Paranormal Beliefs and Personality: Associations and Research Limits
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Extraordinary Experiences & Anomalistic Psychology · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Personality research identifies statistical associations between paranormal beliefs and particular psychological traits, including openness, conscientiousness, emotionality, absorption, and imaginative involvement. These findings are specific to the beliefs, questionnaires, and populations investigated. They do not establish a universal “paranormal believer” personality, permit reliable classification of an individual, or confirm the external reality of a reported paranormal event.
A 2020 study of 599 adults found that six broad personality domains and cognitive ability accounted for approximately 10% of variation in its paranormal-belief measure. Adding other predictors raised the explained variance to approximately 19%. The remainder was not explained by that particular model. A 2022 systematic review identified 71 studies with 20,993 participants on cognitive correlates of paranormal belief, documenting heterogeneous results and important methodological limitations. The latter review investigated cognition rather than estimating one pooled Big Five personality association.
This encyclopedia article explains what the research measures, the strongest individual studies, how broad and narrow traits differ, why apparently conflicting findings can both be valid for their own outcomes, and what readers, researchers, educators, and clinicians may reasonably conclude.
What researchers mean by paranormal belief
Paranormal belief is a research construct operationalized through questions about purported extraordinary phenomena such as telepathy, precognition, ghost-related activity, magical influences, and superstition. Different surveys include different propositions. The measured outcome is a person's endorsement of questionnaire statements; it is not a verification that an extraordinary external event occurred.
The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale includes 26 items organized historically around seven categories, including psi, precognition, superstition, spiritualism, and traditional religious belief. Its content has stimulated enduring debate about the meaning of a total score. Drinkwater and colleagues examined alternative factor models with 3,764 participants and favored a bifactor specification that recognizes both a broad dimension and subordinate content differences.
The Paranormal and Supernatural Beliefs Scale was developed to address psychometric and conceptual limitations of earlier instruments. Its initial usable development sample comprised 231 adults. Classical and Rasch measurement approaches yielded related versions, with the authors ultimately preferring a 13-item, four-response-option scale. Validation of an instrument is evidence about its measurement properties under studied conditions; it does not guarantee that all beliefs, cultures, or trait associations are equivalent.
An important editorial and scientific boundary follows from this history. Religious identity, faith traditions, and sacred practices constitute their own psychological and cultural domains. Their presence in historical paranormal questionnaires does not justify equating religious adherence with paranormal credulity or making judgments about theological truth.
Personality traits and their measurement
Personality traits describe relatively persistent tendencies in emotion, behavior, and thought across situations. The Big Five are openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The related HEXACO model uses six dimensions, adding honesty–humility and defining some other domains differently. A HEXACO emotionality result cannot simply be renamed Big Five neuroticism.
Each trait is a continuum. Scores require the context of a particular instrument and reference sample; they are not personality types or clinical diagnoses. The English Hub's complete guide to the Big Five covers the general structure, while this article focuses specifically on correlations with paranormal-belief endorsement.
Researchers also study narrower dispositions—absorption, fantasy proneness, intuitive thinking, schizotypy, and response to uncertainty. Some relate to personality, but they should be defined separately. Intelligence and performance on a reasoning task are likewise different constructs from either personality or belief. Combining all of these into one supposed psychological profile makes an explanatory model less precise.
The principal evidence: a 2020 study of individual differences
Betsch, Aßmann, and Glöckner examined 599 adults aged 18 to 81, approximately 60% of them women. The study considered six personality domains, cognitive ability, and additional variables previously associated with paranormal beliefs. The belief measure included domains such as magic, astrology, esoteric claims, supernatural beings, and spirituality. Original peer-reviewed report.
The authors reported that personality dimensions plus cognitive ability explained approximately 10% of measured belief variance. Their expanded model explained 19%. Its predictors included greater openness, greater emotionality, lower conscientiousness, lower cognitive ability, greater ontological confusion, and weaker causality understanding. Each predictor represents a statistical component within the specified analytic model, not an essential feature of every believer.
This study advanced the field by assessing several competing explanatory variables simultaneously. Its design was nevertheless observational and correlational. It cannot establish which characteristics appeared first, whether one caused another, or how well its model predicts entirely new samples. Explained variance depends on questionnaire reliability, sample composition, and which candidate variables investigators include. For that reason the percentages must not be presented as a universal measurement of how much personality determines belief.
