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| Credit: flickr user: Sean McGrath |
People who think intuitively are more likely to ascribe a weird event to the paranormal, according to a recent paper in the Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Those who are more inclined to analytical thinking, on the other hand, think a weird experience can be explained by random chance.
This research is based on a school of thought that suggests people have two available “cognitive routes.” We can process information using fast, automatic, intuitive thinking, or rethink our initial impulses using a conscious, slower, and more reflective route. People’s inclination to focus on one or other of these routes is tested using the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), which uses questions with an obvious (but incorrect answer), and a less obvious, correct solution. The right answer can be reached by tapping into the slower, more analytical thinking system.
There have been a few studies suggesting that people who believe in the supernatural are more likely to use intuitive rather than analytical thinking when they take the CRT. The authors of the recent paper wanted to establish exactly how this happens: what is the mechanism by which intuitive thinking might give rise to paranormal beliefs?
Cheating at cards
Romain Bouvet and Jean-François Bonnefon set out to make a group of research participants think they had experienced an encounter with someone who seemed to be psychic. They told 61 research participants (who had already taken the CRT and a test of paranormal belief) that they were taking part in an experiment that investigated the possibility of a “telepathic transfer of information from one person to another.” The participant was paired with another “participant,” who was actually a confederate of the experimenter.
One of the two would choose a card from a set of five, and the other participant had to try to guess (without seeing the card) which card had been chosen. To make the real participant think that the game wasn’t rigged, they were asked to choose one of two pieces of paper. This would supposedly assign them to one of the two roles: either the person choosing the cards, or the person trying to guess its identity. In reality, both pieces of paper assigned them to the role of “chooser.”
After the participant had picked a card from the set of five, the experimenter (who could see the cards) would cue the “mind-reader” to guess which card had been chosen. The words the experimenter used secretly passed information about the card to the fake participant: if the experimenter said “Well now,” the mind-reader would know that the card showed a star, “Well OK” indicated a cross, “Well” indicated a square, and so on.
After the “mind-reader” had made three correct guesses, both the real and fake participants were given a questionnaire. (Again, the real participant needed to keep thinking that the other participant wasn't a plant.) They were asked how weird they had found the experience; possible ratings ranged from “mysterious/understandable” to “troubling/ordinary” and “strange/mundane." They were also asked how the results could be explained: by luck, by probability, or by a “non-scientific phenomenon such as extrasensory perception.”
The results suggested that people who used more intuitive thinking on the CRT were more likely to suggest that ESP was responsible for the weird result. This was the case whether or not they said they believed in the paranormal before they began the experiment. On the other hand, people who showed analytical thinking on the CRT were more likely to say that the experience could be explained by probability—they thought it was a fluke.
Both groups found the experience weird, so it isn’t just that the intuitive thinkers thought it was strange and the analytical thinkers found it normal. It’s also important to note that the intuitive thinkers weren’t ready to accept just any explanation they were given: they were offered statistical fluke as an explanation, and opted instead for the paranormal.
The researchers replicated this result with another sample of 64 participants, finding the same result with analytical and intuitive thinking. Because of the sample sizes, more replications will ultimately be needed to have a high confidence in the results.
More questions than answers
There are still some very important questions about this research. In particular, it's not clear exactly what the CRT tests, and what other cognitive factors might be coming into play. Previous research has found that the results of the CRT are highly correlated with cognitive ability in general. So to be sure that the results of this experiment were caused by intuitive or analytical thinking rather than general problem-solving ability, it would really be necessary to control for IQ.
It’s possible that people who show more “analytical thinking” on the CRT just have greater cognitive ability, and are therefore able to answer the CRT questions correctly; and that these same people have a better grasp of statistics, causing them to suspect that three correct guesses with a set of five cards wouldn’t be an impossible statistical occurrence.
The researchers are clear that they do not think these results are the final say on paranormal beliefs, but rather just one contributing mechanism. They also emphasise that these results can’t tell us anything about religious beliefs, because they only looked at ESP (and, in a related experiment, astrology). Religious beliefs, they write, are much more complex and unlikely to be explained by a simple habit of thinking or cognitive ability.
What these results could suggest, however, is that intuitive thinkers are more at risk for being preyed upon by unscrupulous individuals selling “psychic training” or other paranormal services. Although most literature is careful not to ascribe a greater value to one or the other thinking style, they write that it seems “appropriate to break with this tradition of cautiousness” in this case, in order to warn intuitive thinkers of their potential vulnerability.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2015. DOI: 10.1177/0146167215585728 (About DOIs).
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