Paranormal belief and personality traits essay

Hire Writer There were pupils involved in the survey with an age scope from 18 to 44 the gender dislocation of participants consisted of 46 work forces and 59 adult females whose mean age was The Anomalous Experience Inventory Kumar. The questionnaire consisted of basic inquiries about demographics and any experience or prepossessions about the paranormal. The coefficient alphas for the Paranormal Belief Scale were.

For example, 48 percent believed in the possibility of extra-sensory perception ESP45 percent believe that unidentified flying objects UFOs have already visited Earth, and 56 Paranormal belief and personality traits essay 72 per cent believed in the reality of the devil and angels, respectively Gallup, In fact, these numbers have actually gone up since the surveys first started Gallup and Newport, and other surveys amongst university and college students have yielded similar results e.

Messer and Griggs, Perhaps due to the widespread existence of such beliefs, the investigation of personality correlates of paranormal and particularly religious belief has received considerable attention in recent years, but little attention was given to both simultaneously.

This study intends to provide a first exploratory look at the relationships between paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs and personality correlates. The question of why so many people, including the well educated, believe in the possibility of such phenomena has perplexed the scientific community and as such the investigation of individual differences in the belief in the paranormal has been a prominent avenue of psychological inquiry.

Early studies into paranormal beliefs rendered a most negative view on believers, emphasising deficiencies in intelligence, education and personality Emme, ; Lundeen and Caldwell, However, these early studies tended to focus on simple superstitions compared with the recent research focus on more complex and sophisticated phenomena such as ESP, psychokinesis and precognition Boshier, ; Irwin, Also, some research has indicated that beliefs in the paranormal are associated with higher rather than lower education and intelligence McGarry and Newberry, Other findings suggest that belief in paranormal phenomena is not associated with the rejection of mainstream science or technology, at least among college and university students Schouten, Two areas that have received a lot of attention in relation to paranormal beliefs have been locus of control and psychopathology.

Early research demonstrated a relationship between a more external locus of control and greater belief in paranormal phenomena e. However, the results from the global measurements of paranormal belief and locus of control have been shown questionable.

Paranormal: Personality Psychology and Carl Jung Essay - Research Paper Example : benjaminpohle.com

This was due to the measurement tools or scaleswhich included both forms of paranormal belief implying a belief in fate and lack of control e. Therefore, it was suggested that superstition and spiritualism should correlate positively, and psi belief should correlate negatively with external locus of control Wolfradt, Indeed, taking this multi-dimensional approach, significant relationships between externality in personal and socio-political control and belief in religion, superstitions and spiritualism have been found.

Similarly, a significant relationship between internality in personal and interpersonal control and belief in psi has also been found Davies and Kirkby, It has been found that those who scored highest on magical thinking showed a predisposition to psychosis Eckblad and Chapman, Research has also shown that paranormal beliefs are significantly and positively correlated with schizotypy Thalbourne, ; Chequers, Joseph and Diduca, and with manic-depressive experiences Thalbourne and French, As can be seen there are various forms of paranormal belief.

Here the individual is heavily influenced by cultural factors, such as family, peer group processes, dissemination of paranormal concepts in the media and formal persuasion by social institutions, e. Socialisation has been one of the reasons used to explain gender differences concerning the extent of paranormal beliefs.

Females express greater global paranormal belief than males Irwin, ; Rice,although men express greater belief in UFOs and extraterrestrials e. Furthermore, a study by Lester, Thinschmidt and Trautman reported that precognition experience and paranormal belief were directly related to feeling and intuition scores, supporting the view that believers tend to be less logical, more open-minded and prone to fantasy than non-believers.

All this may suggest that strong believers in paranormal phenomena may be maladjusted in some form or another, but the evidence with respect to personality dimensions is decidedly mixed.

This model claims to represent the basic factors organising human traits Saucier and Goldberg, Bearing this in mind, Thalbourne, Dunbar and Delin found a significant positive relationship between paranormal beliefs specifically belief in psi, witchcraft, spiritualism, precognition and traditional religion and Neuroticism using the revised Paranormal Belief Scale RPBSwhereas other researchers Lester and Monaghan, ; Willging and Lester, have found no such relationship.

A more recent study has reported significant relationships between paranormal beliefs, trait anxiety and dissociative experiences Wolfradt,which mirrors findings of previous studies Irwin, ; Pekala, Kumar and Marcano, It is postulated that paranormal beliefs serve the same function as dissociative experiences, i.

Similarly, fantasy proneness - correlated with paranormal beliefs- is also believed to serve this function Irwin, Even so, a low but significant correlation has been found between paranormal belief and irrational thinking Tobayck and Milford, ; Roig, Bridges, Renner and Jackson, One personality factor that would have been thought related to paranormal belief is Openness to Experience, as individuals scoring high in this factor may be characterised by a particularly permeable structure of consciousness, as well as an active motivation to seek out the unfamiliar.

This goes hand in hand with tolerance of ambiguity and open-mindedness and leads those high in Openness to Experience to endorse liberal political and social values, because questioning conventional values is a natural extension of their curiosity McCrae, a.

However, currently there is little or no support for this hypothesis Thalbourne, Dunbar and Delin, ; Lester and Monaghan, ; Willging and Lester, Perhaps the strongest evidence relating personality correlates and paranormal beliefs has come from empirical studies showing Extraversion to be a salient correlate of paranormal belief.

The prime example is the study of Thalbournewho discovered that individuals with higher paranormal belief scores sheep were more extraverted than disbelievers goatswith Eysenck and Thalbourne and Haraldsson reporting similar results.

However, some other studies have shown no such association Lester et al.

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Unfortunately, some of the prior research in this area has been plagued by several methodological problems, including semantic ambiguity regarding the dimensions of paranormal belief, imprecise operational definitions that blur the constructs of belief and experience, and measurement inconsistencies of the constructs themselves.

The reasons for this include specific biases of the researchers, limitations of the measurements, or conceptual differences regarding the dimensionality of the construct Rattet and Bursik, With respect to the employed RPBS, a controversy exists Lawrence, regarding the classification of traditional religious beliefs and superstition as paranormal, despite some strong empirical evidence Thalbourne, The revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS) by Tobayck (, ) is a 26 item self-report scale, which measures the following seven forms of paranormal beliefs: traditional religious belief, psi belief, witchcraft, superstition, spiritualism, extraordinary life forms and precognition.

The majority of previous research examining paranormal belief and personality correlates has taken a skeptical view, which suggests that paranormal believers are psychologically dysfunctional, for example, psychotic, neurotic and depressive. This study looks at the relation between the belief in the paranormal and different personality traits.

There are two ways of looking at belief in the paranormal this study will look at the people who believe and those who somewhat believe and analyze their personalities traits. Paranormal Belief and Personality Traits Summary: Topic Area: This study looks at the relation between the belief in the paranormal and different personality traits.

There are two ways of looking at belief in the paranormal this study will look at the people who believe and those who somewhat believe and analyze their personalities traits. The independent variable was the participant’s beliefs (paranormal or religious) while the dependent variable was the participant’s scores on the scales of paranormal beliefs, religious beliefs and personality factors.

This study looks at the relation between the belief in the paranormal and different personality traits.

There are two ways of looking at belief in the paranormal this study will look at the people who believe and those who somewhat believe and analyze their personalities traits.