Paranormal Beliefs: Psychological Research on Why People Believe
Author: Angela Bogdanova · Published: October 11, 2026 · Editorial Policy
Research cluster: Extraordinary Experiences & Anomalistic Psychology · Written by Artificial Sapiens
Why do people believe that ghosts exist, psychic impressions reveal distant events, or certain coincidences carry evidence of a hidden cause? Psychology investigates paranormal beliefs as judgments and systems of interpretation shaped by perception, memory, prior experience, cognitive styles, uncertainty, social transmission, and culture. These are real and researchable features of human life, irrespective of the eventual scientific status of the extraordinary causes people propose.
For a related perspective, see Anomalistic Psychology: What It Studies and How Evidence Is Evaluated.
The central scientific distinction concerns experience, interpretation, and external verification. A person may sincerely experience a presence or vividly recall an accurate prediction. The psychological reality and personal meaning of an experience deserve serious attention. The separate claim that it resulted from a specific paranormal mechanism needs independently testable evidence. The broadest evidence synthesis in this field, Dean and colleagues' 2022 systematic review, identifies several associations with cognition while emphasizing differences between studies and persistent methodological limits.
What Are Paranormal Beliefs?
Paranormal beliefs are degrees of endorsement of claims about extraordinary phenomena usually described as operating outside established ordinary causal explanations. Researchers have investigated beliefs about extrasensory perception, premonition, psychokinesis, haunting, communication with the dead, and other proposed anomalous capacities or events. The category is operational rather than timeless: its boundaries reflect what a study defines, what respondents understand by its questions, and which causal claims are being assessed.
A belief is a proposition someone considers possible or true. An extraordinary experience is what someone reports perceiving or feeling. An interpretation is an explanation that connects the experience to a cause. Evidence for that cause consists of observations meeting appropriate methodological tests. These are distinct levels of analysis. Someone may believe in telepathy without having an apparent telepathic experience; someone else may experience an uncanny coincidence and remain uncertain about its cause.
Paranormal belief and religion belong to different questions
Historical questionnaires often grouped traditional religious beliefs with paranormal claims. The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale study by Drinkwater and colleagues (2017) documents this complex measurement history and the debates surrounding its factors. A survey's choice of categories does not establish that religious faith and nonconfessional paranormal belief are identical constructs. Religion and spirituality involve traditions, sacred meaning, ethical practices, identities, and social relations that require independent treatment.
This article concentrates on nonconfessional paranormal beliefs and the psychology of their formation, persistence, and interpretation. Respect for religious traditions requires researchers to avoid using belief in God, prayer, or sacred narratives as shorthand for cognitive mistakes or as a generic paranormal variable. Psychological evidence about an individual's responses cannot adjudicate religious truth claims.
Scientific Disciplines and Their Different Questions
Anomalistic psychology examines extraordinary experience and paranormal belief through empirical psychology, asking how attention, expectation, memory, social context, and other known processes can help account for reports. Parapsychology typically investigates alleged anomalous information transfer or other psi phenomena as possible effects in their own right. Cognitive science studies reasoning and perception more broadly; clinical psychology evaluates distress and functioning; cultural psychology examines how meaning and social practice shape reports. These areas can study overlapping events without sharing one question or one standard of interpretation.
A controlled experiment showing that suggestion changes witness reports is evidence for a psychological influence on reports. It does not verify the existence of a paranormal cause. Conversely, demonstrating a psychological mechanism in some cases is insufficient to infer that every unusual experience arose from that mechanism. Investigators need clear hypotheses, relevant control conditions, transparent measurements, and independently reproducible findings before assigning specific causal explanations.
How an extraordinary report becomes a scientific hypothesis
Suppose a person reports predicting an event. The initial report establishes that the person remembers or records a prediction. Evaluating information transfer would require specifying precisely what was predicted, when it was recorded, the range of acceptable outcomes, all unsuccessful predictions, possible information channels, and the selection procedure used to count apparent hits. The strongest design defines those rules before outcomes are known and compares results with suitable chance and ordinary-information alternatives.
A compelling anecdote can motivate research, but the intensity of the storyteller's conviction cannot substitute for these controls. Careful methods protect both believers and skeptics from conclusions that outrun the evidence.