The researchers discussed the attractiveness of narratives and the evaluation of evidence as possible explanations. These are theoretically plausible interpretations that require further testing. A single person's relationship to an extraordinary story may also depend on cultural upbringing, the social environment, memorable experiences, and what the person understands a questionnaire item to mean.
Openness to experience: why the direction can change
Openness captures intellectual curiosity, imagination, aesthetic interest, and receptivity to unfamiliar experiences. In the 2020 multivariable model it was a positive predictor of the broad paranormal-belief outcome. One possible interpretation is that openness to unfamiliar possibilities can accompany greater willingness to consider extraordinary propositions. Betsch et al., 2020.
A more recent investigation demonstrates why this cannot be a universal rule. Silvia, Crasson, Greengross, and Kuhn studied audience interpretations of stage magic with adult samples of 412 and 292. In their first study, participants who attributed stage tricks more strongly to supernatural powers tended to score lower, rather than higher, in openness; they also tended to be higher in extraversion and neuroticism. Silvia et al., 2025.
There is no need to force these results into one trait stereotype. A general questionnaire about a range of paranormal beliefs and a specific judgment about a magician's performance assess distinct outcomes. Someone may welcome unusual ideas yet recognize performance magic as a practiced skill. Someone else may readily endorse a supernatural attribution while showing less preference for open-ended intellectual exploration. Facets of openness can also have different associations from its broad total score.
Conscientiousness and deliberate appraisal
Conscientiousness includes tendencies toward organization, planning, persistence, and self-regulation. The 2020 study identified a negative adjusted association with paranormal-belief scores. The authors discussed careful review of claims as one possible explanatory element. Betsch et al., 2020.
Conscientiousness does not itself measure scientific literacy, critical thinking, or truthfulness. A person can be highly dependable while endorsing an unusual belief, and another can be disorganized while carefully evaluating extraordinary claims. The appropriate research question is whether the measured association remains after accounting for relevant factors such as education, cognitive reflection, knowledge of probability, and the content of particular beliefs.
Results from a broad self-report domain cannot identify why an individual accepted a story, nor can they establish that endorsing a belief reflects a moral or character defect. Those inferences would substitute an unsupported individual judgment for a limited population correlation.
Emotionality, neuroticism, and extraversion
Emotionality within HEXACO concerns aspects of emotional sensitivity, attachment, and threat responsiveness; Big Five neuroticism refers more broadly to negative emotional reactivity. Their definitions overlap in some areas but differ substantively. Researchers must retain the exact terminology of the personality instrument used.
Emotionality was included in the 2020 expanded model. The first stage-magic sample in the 2025 research showed higher neuroticism and extraversion among those making stronger supernatural performance attributions. Neither result demonstrates that fear or sociability universally causes paranormal belief. The dependent variables and underlying personality inventories were different. Betsch et al., 2020; Silvia et al., 2025.
An extraordinary experience can feel frightening, comforting, interesting, or emotionally neutral. Different people may construct very different explanations for a similarly ambiguous event. Measures of personality and affect can help describe correlates of those interpretations, while their causal role remains a separate empirical question.
Agreeableness and honesty–humility
Agreeableness concerns interpersonal compassion, consideration, and cooperation. Honesty–humility is a separate HEXACO dimension. Neither trait is equivalent to gullibility, conformity, deception, or the willingness to consider a new idea.
The results reviewed here do not establish a stable, universal effect for agreeableness or honesty–humility across paranormal belief domains. The absence of a dimension from one adjusted predictive model also does not prove that its correlation is exactly zero in other populations or with different outcomes. Betsch et al., 2020.
Studies should specify narrower hypotheses, use validated measures, and replicate findings before describing people who endorse extraordinary claims as intrinsically more trusting, less principled, or more socially compliant.
Absorption, fantasy proneness, and imaginative involvement
Absorption is a disposition toward deeply immersive attention, including engagement with imagery, sensory details, and compelling experiences. Fantasy proneness describes sustained involvement in imagination. These traits can affect the felt richness of an inner experience. Neither is a psychiatric diagnosis, and neither demonstrates that a sincerely reported event was fabricated.
Webster and Saucier investigated how absorption, fantasy proneness, superstitiousness, and religiousness were associated with desire for 12 imagined extraordinary powers and judgments concerning their possibility. Their final analyzed sample included 143 participants. In multivariable analyses, absorption and belief that luck can be changed uniquely related to desire for supernatural powers. Absorption also related to participants' judgments that humans possess or could possess such powers. Webster & Saucier, 2023.
