(Newswire.net — February 28, 2021) — This page clarifies the notion that people who are firm believers in psychic ability have various psychological attributes that increase the chances of them misattributing paranormal interference in their normal life. The page focuses on the structure and measurement of psychic beliefs, and misattribution hypothesis to find the relationship between distantly related material. Finally, the page offers several directions for future researchers, including the need to build a belief model, address issues like correlation and causation; resolve different patterns of findings present in different areas; and come up with a fine measure of belief in psychic ability.
Structure and measurement of psychic belief
There are two major types of psychic abilities: extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis.
Extra-sensory perception (ESP) is an ability to receive information from any channel of communication not recognized by science, and including clairvoyance (unique information not known to anyone else), telepathy (information transferred from a distance and is known to another person), and precognition (where information is about future event).
Psychokinesis (PK) is an ability to influence physical objects or biological systems using unknown tricks like causing objects to rise, dice to roll sixes, and paranormal healing.
The misattribution hypothesis
According to the misattribution hypothesis, people’s beliefs in psychic ability are due to misattributed psychic’s impact on normal life. This paper explains this hypothesis by examining the relation between psychic belief and four processes that might have been responsible for such misattribution;
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Lack of general cognitive abilities,
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probability of misjudgment,
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the propensity to find a connection in distantly related material, and
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fantasy proneness.
We will review all four of these areas:
Lack of general cognitive abilities:
Some researchers have found that believers may have poor cognitive abilities as compared to non-believers and therefore they may not be able to judge whether the claimed psychic phenomena have any normal connection or not. Researchers have come up with so many researches that have claimed to explain this hypothesis and examine the relationship between people believing in psychic ability and their academic achievement, intelligence, and reasoning.
Probability of misjudgment
People can unwillingly misattribute psychic causality to any unusual experience ( for example, when you are thinking of a close friend and some moments later, you receive a call from him or her), if your friend doesn’t understand the prevalence of that experience happening by chance, and reject coincidence as a not so worthy moment.
The propensity to find a connection in distantly related material
People often believe that they have psychic power when they experience a correlation between their thoughts and events in the real life. As a result, some researchers have claimed that the more people possess the ability to find connections between their thoughts and real-life events, the more they are expected to believe in their psychic powers.
Fantasy proneness.
Fantasy proneness refers to an experience when the believer gets so involved in the fantasy that it becomes difficult for him or her to believe when their experience is purely imaginary or caused by some external factors.
Directions for future
It is proposed to build a pattern of belief model. For example, people who believe in psychic powers have always managed to obtain higher scores than non-believers when checked on several measures of fantasy proneness and exhibited a propensity to find the relationship between distant material.
So many researchers have managed to conclude that people who believe in psychic ability have more power to misattribute paranormal causation to normal life experiences. If you want to experience the same, do not hesitate to click on the link Paranormal Abilities & Magical Powers.