Paranormal belief and reasoning

Paranormal belief and the conjunction fallacy: Controlling for temporal relatedness and potential surprise differentials in component events

“…Blackmore & Troscianko, 1985;Tobacyk & Wilkinson, 1991) and more pronounced cognitive 'deficits' (French 1992;French & Wilson, 2007;Irwin, 1993Irwin, , 2009Irwin & Watt, 2007). Presumably, the lack of believer versus non- Dagnall et al (2007) reflects the methodological limitations such as the use of a single conjunctive scenario and studentbased sampling inherent in their study (see Rogers et al, 2009). Previous work suggests both believers and non-believers will make fewer conjunction errors for paranormal than for non-paranormal events (Rogers et al, 2009).…”

“…In the first, Dagnall, Parker, and Munley (2007) had university students complete a series of probabilistic reasoning tasks including one that asked whether, in a local football match, it was more likely that Team A would (a) score first, (b) score first and win, (c) score first and lose or (d) score first and draw the game. Overall, paranormal believers were just as prone to making conjunction errors as non-believers.…”

“…In a further attempt to overcome the methodological limitations of earlier work (cf. Dagnall et al, 2007), Rogers and colleagues also sampled a wider range of university students, controlled for participants' level of qualification (knowledge) in maths, statistics and/or psychology and used a narrower, arguably more appropriate, measure of paranormal belief (Thalbourne & Delin, 1993). As expected, paranormal believers made more conjunction errors than non-believers implying belief in the paranormal is associated with a greater susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy and thus to probabilistic reasoning biases (e.g.…”

Pseudo‐science: A meaningful context for assessing nature of science

“…Complementary misconceptions on SE' nature were found when science and non-science students were asked to enquire water dowsing scientifically: 1) empirical enquiries were not seen a requirement of SE, since some designs were of a social nature only; 2) like in the (Dragnall, Parker, & Munley, 2007), most of the designs proposed by believers were empirically naïve , aimed at collecting selected data that could support water dowsing apparent efficacy without having in consideration the validity of the data; and 3) enquiries under controlled conditions did not follow the guidelines of 'exploratory experimentation' (Steinle, 1997) because the sample size was inadequate,…”

Homo Economicus vs. Human Being: Outcomes of Irrationality

“…The standard questions used to measure paranormality, the Paranormal Belief Scale (PBS), were developed by Tobacyk and Milford (1983) and are widely used (Hergovich and Arendasy 2005, Aarnio and Lindeman 2005, Dagnall et al 2007, Peltzer 2003. These authors propose a 25-item questionnaire based on the results from factor analysis of a 61-item pool.…”