It has been hypothesized that illusory agency detection is at the basis of belief in supernatural agents and paranormal beliefs. In the present study a biological motion perception task was used to study illusory agency detection in a group of skeptics and a group of paranormal believers. Participants were required to detect the presence or absence of a human agent in a point-light display. It ...

In the reasoning literature, paranormal beliefs have been proposed to be linked to two related phenomena: a biased perception of causality and a biased information-sampling strategy (believers tend to test fewer hypotheses and prefer confirmatory information). In parallel, recent contingency learning studies showed that, when two unrelated events coincide frequently, individuals interpret this ...

Please cite this article in press as: Rabeyron, T., & Differences (2009), doi:10.1016/j.paid.2009.11.0 Previous research has suggested that paranormal beliefs and experiences are associated with thinner mental boundaries and traumas during childhood. This paper examines more thoroughly the relationship between paranormal experiences, mental health and boundaries, and psi abilities. One hundred ...

Is there a world beyond the senses? Can we perceive future events before they occur? Is it possible to communicate with others without need of our complex sensory-perceptual apparatus that has evolved over hundreds of millions of years? Can our minds/souls/personalities leave our bodies and operate with all the knowledge and information-processing ability that is normally dependent upon the phy...

In Experiment 1, participants took part in a fake seance. An actor suggested that a table was levitating when, in fact, it remained stationary. After the seance, approximately one third of participants incorrectly reported that the table had moved. Results also showed a significant relationship between the reported movement of the table and belief in the paranormal, with a greater percentage of...

We examined lay people's conceptions about the relationship between mind and body and their correlates. In Study 1, a web survey (N = 850) of reflective dualistic, emergentistic, and monistic perceptions of the mind-body relationship, afterlife beliefs (i.e., common sense dualism), religiosity, paranormal beliefs, and ontological confusions about physical, biological, and psychological phenomen...

Ghost tours, which purport to bring tourists into situations where they may encounter the paranormal, hinge on humanity’s near-universal fascination with the spirit world. Ghost belief has been a contentious and ubiquitous feature of human culture through recorded time. The ghost as a theoretical construct has spanned continents and societies, surfacing in entertainments and rituals alike. In A...

Paranormal belief and suggestibility seem related. Given our recent findings outlining a putative association between suggestibility and a specific dopaminergic genetic polymorphism, we hypothesized that similar exploratory genetic data may offer supplementary insights into a similar correlation with paranormal belief. With more affordable costs and better technology in the aftermath of the hum...

Introduction: Brain lateralization is associated with human behavior. Therefore, this study aimed at investigating the effects of brain lateralization on the scores of paranormal beliefs. Methods: The study population included 180 students of Sanandaj universities, Sanandaj City, Iran who were selected with convenience sampling method (100 left-brained males, 6 left-brained females, 56 both le...