| Abstract/Results: | ABSTRACT:
OBJECTIVES:
This study examined the degree to which paranormal believers, who profess ‘strong’ belief in the popular expression of a topic known as the primary item (e.g., There is such a thing as extrasensory perception), disagree with related items and/or the putative ‘cause’ of the topic, known as secondary items (e.g., Some people have an unexplained ability to predict the future). It was theorised that scoring differences between primary and secondary items might identify certain kinds of paranormal believer.
METHODS:
The Paranormal Belief Informedness Scale (PBIS) was constructed from extant PB scales - it consists of 10 primary items, & 10 secondary items. PBIS subscale scores were used to identify three major PB types in the sample (N = 343): ‘primary believers’ (who believe in all 10 primary items), ‘primary non-believers’ (who believe in none of the 10 primary items), and ‘mixed believers’ (who believe in only some primary items).
PRELIMINARY RESULTS:
We found significant response-rate differences between primary and secondary items across believer types, and across psi categories (i.e., ESP, PK, and life after death). For the full sample, it was shown that there is a significant relationship between PB and reality testing deficits (IPORT; Lenzenweger et al., 2001), but this relationship tended not to be significant across believer types. There was no evidence in the full sample, or in any believer type, that PB was correlated with depression as measured on the BDI-II (Beck et al., 1996).
CONCLUSION:
We suggest that such relationships are not necessarily linear but may only be monotonic, possibly involving ‘ceiling effects’; linear trends should not be assumed when dealing with predictors of paranormal belief.
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