These outcomes are about attitudes toward hypothetical capacities, not evidence of the capacities themselves. The small observational sample limits generalization, and correlated imaginative dispositions make unique contributions sensitive to model selection. The results support studying absorption as a potentially relevant dimension without turning imagination into a universal causal explanation.
Schizotypy and clinical distinctions
Schizotypy is studied as a dimensional collection of characteristics that may include unusual perceptual experiences, uncommon beliefs, and other styles of cognition or social experience. Some research has examined its overlap with paranormal beliefs and related patterns. This topic requires exact separation between trait questionnaires, psychotic-like experiences, distress, and recognized clinical disorders. A 2025 longitudinal study discusses overlap with schizotypy while investigating belief, coping, and psychological meaning.
Believing in precognition, reporting a sensed presence, or scoring high on an absorption questionnaire is not, by itself, evidence of schizophrenia, schizotypal personality disorder, dissociation, or a psychotic disorder. A clinical diagnosis requires an appropriate assessment of a full presentation, including symptom pattern, distress, impairment, culture, medical factors, and sleep-related contexts.
Likewise, the fact that someone reports an extraordinary experience establishes a report worth understanding. Independent evidence is necessary to assess what externally occurred. Personality research cannot determine the cause of one particular reported experience from trait scores alone.
Personality is not the same as reasoning ability
Cognitive reflection, conditional reasoning, judgments of randomness, critical thinking, and intelligence are related research domains but are not interchangeable with Big Five personality traits. A person can have a particular cognitive style without having a recognizable paranormal-believer personality profile.
Dean and colleagues systematically reviewed 71 studies involving 20,993 adult participants. They grouped findings by perceptual and cognitive biases, reasoning, intelligence and academic ability, thinking styles, executive functions and memory, and other cognitive functions. The relatively consistent associations concerned greater intuitive thinking and confirmatory bias together with reduced conditional-reasoning performance and perception of randomness. However, the review reported substantial heterogeneity. Dean et al., 2022.
This was a systematic review of cognitive-functioning research, not a meta-analysis showing a single personality effect in 20,993 people. It should inform interpretation of competing cognitive explanations while remaining separate from specific trait correlations. A correlation with one reasoning task does not allow a diagnosis, a definitive intelligence judgment, or a conclusion about an individual's account.
Psychological pathways under investigation
Several mechanisms may contribute to associations between traits and beliefs. Imaginative involvement may make extraordinary scenarios particularly engaging. Emotional dispositions could affect whether uncertainty feels interesting or threatening. Social context might influence the narratives a person encounters and the interpretive communities they trust. Deliberate evaluation and existing knowledge may influence how competing explanations are weighed. These are partly overlapping, testable hypotheses rather than established causes of every paranormal interpretation. Betsch et al., 2020; Webster & Saucier, 2023.
There are also competing explanations for a measured trait–belief correlation. A dispositional characteristic may precede the belief; adopting a belief might affect self-description; or a third influence could shape both. Cultural learning, age, education, prior experiences, questionnaire wording, and response tendencies are potential confounders. Most cross-sectional studies cannot distinguish these pathways.
Psychological evidence establishes that perception, memory, expectation, attention, and reasoning can influence reports and interpretations. It does not follow that any one mechanism necessarily explains every unusual personal experience. Separately, the sincerity and emotional significance of a report do not demonstrate the external paranormal cause proposed for it.
Different beliefs, different patterns
Telepathy, superstition, apparitions, precognition, and supernatural attributions of theatrical performances may carry different assumptions and meanings. Combining them into one sum score can be useful for some research questions and misleading for others. The 2017 assessment of the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale examined a general factor alongside subfactors, while the 2021 instrument-development study approached item selection differently. Drinkwater et al., 2017; Dean et al., 2021.
The 2025 stage-magic study also showed that domain-specific supernatural attributions related to wider paranormal-belief patterns. Its first-sample personality associations were not a direct test of every kind of supernatural claim. Silvia et al., 2025.
The correct question is therefore which aspect of paranormal belief is being measured, which personality trait or facet is involved, and which statistical relationship survives appropriate controls. A claim about “the personality of paranormal believers” should be treated as a broad hypothesis until these questions are answered.
Culture, meaning, and psychological well-being
People understand unusual reports through available social and cultural categories. Differences in language, historical traditions, media exposure, and personal experience can shape questionnaire endorsement. Measurement equivalence matters when the same scale is used across groups, especially where items combine different belief traditions.