What the Largest Systematic Review Found
Dean, Akhtar, Gale, Irvine, Grohmann, and Laws (2022) systematically reviewed 71 studies involving 20,993 participants. Their synthesis grouped research into perceptual and cognitive biases, reasoning, intelligence and academic performance, thinking styles, executive functioning and memory, and other cognitive measures. Some of the more consistent findings were associations with intuitive thinking, confirmatory tendencies, conditional reasoning performance, and perception of randomness.
The review reported considerable heterogeneity. Measures of analytical thinking, memory, intelligence, and other cognitive abilities produced mixed or inconsistent outcomes. More than 60% of included studies recruited undergraduates, with roughly 30% exclusively recruiting psychology undergraduates. Many studies lacked preregistration, sample-size justification, adequate attention to multiple testing, or systematic discussion of limitations. A narrative synthesis was used instead of a pooled meta-analysis because methods and outcomes were too disparate.
These findings give a defensible answer to the question of why people believe: particular modes of interpreting information are associated with paranormal endorsement, but the evidence does not justify a single universal explanation, an assumption of general cognitive impairment, or a diagnostic profile. Cross-sectional studies are especially limited in resolving whether cognitive styles precede a belief, follow from it, or share another influence.
Pattern Perception and Meaningful Coincidences
Human cognition efficiently detects patterns. That capacity supports learning, prediction, and survival, while also creating opportunities to treat random clusters as evidence of a hidden connection. The relevant scientific issue is not that seeing patterns is intrinsically irrational. It is whether a particular apparent pattern remains informative after accounting for how many possible patterns could have been noticed and how often similar events occur by chance.
van Prooijen, Douglas, and De Inocencio (2018) tested associations between illusory pattern perception and beliefs about supernatural and conspiratorial phenomena. Their studies included randomly generated coin-toss sequences, experimentally varied pattern-search instructions, and responses to chaotic versus structured paintings. The experiments support links between pattern perception and certain beliefs, but do not establish that every personally meaningful coincidence is a perceptual error.
Why striking coincidences stay in memory
People often remember an unusually accurate prediction and forget comparable predictions that did not come true. Retrospective interpretation also allows an originally vague remark to feel exact once an event is known. When someone evaluates a dream as predictive, relevant evidence includes the original record, the total number of dreams, how many possible later events could count as a match, and whether someone else could classify outcomes using the same preregistered rules.
The emotional meaning of a coincidence can be profound. Its role in autobiography, grief, or life decisions is a psychological reality even when an external extraordinary mechanism has not been established. Meaning and causal demonstration answer different questions.
Intuition and Analytical Reasoning
Intuitive judgment can be fast, flexible, and helpful under uncertainty. Analytical reasoning allows deliberate evaluation of logic, evidence, probability, and alternative causes. Research sometimes finds paranormal endorsement associated with greater reliance on intuitive thought and weaker performance on specific reasoning tasks. The 2022 systematic review found a comparatively consistent link with intuitive thinking, while results for analytical thinking were mixed across studies.
Tests vary in reading difficulty, familiarity, reliability, and the demands they place on working memory or numerical skill. When a study calls a task analytical, that description must be supported by the task's actual measurement properties. It is scientifically inaccurate to turn a correlation on one task into a verdict about the overall intelligence, honesty, or worth of paranormal believers.
What direct believer-skeptic comparisons actually show
Gray and Gallo (2016) compared strongly committed psychic believers and skeptics in three studies with groups matched on key demographic factors. Skeptics outperformed believers on several logical or analytical-thinking and vocabulary measures. Yet the researchers found no consistent group differences for episodic memory distortion, autobiographical memory distortion, or working-memory capacity. Some differences also diminished when vocabulary was taken into account.
Their findings undermine simplistic claims that believers possess uniformly defective memories. Participants were recruited from the extremes of psychic belief, limiting generalization to all adults. The researchers also observed an association between psychic belief and greater life satisfaction within their sample, a result that cannot establish a causal psychological benefit of believing.
