology has failed to produce any findings that could be replicated by independent experimenters under stringent conditions (Alcock, 1987).  

   It is reasonable to ask then, why would serious researchers, including someone as respected as Daryl Bem, continue to investigate a field that has failed to demonstrate that any of the phenomena it studies actually exist? Alcock (1987) argued that parapsychology is not just about a search for something that is currently unknown to science; it is fundamentally a quest to validate the existence of the human soul. That is, parapsychology represents a deep view of reality that is at odds with that of mainstream science.

The evidence for this claim and its implications are discussed in part 2 of this article.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.  

This article also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

References

Akers, C. (1987). Parapsychology is science, but its findings are inconclusive. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(4), 566-568.

Alcock, J. E. (1987). Parapsychology: Science of the anomalous or search for the soul? Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 10(4), 553-643.

Bem DJ (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of personality and social psychology, 100 (3), 407-25 PMID: 21280961
Francis, G. (2012). Too good to be true: Publication bias in two prominent studies from experimental psychology. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 19(2), 151-156. doi: 10.3758/s13423-012-0227-9

Galak J, Leboeuf RA, Nelson LD, & Simmons JP (2012). Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi. Journal of personality and social psychology PMID: 22924750
Kennedy, J. E. (2005). Personality and motivation to believe, misbelieve, and disbelieve in paranormal phenomena. Journal of Parapsychology, 69(2), 263-291.

MacPherson, J. S., & Kelly, S. W. (2011). Creativity and positive schizotypy influence the conflict between science and religion. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(4), 446-450. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.11.002

Ritchie SJ, Wiseman R, & French CC (2012). Failing the future: three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem's 'retroactive facilitation of recall' effect. PloS one, 7 (3) PMID: 22432019
Thalbourne, M. A., & Storm, L. (2012). Has the Sheep-Goat Variable Had Its Day? Testing Transliminality as a Psi Predictor. Australian Journal of Parapsychology, 12(1), 69-80.

Opening the mind: where scepticism and superstition meet

As noted in a previous posting, a number of recent papers have found that religious and paranormal beliefs were positively associated with “intuitive” thinking and negatively associated with “analytical” thinking. One of these studies (Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2011) investigated personality traits and found that openness to experience had a moderate negative correlation with belief in God, suggesting that the more open to experience people are, the less likely they are to believe. Interestingly this correlation (r = -.32) was larger than the correlation between analytical thinking and God belief (r = -.18), indicating that openness to experience may have a stronger impact on belief than thinking style. Shenhav et al. found that priming intuitive thinking could increase reported belief in God, whereas priming analytical thinking could decrease it. Subsequent studies confirmed that priming analytical thinking reduced both religious and paranormal beliefs (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler,& Fugelsang, 2012). This raises an intriguing possibility that priming openness to experience could have an influence on supernatural belief, although due to the ambiguous nature of openness to experience the results could encompass both increased scepticism or increased superstition.

Openness to experience is a broad feature of personality associated with intellectual curiosity, artistic interests, questioning of traditional values and authority, and willingness to explore new experiences and activities. Openness to experience is positively related to a construct called need for cognition, which is associated with analytical thinking. A survey conducted by the Center for Inquiry found that openness to experience was the personality trait that most strongly distinguished between those who considered themselves religious and those who did not, with the latter scoring higher on this trait (Galen, 2009). However, openness to experience is also positively correlated with paranormal beliefs (Smith, Johnson, & Hathaway, 2009), magical thinking (DeYoung, Grazioplene, & Peterson, 2012) and mystical experience (MacDonald, 2000). Paradoxically perhaps, openness to experience thus encompasses a rather diverse set of characteristics, some of which would seem to support disbelief in religion, whereas others seem to support mystical and spiritual ideas. 