Paranormal beliefs may also participate in personal meaning and coping. Dagnall, Denovan, Drinkwater, and Escolà-Gascón followed 1,158 respondents across three waves separated by three months. Their analyses identified associations among paranormal-belief endorsement, meaning in life, active and avoidant coping, and social identity, and found patterns differing from those related to conspiracy-theory endorsement. The design was observational. It cannot prove that adopting paranormal belief causes better well-being or that such relationships generalize equally to all groups. Dagnall et al., 2025.
These findings reinforce the importance of studying a person's subjective significance and functioning without deciding theological questions or importing conclusions from one belief domain into another.
Methodological limits: how much can we trust a trait correlation?
Questionnaire studies are efficient but sensitive to common-method bias, scale reliability, social desirability, and item interpretation. Some traditional measures combine conceptually different categories. Their factor structure may change under alternative assumptions, making broad score comparisons uncertain. Drinkwater et al., 2017; Dean et al., 2021.
Sampling also matters. The 2022 systematic review found that more than 60% of included cognitive studies recruited undergraduates and roughly 30% sampled exclusively psychology undergraduates. Those observations apply to the included cognitive literature, not automatically to every personality study. Nonetheless, they illustrate the importance of representative recruitment and the limits of treating university-based convenience samples as descriptions of the entire population. Dean et al., 2022.
Researchers may test many trait domains, subscales, demographics, and interactions. Without planned hypotheses, adequate statistical power, multiplicity controls, and transparent reporting, apparent associations may be chance findings. Independent replication and preregistration reduce these risks. Cross-cultural investigations should assess whether the same item means the same thing across languages and social settings.
A small p-value says little by itself about practical importance. An explained-variance value describes performance within a statistical model; it is not a percentage of causes, a probability of individual belief, or a clinical prediction. The expanded 2020 model explaining about 19% of score variation left most observed variation outside the measured predictors. The estimate also depends on the development sample and needs testing in independent datasets. Betsch et al., 2020.
Longitudinal designs can help establish time order, but repeated observational measurement still cannot remove every confounder. Evidence for a causal pathway would be strengthened by convergent designs, prospective preregistration, credible interventions where ethical and feasible, and independent reproduction of effects.
Clinical and practical significance
Anomalistic psychology studies unusual reports, interpretations, and beliefs through empirical methods. Trait associations do not establish an individual psychological deficit or authorize psychiatric classification. A belief may be personally meaningful, neutral, comforting, confusing, or distressing. The relevant concern for care is the person's well-being, safety, and functioning.
Professional assessment may be appropriate when experiences are accompanied by sustained fear, severe sleep disturbance, substantial functional impairment, significant behavioral changes, or immediate safety concerns. Evaluation should consider the full context, including medical and sleep-related possibilities, while treating the person's account respectfully. There is no basis for diagnosing someone from a belief questionnaire, a single memory, or an unusual perceptual report.
For readers, the most constructive approach is to distinguish experience, memory, interpretation, and evidence. For educators, explaining probability, cognitive methods, and uncertainty works better when it avoids stereotyping believers. For researchers, the highest priorities include precise construct definitions, representative and diverse samples, validated instruments, transparent statistical analyses, and independent replications.
Conclusions
Evidence supports associations between particular paranormal-belief measures and some broad personality traits and narrower psychological dispositions. The patterns differ by outcome and sample. The 2020 multi-predictor study illustrates modest explanatory scope, the 2022 cognitive review highlights evidence heterogeneity, and more recent focused studies show why distinct paranormal propositions should be examined separately. Betsch et al., 2020; Dean et al., 2022; Silvia et al., 2025.
A universal personality profile of paranormal belief has not been established. Causal direction remains insufficiently resolved. Group-level findings cannot reliably explain why a particular person reports an experience or holds a belief. The psychological reality and meaning of an experience are legitimate subjects of science; a claimed external paranormal cause requires distinct, independently evaluated evidence.
Frequently asked questions
Is there a paranormal believer personality type?
No single scientifically established type captures everyone who endorses paranormal propositions. Particular trait associations exist in particular studies, but measured belief categories, instruments, and samples vary considerably. Betsch et al., 2020.
Are open-minded people more likely to believe in psychic powers?
Some studies find higher openness associated with broad paranormal-belief scores. A study of supernatural explanations of stage magic found an inverse openness association in one sample. The findings address different measured outcomes and should not be generalized without that distinction. Betsch et al., 2020; Silvia et al., 2025.