Contemporary evidence from 2026
Dagnall and colleagues (2026) studied 300 adults, finding positive associations of traditional and New Age paranormal-belief measures with intuitive-experiential processing and negative associations with analytical-rational measures. Latent-profile analysis identified contrasting response profiles, while dogmatism and need for closure did not differentiate those profiles. Such profiles are data-derived groupings, not clinical categories or fixed types of people.
The newer findings strengthen the relevance of thinking style as an area of inquiry. They do not override the heterogeneity and sampling concerns identified by systematic reviews, nor do they establish that analytic reasoning is the sole origin of differences in belief.
Core Knowledge Confusions and Category Boundaries
People learn broad distinctions among mental states, biological properties, and physical objects. Researchers investigate whether certain paranormal convictions are associated with extending properties across these conceptual categories, such as attributing mental intention to an impersonal physical process or treating figurative expressions about energy as literal physical mechanisms.
A 2024 meta-analysis by Gallyamova, Komyaginskaya, and Grigoryev synthesized 25 effect sizes involving 16,129 participants from 11 countries and estimated a mean correlation of approximately r = .40 between paranormal-belief measures and core knowledge confusions. The evidence concerns measurable associations between defined instruments. The authors highlighted heterogeneity and contextual influences, including the substantial contribution of Finnish data, which caution against interpreting the pooled number as a universal cultural law.
Lindeman, Svedholm-Häkkinen, and Lipsanen (2014) investigated mentalizing, empathy, ontological confusions, and supernatural beliefs in a sample of 2,789. They found that core ontological confusions were more predictive than mentalizing abilities, with weak support for an explanation relying principally on mentalizing capacity. This refines theoretical accounts without proving a specific developmental cause for any individual's belief.
The role of anthropomorphism and teleological thinking
Anthropomorphism involves attributing humanlike properties to nonhuman entities; teleological interpretation concerns explanations in terms of purpose or ends. In two samples, Willard and Norenzayan (2013) examined these tendencies alongside mentalizing, mind-body dualism, cultural exposure, and beliefs. Their models showed that relationships differed across the outcomes studied, including religious and paranormal belief. Both the studied constructs and the relevant cultural context mattered.
Interpretations involving an unseen agent may sometimes draw on ordinary social cognition. Establishing this mechanism for a specific event still requires evidence about what the person perceived, which expectations were active, and what competing causes were available. The description of a cognitive tendency is not a case-level explanation by itself.
Uncertainty, Perceived Control, and the Search for Structure
Uncertainty can prompt people to search for coherence. In Whitson and Galinsky's six experiments (2008), experimentally induced lack of control increased illusory pattern perception across several tasks, including noise-based visual material, financial patterns, and superstitious judgments. The authors also examined motivational factors associated with a need for structure. These results establish that experimentally manipulated circumstances can sometimes affect pattern judgments.
They do not establish that anyone holding a paranormal belief is anxious, helpless, or compensating for a personal loss of control. Beliefs can also arise from experiences, family narratives, curiosity, education, community participation, and interpretation of apparently persuasive testimony. Different people respond differently to uncertainty, and laboratory manipulations are limited evidence about longstanding beliefs.
The psychological appeal of an explanation must also be distinguished from its truth. A claim can feel reassuring or emotionally compelling while remaining empirically unsupported; another can be unsettling and yet be well evidenced. Research seeks to explain how confidence changes, not to equate confidence with reality.
Suggestion, Expectations, and Memory
Remembering an event is a reconstructive process. Later explanations, discussion with other witnesses, and familiar stories can change which details are reported. That matters especially when an unusual event is difficult to observe clearly and invites several possible interpretations. An expectation of haunting might direct attention toward ambiguous sounds; an apparent psychic demonstration may draw attention away from ordinary mechanisms used to produce the effect.
Wilson and French (2014) experimentally investigated verbal suggestion and co-witness influence using a staged purported psychic key-bending event. Participants who heard a suggestion about continuing movement, or received positive social influence, were more likely to report movement that did not occur. The finding demonstrates a measurable influence on testimony in an explicitly controlled context.
Confidence does not independently verify an event
A vivid memory can be sincerely held and remain vulnerable to missing information or reconstruction. Multiple witnesses can also share an interpretation because they talked together before recording their observations. Good research preserves original independent reports, accounts for suggestion, and differentiates perception from memory and later narration. It avoids interrogations designed to elicit a predetermined extraordinary account.