 Sceptical scientists and believers in the occult alike tend to be high in openness to experience

It has been argued that these diverse aspects of openness to experience all share an underlying theme of cognitive exploration of both inner and outer experience (DeYoung, et al., 2012). People who are high in openness to experience are interested in unconventional ideas and have a willingness to question traditional values and beliefs. This might help to explain why both paranormal believers and atheists (who generally tend to be sceptical of all supernatural beliefs) tend to be high in openness to experience. Atheists are willing to question traditional religious beliefs and form their own opinions. People who believe in the paranormal may be attracted to paranormal phenomena because they are outside mainstream experience. Where atheists and paranormal believers may differ is in narrower aspects of personality encompassed by openness to experience. De Young et al. proposed that the traits encompassed by openness to experience fall along a spectrum with the more intellectual aspects, such as need for cognition at one end, and the more unusual experiential traits, such as fantasy-proneness and magical thinking at the other end. People who endorse paranormal beliefs may be more open to fantasy (Smith, et al., 2009) and more prone to unusual perceptual experiences (DeYoung, et al., 2012). Atheists on the other hand tend to self-identify as intellectuals and tend to attribute their lack of belief to their interest in logic and rationality (Caldwell-Harris, Wilson, LoTempio, & Beit-Hallahmi, 2011). Interestingly, although openness to experience and intelligence are moderately positively correlated, in the Shenhav et al. study measures of intelligence had almost no relationship with belief in God. This suggests that belief is more closely related to personality preferences than actual intellectual ability. 

Due to the heterogeneity of the construct, priming openness to experience could have ambiguous effects on supernatural beliefs. The idea of priming openness to experience might seem implausible because personality traits such as openness to experience are usually thought of as enduring characteristics of a person that remain stable over time. Stable traits may be contrasted with more transient states that reflect changes in a person’s mood. For example, some people may be generally sociable (a trait) yet at any given moment how sociable they feel (their state) may vary with their mood. Research has found that stable personality traits have corresponding states and that it is possible to experimentally induce temporary changes in these states (Schutte, Malouff, Segrera, Wolf, & Rodgers, 2003). This was done by asking people to concentrate on imagining themselves in a number of situations where they were acting as if they were in a particular state. For example, state extraversion was induced by asking them to imagine they were the centre of attention at a party. State openness to experience was induced by asking a person to imagine they were having an intellectual discussion. The experimenters found that the inductions did produce significant increases in personality states associated with openness to experience.

As far as I know, no experiments have been done to test whether priming state openness to experience would affect supernatural beliefs. For example a person might be asked to imagine what it would be like to have a very unconventional lifestyle. One reasonable prediction would be that priming openness to experience could reduce more conventional forms of religious belief, but could also increase receptivity to paranormal or mystical ideas. Priming manipulations focusing on narrower aspects of openness might produce more specific results. Thus, asking someone to imagine they were having an intellectual discussion might produce more general scepticism, whereas asking someone to imagine what it would be like to have a rich fantasy life might produce receptivity to more mystical types of thought and experience. Studies that primed analytical thinking did not assess how durable the effects on religious beliefs were. Priming states of openness might have only a transitory effect on a person's beliefs. Nevertheless, research into this area would help shed light on the processes underlying both rational and non-rational beliefs.

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© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided.  

This article also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

Other posts discussing the possibilities of priming
Reason Versus Faith? The Interplay of Intuition and Rationality In Supernatural Belief

Think Like a Man: Effects of Gender Priming on Cognition
Turning the Wheels of the MInd - Clockwise movements increase openness to experience

Are Sex And Religion Natural Enemies?

References

 Caldwell-Harris, C. L., Wilson, A. L., LoTempio, E., & Beit-Hallahmi, B. (2011). Exploring the atheist personality: well-being, awe, and magical thinking in atheists, Buddhists, and Christians. Mental Health, Religion & Culture, 14 (7), 659-672 DOI: 10.1080/13674676.2010.509847

DeYoung, C. G., Grazioplene, R. G., & Peterson, J. B. (2012). From madness to genius: The Openness/Intellect trait domain as a paradoxical simplex.  Journal of Research in Personality, 46 (1), 63-78 DOI: 10.1016/j.jrp.2011.12.003

Galen, L. W. (2009). Profiles of the godless: Results from a survey of the nonreligious. Free Inquiry, 41-45.