Is paranormal belief associated with neuroticism?
A 2025 stage-magic study reported higher neuroticism among participants giving stronger supernatural explanations in its first sample. This does not establish a universal pattern or imply that an individual has an anxiety disorder. Silvia et al., 2025.
What is the role of absorption and fantasy proneness?
They describe individual differences in imaginative engagement. One small study found associations between absorption and judgments about hypothetical supernatural powers. Such findings concern psychological engagement and expressed beliefs, not verified paranormal abilities or a diagnosis. Webster & Saucier, 2023.
Are people who believe in ghosts less intelligent?
An individual intelligence judgment cannot be made from paranormal belief. A systematic cognitive review found some group-level correlates in reasoning and thinking style alongside heterogeneous findings and substantial limitations. It does not license stereotyping any person. Dean et al., 2022.
Does paranormal belief indicate psychosis or schizotypal personality disorder?
No. Belief endorsement and unusual experiences are not diagnostic categories. A psychiatric assessment requires an established clinical framework and information about the whole presentation, distress, impairment, culture, and other factors.
Are religious beliefs the same as paranormal beliefs?
They are distinct psychological and cultural subjects. Some historical instruments included religious items alongside other extraordinary propositions. The resulting scores require careful interpretation and cannot justify reducing religious adherence to a cognitive error. Tobacyk, 2004.
Do paranormal beliefs improve psychological well-being?
A longitudinal observational study reported associations with meaning, social identity, and coping, with different patterns from conspiracy-theory endorsement. These results do not establish that adopting such beliefs causes psychological benefit for an individual. Dagnall et al., 2025.
Can a personality test predict whether someone believes in telepathy?
Existing group-level correlations do not supply a validated personal classification test. Prediction would require representative data, independent validation, defined belief criteria, and estimates of error and uncertainty.
Why do studies disagree about personality traits?
They frequently use different belief inventories, samples, personality models, statistical controls, and measurement assumptions. A general score can combine heterogeneous beliefs. Preregistration, psychometric validation, and replication are needed to test the robustness of findings. Dean et al., 2021; Drinkwater et al., 2017.
Do personality correlations prove or disprove paranormal phenomena?
They do neither. Correlations concern measured beliefs or interpretations. A claim about an external event must be evaluated using evidence directed at that event. Personal experience can be meaningful independently of what has been externally verified.
Related Articles
Measuring Paranormal Beliefs: Scales, Validity, and Limits — scales, reliability and validity of the belief variables correlated with personality.
References
Betsch, T., Aßmann, L., & Glöckner, A. (2020). Paranormal beliefs and individual differences: Story seeking without reasoned review. Heliyon, 6(6), e04259. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.heliyon.2020.e04259
Dagnall, N., Denovan, A., Drinkwater, K. G., & Escolà-Gascón, Á. (2025). Paranormal belief and conspiracy theory endorsement: Variations in adaptive function and positive wellbeing. Frontiers in Psychology, 16, 1519223. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1519223
Dean, C. E., Akhtar, S., Gale, T. M., Irvine, K., Wiseman, R., & Laws, K. R. (2021). Development of the Paranormal and Supernatural Beliefs Scale using classical and modern test theory. BMC Psychology, 9, 98. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-021-00600-y
Dean, C. E., Akhtar, S., Gale, T. M., Irvine, K., Grohmann, D., & Laws, K. R. (2022). Paranormal beliefs and cognitive function: A systematic review and assessment of study quality across four decades of research. PLOS ONE, 17(5), e0267360. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0267360
Drinkwater, K., Denovan, A., Dagnall, N., & Parker, A. (2017). An assessment of the dimensionality and factorial structure of the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, 1693. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01693
Silvia, P. J., Crasson, S. J., Greengross, G., & Kuhn, G. (2025). More than just a magic trick? Exploring an audience's supernatural attributions for magicians' performances. Personality and Individual Differences, 246, 113306. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2025.113306
Tobacyk, J. J. (2004). A revised paranormal belief scale. International Journal of Transpersonal Studies, 23(1), 94–98. https://doi.org/10.24972/ijts.2004.23.1.94
Webster, R. J., & Saucier, D. A. (2023). Up, up, and away: Individual differences in imaginative involvement and magical beliefs relate to perceiving and desiring supernatural powers. Imagination, Cognition and Personality, 43(2), 129–149. https://doi.org/10.1177/02762366231183626