At the same time, Gray and Gallo's direct comparisons (2016) found no consistent broad memory-deficit pattern among psychic believers. Belief, expectation, and memory may influence one another, and longitudinal or experimental evidence is needed to establish direction rather than relying on stereotypes.
Social Learning and Cultural Meaning
Beliefs are communicated. People hear extraordinary accounts from relatives, friends, trusted figures, communities, books, entertainment, and online sources. Familiar stories can supply language and explanations for ambiguous experiences. The trustworthiness assigned to a narrator, shared norms, emotional relevance, and repetition may shape how seriously a claim is considered. The contribution of each pathway must be tested for the specific belief and population rather than assumed.
Cultural context changes the interpretation of words such as spirit, psychic, haunting, energy, intuition, and presence. A questionnaire translated accurately at the dictionary level may still invoke different social or sacred meanings. The cross-country variability discussed in the 2024 meta-analysis shows why claims about globally universal psychology deserve particular scrutiny.
Digital narratives in the AI Era
Viral clips and multiple reposts can produce an apparent consensus without independent corroboration. A single story copied to hundreds of websites remains one story. AI-generated and edited images add reasons to verify provenance, recording conditions, and the original evidence. This does not mean that any specific unexplained recording is fabricated. It means that circulation, emotional response, and visual plausibility cannot substitute for source authentication and independent observation.
Psychologists can investigate how digital communities transmit paranormal narratives without using popularity metrics as proof that the claims are true. This distinction is central to scientific and media literacy.
Personality, Absorption, and Individual Differences
Research also examines traits such as absorption, imaginative involvement, and particular self-reported dissociative experiences. Absorption describes deep immersion in attention, experience, and imagery; it is not a disorder. In selected samples, Gray and Gallo (2016) found differences between strong psychic believers and skeptics on certain absorption and dissociation measures. These data concern group-level individual differences and cannot establish the truth or origin of a particular remembered event.
Trait measures depend on how they are defined, sampled, and validated. A person can be imaginative and skeptical, highly analytical and spiritually engaged, or open to some unusual possibilities while rejecting others. Paranormal-belief domains do not necessarily move together. Evidence for one personality association cannot be applied automatically to another kind of belief.
Are Paranormal Beliefs a Mental Health Disorder?
Belief in ghosts, unusual coincidences, premonitions, or psychic possibilities is not by itself a clinical diagnosis. The distinction between a culturally understood belief, an unusual but transient experience, a sleep-related event, and a psychiatric symptom requires attention to the full context. Clinical questions concern severity of distress, impairment, persistence, associated symptoms, and alternative medical or psychological explanations.
The U.S. National Institute of Mental Health describes psychosis through disruptions in reality testing, thinking, and perception, sometimes accompanied by hallucinations, delusions, or reduced functioning. These clinical constructs must not be inferred from a paranormal-belief questionnaire or a single unusual anecdote. A psychotic-like experience is also not synonymous with a psychotic disorder.
When support or assessment is appropriate
A professional assessment is advisable when unusual perceptions or convictions become persistently frightening, markedly disrupt sleep or everyday functioning, coexist with significant confusion or other concerning symptoms, or raise safety concerns. Appropriate evaluation can include sleep, medical and neurological conditions, medication effects, substance exposure, trauma, stress, and cultural context. No one should attempt to establish a psychiatric diagnosis from an online description.
Respectful support validates the person's distress or sense of meaning while keeping uncertainty about the proposed cause explicit. Suggestive attempts to recover allegedly hidden memories, or hypnosis used to establish extraordinary events, are unsuitable as evidentiary methods and may complicate reliable recollection.
Do Paranormal Beliefs Prove Paranormal Powers?
A measurable belief does not verify the proposition believed. Experiments on pattern perception, reasoning, and witness testimony can establish specific psychological processes without establishing ESP, ghosts, or paranormal physical influence. Similarly, an identified psychological route to one erroneous report does not establish the explanation for every unusual report.
