June 2024
A new study by three researchers at the University of Virginia shows that the cognitive style of psi researchers is no different than that of academics who are sceptic to psi phenomena.
Why are people more or less prone to believing in psi phenomena like precognition, telepathy and survival after death? One mainstream physicalist hypothesis is that it has to do with differences in various aspects of cognition, including critical thinking and scientific reasoning.
Previous studies have detected such differences among lay individuals. But when it comes to academic researchers who investigate psychic phenomena, it doesn’t hold true.
The study conducted by Marieta Pehlivanova, Marina Weiler and Bruce Greyson, and published in Frontiers in Psychology, demonstrates that “academics who work with psi differ from lay psi individuals, but not from sceptics, in actively open-minded thinking. In other words, despite their high belief in psi phenomena, psi researchers demonstrate a commitment to sound reasoning about evidence that is no different from that of sceptics”.
The findings suggest that the two groups — who are philosophically and empirically at odds regarding evidence for psi phenomena — “nonetheless do not differ in their endorsement of the principles of ‘good’ thinking about evidence”.
In the literature on lay believers and their cognitive styles, the leading hypothesis is that “deficient” cognitive characteristics are responsible for strong psi beliefs. But psychology professor Etzel Cardeña at Lund university in Sweden and others have shown that staunch sceptics actually have a cognitive style akin to staunch believers.
Both groups are dominated by a style called NFC, a need for cognitive closure. A person reasoning this way has an intolerance for complexity and ambiguity and quickly settles for an answer, even if it is not correct or optimal, to end further information processing.
The opposite style is labeled AOT, actively open-minded thinking, which is essential when dealing with complex phenomena and contradicting results.
The Virginia study investigated AOT and NFC among four different groups: academic psi researchers, lay psi believers, academic sceptics, and lay sceptics.
The FJN would argue that there is a basic premise in this discussion that needs to be scrutinized. A 2016 study on psi believers and sceptics pointed out that individual differences related to psi beliefs may indeed be viewed as differences, rather than “deficits”, and need not be “good or bad”. This is pivotal. Part of the problem with mainstream (Western) physicalism is its insistence that rational thinking is all that is required to understand life, whereas deeply human faculties like intuition, feeling and sense perception are largely disregarded.
According to a Gallup survey, 73 percent of Americans believe in at least one of 10 psi phenomena. In a 2022 poll, 63 percent of respondents said they had had at least one paranormal experience. Despite these high numbers, belief in psi is often dismissed as irrational and unscientific.
Anders Bolling