Gervais WM, & Norenzayan A (2012). Analytic thinking promotes religious disbelief. Science (New York, N.Y.), 336 (6080), 493-6 PMID: 22539725

MacDonald, D. A. (2000). Spirituality: Description, Measurement, and Relation to the Five Factor Model of Personality. Journal of Personality, 68(1), 153-197. doi: 10.1111/1467-6494.t01-1-00094

 Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief  Cognition, 123 (3), 335-346 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003

Schutte, N. S., Malouff, J. M., Segrera, E., Wolf, A., & Rodgers, L. (2003). States reflecting the Big Five dimensions. Personality and Individual Differences, 34(4), 591-603. doi: 10.1016/s0191-8869(02)00031-4

Shenhav, A., Rand, D., & Greene, J. (2011). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0025391

Smith, C. L., Johnson, J. L., & Hathaway, W. (2009). Personality Contributions to Belief in Paranormal Phenomena. Individual Differences Research, 7(2), 85-96.

Reason versus faith? The interplay of intuition and rationality in supernatural belief

Recent papers (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012; Pennycook, Cheyne, Seli, Koehler, & Fugelsang, 2012; Shenhav,Rand, & Greene, 2011) have suggested that religious and paranormal beliefs are supported by “intuitive” thought processes and that engaging in “analytical” thought processes can weaken these beliefs, at least temporarily. These studies have fascinating implications for the development of non-rational beliefs and suggest possibilities for challenging such beliefs. These studies consider intuition and analytical thought as opposed systems, and while this is frequently applicable, previous research has found that in some people these two modes of thought co-exist to a high degree and their combination supports supernatural beliefs.

These studies are based on a “dual process” model of thought that proposes the existence of two parallel information processing modes. The first mode, sometimes called the experiential system, is intuitive, emotional and immediate. The second mode, sometimes called the rational system, is reflective, logical, and deliberative, and hence takes more time to process information than the intuitive system. There are individual differences in the degree to which people prefer to use either of these systems. Recent studies have found that people who show a greater inclination towards the use of intuitive thinking were more likely to endorse belief in God and the afterlife (Shenhav, et al., 2011) as well as in paranormal phenomena, including psychic powers, witchcraft, astrology and so on (Pennycook, et al., 2012). Pennycook et al. even classified belief in God along a spectrum from most conventional (a personal God exists), through the less conventional (belief in an impersonal higher power or an inactive God), and through into degrees of disbelief (agnosticism and atheism). They found that more conventional God beliefs were associated with more intuitive responses, whereas less conventional beliefs and disbelief were associated with more analytical responses.

Even more intriguing were the results of experimental interventions to manipulate intuitive versus analytical thinking. Belief in God was strengthened by a writing intervention designed to either increase confidence in one’s intuition or reduce confidence in one’s rationality (Shenhav, et al., 2011). Conversely, belief in God was weakened by decreasing confidence in intuition or increasing confidence in rationality. A series of experiments in which rationality was primed were also found to decrease belief in God (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012). The primes used included viewing a picture of Rodin’s “Thinker”, reading words associated with analytical thinking (think, reason, analyze, ponder, rational), and, remarkably, reading a questionnaire in a difficult to read font. Previous research has found that information presented in a difficult to read font improves subsequent performance on tests of analytical thinking. Notably, none of these interventions involved any form of argumentation against religious belief or any mention of belief at all. People were simply asked to perform these tasks and then they answered questions about their beliefs.  

These findings have interesting implications for attempts at persuasion for or against religious beliefs. Encouraging people to trust their intuitions or gut feelings in matters unrelated to religion could increase a person’s subsequent receptivity to religious or supernatural ideas. Conversely, encouraging intellectual discussion or even having people read unrelated material in a hard-to-read font could elicit scepticism about such things. The studies cited could not address how durable these effects are likely to be, so it is possible that such interventions might have only transient effects.

The quote is attributed to Martin Luther, 1569.

 The findings of the studies do provide evidence that religious and supernatural beliefs are associated with intuitive thinking and that scepticism about religion is associated with analytical thinking. However, it would be premature to conclude that such beliefs are best viewed in terms of a dichotomy in which intuitive and analytical thinking are by nature opposed to each other. Such a dichotomy seems to be implied by statements by Pennycook et al. that: “initial intuitions during problem-solving often pre-empt further analysis” (p. 336) and “An analytic cognitive style will typically involve a broader assessment of problem elements as well as an examination and critical evaluation of intuitions.” The task used to assess preference for intuitive or analytical thinking actually involves asking people to solve problems where there is an intuitively appealing but incorrect answer, so that to reach the correct answer the person must reject their initial intuition. The nature of the task itself therefore sets up a dichotomy in which intuition and reflection are incompatible. This may well be applicable much of the time but there is some intriguing evidence that the two modes of thought sometimes operate in a parallel rather than a conflicting manner. This parallel operation has been found to have implications of its own for supernatural beliefs.