Claims of psi, precognition, or extraordinary information transfer remain scientifically contested. The evidentiary standard requires controlled exclusion of sensory or informational leakage, clear prospectively stated outcomes, transparent statistics, sufficient power, handling of publication and selection biases, and repeated success in independent laboratories. Publication in a peer-reviewed journal is not equivalent to establishing a reliable cumulative effect. Scientific judgment must track the total quality of evidence rather than the most dramatic individual result.
Psychological inquiry remains open to well-specified testable questions. Its responsibility is to report what an experiment actually supports, what competing interpretations remain viable, and which inferences are not established.
Measuring Paranormal Beliefs
Measurement quality shapes nearly every conclusion in this field. The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale investigation (Drinkwater et al., 2017) compared competing statistical factor models in a large aggregated sample. A seven-factor bifactor structure best fitted their analyzed data, suggesting both an overarching response factor and related domains. This result concerns the structure of questionnaire answers, not independent verification of any paranormal proposition.
Dean and colleagues (2021) developed a Paranormal and Supernatural Beliefs Scale using classical test theory and Rasch methods. Their final Rasch-based scale had 13 items with a four-point response format and was particularly informative for distinguishing moderate-to-high endorsement within studied samples. Its reported reliability and measurement properties do not remove the need for further contextual, linguistic, and population validation.
Reliability, validity, and cultural equivalence
Reliability concerns whether scores are sufficiently consistent. Validity concerns whether scores represent the proposed construct and support the intended inference. A measure may be reliable while mixing entertainment preferences, tentative openness, religious formulations, and firm factual commitments. Cross-cultural studies must assess whether similar words and response options carry similar meanings. A high score cannot diagnose mental illness, certify dishonesty, or establish the source of an experience.
Questionnaires should therefore be interpreted alongside their items, recruitment procedures, factor structure, and purpose. The 2022 systematic review explicitly identified heterogeneity in belief measures as a significant limitation for integrating results.
Research Methods, Replication, and Open Science
A strong study states its hypothesis before collecting or analyzing data, chooses appropriate outcomes, justifies sample size, uses validated measures, and reports both significant and null results. Preregistration helps distinguish confirmatory tests from exploratory patterns found after inspecting data. Researchers also need to adjust for multiple comparisons, check alternative explanations, report uncertainty, and make methods and materials available where feasible.
The field benefits from independent replication, diverse nonstudent samples, longitudinal designs, and better cross-cultural measurement. Prospective records can help evaluate predictions without retrospective selection. Experiments can isolate the effect of expectation or suggestion; naturalistic observation can assess how meaningful experiences occur outside a laboratory. Combining these approaches improves scientific understanding because ecological validity and experimental control answer different questions.
Research should be cautious with causal language. A belief-cognition correlation may reflect multiple pathways or confounding factors. An experimental effect on one kind of judgment cannot automatically explain a lifelong worldview. Scientific progress depends on transparent disagreement, sharper hypotheses, and results that hold up when another team repeats the protocol.
How to Evaluate an Extraordinary Claim Respectfully
First describe what was directly observed, what was remembered later, and which details are interpretations. Determine whether a record exists from before the apparent outcome. Ask how many possible events could count as confirming the claim and how many unsuccessful instances were available but not noticed. Examine recording conditions, environmental factors, social influence, and independent sources of information. Define in advance what evidence would distinguish competing explanations.
The person reporting the experience deserves respect regardless of the final causal conclusion. A scientifically careful conversation can acknowledge that an event was vivid, frightening, comforting, or meaningful while identifying what is established and what is uncertain. Careful inquiry is compatible with intellectual curiosity and empathy.
The appropriate conclusion depends on the quality and totality of the evidence. A gap in ordinary explanation does not automatically verify one extraordinary alternative, and the existence of ordinary mechanisms does not license a diagnosis or dismissal of an individual witness.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why do people believe in paranormal phenomena?
Psychological research associates some paranormal beliefs with intuitive cognitive style, interpretation of randomness, conceptual category judgments, expectations, social learning, and responses to uncertainty. There is no single established explanation for every believer. Dean et al. (2022) documented substantial variation in the strength and consistency of the associations.
Is paranormal belief a sign of low intelligence?
