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New Study Concludes Believers in the Paranormal are Excessively Gullible; Paranormal Believers Not Buying It
The article first appeared on: http://classifiedleaks.com/new-study-concludes-believers-paranormal-are-excessively-gullible-paranormal-believers-not-buying-it
Every few months or so, a mainstream scientific magazine or journal will publish a mocking, derogatory article that asks why people still believe in the paranormal, UFOs, and conspiracies, or any other field of knowledge that hasn’t received the official sanction of the government, the media and the scientific priesthood. The writers of these articles and their fawning sycophants in the comments sections take great pleasure in asserting their intellectual superiority over those who don’t subscribe to the dictates of materialist science, which has become the most acceptable form of religion in our times.
These days the popular strategy among academics is to psychologize interest in the paranormal. In other words, to dismiss it as the fevered speculations of those who are too narcissistic, delusional and ensnared in webs of wishful thinking to realize they need therapy, and pronto.
A good example of this is a study discussed in a recent edition of Scientific American, which was carried out by a pair of psychologists at the University of Toulouse in France. In this case that’s ‘Toulouse’ as in ‘too loose with the truth’ and ‘too loose with the facts.’
These two geniuses set out to prove their thesis that believers in the paranormal were more likely to be “intuitive” thinkers, while skeptics and non-believers could be placed in the “reflective” category. In fact every single human being relies on both reflection and intuition, but these jokers wanted to show that people who leaned more intuitive were prone to conclusion jumping.
And to no one’s surprise they accomplished their mission. They found study participants who accepted vague horoscopes as genuine and who believed a rigged laboratory test for ESP was producing good results were more likely to be “intuitive” than “reflective,” while the opposite was true for skeptics. And based on that, we are expected to conclude that all paranormal beliefs are false and should be abandoned for all time. Anyone who refuses to do so is clearly a dolt and beneath contempt.
But research like this tell us absolutely nothing about the thoughts, beliefs and ideas of paranormal researchers who’ve collected mountains of data and who base their advocacy on numerous scientific studies, tons of eyewitness testimony, ample film and audio evidence and their own personal experiences. Nor does it tell us anything about those of us who take the paranormal seriously precisely because they are aware of all this data – which probably includes the majority of paranormal aficionados.
The psychologizing of belief in the paranormal is lame and logically incoherent. If we are going to dismiss people’s beliefs based on their psychological tendencies we should hold everyone to the same standard, including debunkers and skeptics whose egos prevent them from acknowledging the limitations of their understanding, knowledge and experience.
The paranormal has more than its share of flakes and crazies. But so does establishment science (we’re looking at you, Richard Dawkins), along with every other ideology or interest group known to man.