The dual-process model originally proposed that the two modes are independent of each other and as a result although some people habitually prefer one mode over the other, some people actually prefer to use both, while some people have little preference for either. One study sorted people into four clusters based on their respective preferences for the two modes of thought and examined their patterns of belief (Wolfradt, Oubaid, Straube, Bischoff, & Mischo, 1999). The cluster who had high preferences for both intuitive and analytical thought (“complementary thinkers”) actually had the highest rates of paranormal belief of all four clusters and also scored higher on measures of magical thinking compared to the cluster with high analytical and low intuitive thinking (“rational thinkers”). Wolfradt et al. suggested that: “A simultaneous processing style leads potentially to a disinhibition of associations which fosters irrational thinking” (p. 828).

 The potentially complementary relationship between intuitive and analytical modes of thought seems to shed some light on religious beliefs among scientists. Scientists are vocationally committed to empiricism and therefore would be expected to be naturally high on analytical thinking. Scientists are generally expected to reject beliefs that are not based on evidence and surveys have found that the majority of scientists are not religious. However, there are a substantial minority of scientists who are religious (one study found as many as 40%) and this poses a question about why people who are committed to evidence-based propositions in their work would simultaneously accept faith-based beliefs in their private lives (MacPherson & Kelly, 2011). The MacPherson and Kelly study found that although scientists as a group were generally less religious than non-scientists, they also scored higher in creativity and magical thinking. Additionally, among these scientists, religious belief, creativity, and magical thinking were all positively correlated. This suggests that among scientists there is a subgroup that is religious, creative and accepting of unconventional views of reality. The authors suggested that religious and paranormal beliefs may be linked to creativity and that these may form part of a broader psychological dimension known as transliminality. Transliminality involves the crossing of psychological material into and out of awareness. People who are high in transliminality may feel more able to accommodate the apparent tension between rational and non-rational ideas. This notion seems similar to that of Wolfradt et al. who proposed that the “complementary” thinking style fosters loose associations that support magical thinking associated with paranormal beliefs.

Future research could examine what effects experimental manipulations of analytical thinking might have on complementary thinkers, such as religious scientists. It seems possible that in order to decrease the religious beliefs of a complementary thinker it would be necessary not only to strengthen their analytical thinking but to weaken their reliance on intuition. Such research might be of particular interest for example to those who are concerned about the increasing prominence of non-evidence based treatments such as alternative medicine in educational institutions.  

Follow me on Facebook, Google Plus, or Twitter.

© Scott McGreal. Please do not reproduce without permission. Brief excerpts may be quoted as long as a link to the original article is provided. 

This article also appears on Psychology Today on my blog Unique - Like Everybody Else.

Other posts discussing the possibilities of priming
Opening the Mind: Where Skepticism and Superstition Meet 
Think Like a Man: Effects of Gender Priming on Cognition

Turning the Wheels of the MInd - Clockwise movements increase openness to experience

Are Sex And Religion Natural Enemies?

  

References

          Gervais, W. M., & Norenzayan, A. (2012). Analytic Thinking Promotes Religious Disbelief Science, 336 (6080), 493-496 DOI: 10.1126/science.1215647

MacPherson, J. S., & Kelly, S. W. (2011). Creativity and positive schizotypy influence the conflict between science and religion. Personality and Individual Differences, 50(4), 446-450. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2010.11.002

           Pennycook, G., Cheyne, J. A., Seli, P., Koehler, D. J., & Fugelsang, J. A. (2012). Analytic cognitive style predicts religious and paranormal belief  Cognition, 123 (3), 335-346 DOI: 10.1016/j.cognition.2012.03.003

Shenhav, A., Rand, D., & Greene, J. (2011). Divine intuition: Cognitive style influences belief in God Journal of Experimental Psychology: General DOI: 10.1037/a0025391

Wolfradt, U., Oubaid, V., Straube, E. R., Bischoff, N., & Mischo, J. (1999). Thinking styles, schizotypal traits and anomalous experiences. Personality and Individual Differences, 27(5), 821-830. doi: 10.1016/s0191-8869(99)00031-8