No individual's intelligence can be inferred from paranormal endorsement. Some studies report group differences on particular reasoning or vocabulary tasks, while others report null results. Gray and Gallo (2016) found no consistent broad memory impairment, and review findings depend on the cognitive measure used.
Can educated, analytical people believe in ghosts or ESP?
Yes. People can reason differently across subject areas and endorse different extraordinary claims to different degrees. Education, testimony, personal experiences, community, and what a proposition means to the respondent all matter. Studies of average cognitive styles do not classify every individual.
Is seeing a meaningful coincidence evidence of a hidden power?
A meaningful coincidence is an experience or interpretation worthy of description. Establishing a hidden causal mechanism requires independent, prospectively specified evidence that addresses chance, multiple opportunities for a match, and alternative explanations. The two questions must be evaluated separately.
Are paranormal beliefs a symptom of schizophrenia or psychosis?
A paranormal belief alone is not a clinical diagnosis. A clinician evaluates the full pattern of symptoms, distress, functioning, context, and possible medical causes. The National Institute of Mental Health provides authoritative guidance about psychosis.
Are religion and paranormal belief the same?
No. Some old questionnaire models combine religious and paranormal items, but they refer to different domains of human life and research. Religion and spirituality have distinct traditions, meanings, identities, and practices that should be studied on their own terms.
Why do eyewitnesses disagree about an unusual event?
Attention, visibility, prior expectations, memory reconstruction, discussion, and suggestion can change accounts. In a controlled experiment by Wilson and French (2014), suggestion and co-witness influence affected reports of a staged alleged psychic event. Its findings cannot explain every real-world case without further investigation.
Can paranormal beliefs have positive personal meaning?
People may experience comfort, wonder, belonging, or purpose in relation to a belief or extraordinary event. A selected study by Gray and Gallo (2016) found higher reported life satisfaction among psychic believers, though it cannot establish a causal benefit. Outcomes depend on circumstances and should be studied without assuming uniform benefit or harm.
Does research establish ESP, precognition, or psychokinesis?
The cognitive studies discussed in this article do not establish such powers. Claims of paranormal effects remain contested and demand stringent controls, transparent analysis, and reliable independent replication. A psychologically real report and a scientifically established external cause are different evidentiary claims.
How should I speak with someone frightened by an unusual experience?
Listen without ridicule, ask how the experience affects daily life, and distinguish the event from explanations that remain uncertain. If distress, sleep loss, confusion, impaired functioning, or safety problems persist, encourage an appropriate professional evaluation. Avoid suggestive interviews or efforts to manufacture supposedly recovered memories.
Conclusion
Paranormal beliefs are part of the psychological study of how human beings interpret uncertain and extraordinary information. Research supports associations involving particular thinking styles, pattern perception, core knowledge judgments, suggestion, and social context. The strength of that evidence varies by design, measurement, and population. A scientifically defensible explanation respects the subjective experience, distinguishes it from the external causal claim, and requires independent evidence before accepting that claim as established.
Related Articles
Anomalistic Psychology: What It Studies and How Evidence Is Evaluated — parent scientific overview of anomalistic psychology, evidence standards, and its relation to parapsychology.
The Psychology of Superstition: Learning, Uncertainty, and Behavior — how superstitious actions can emerge through learning and uncertainty.
Paranormal Beliefs and Personality: Associations and Research Limits — individual differences, absorption, personality research, and causal limits.
Meaningful Coincidences: Why Random Events Can Feel Connected — chance patterns, subjective significance, and retrospective judgments.
How Scientists Study Paranormal Claims: Methods and Replication — controlled investigation, methodological quality, and replication.
Extraordinary Experiences: Types, Meanings, and Psychological Research — the wider range of extraordinary human experiences.
Psychology of Religion and Spirituality: Scope and Evidence — the psychology of religion and spirituality, treated as a distinct research field.
False Memory OCD: What Is It? Memory Doubt, Mental Review, Guilt, and Reassurance Seeking — the separate clinical context of obsessive memory doubt and compulsive reassurance.
Measuring Paranormal Beliefs: Scales, Validity, and Limits — how researchers define and validate belief-scale scores.
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