Question Authorities

How the social sciences pathologize belief in the paranormal

The author in Roswell, New Mexico, 2024. (Jacqueline Castel)

This article challenges a widespread premise in the social sciences: classifying belief in the paranormal as symptomatic or dysfunctional. It is written as a scholarly paper, structured and referenced in American Psychological Association (APA) style. You will find it in no academic journal—which is, in part, the point. I hope this paper encourages a new wave of independent scholarship that stress tests “official knowledge” of the paranormal and anomalous. Vox populi. -M-

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Abstract. A survey of key recent social-science literature on belief formation finds predominance of vague definitions, subjective references, and incomplete or questionable sourcing in critiques of paranormal belief (PB) and its holders. Thirty-four scholarly papers published between 2018 and 2024 evince repeat issues of equating belief in anomalous cognitions with conspiracism, often based on inadequate definitions and premises. In considering questions of belief formation, prevailing scholarly literature neglects peer-reviewed studies supporting replicated statistical evidence for anomalous cognitions. The author cites career experience as a publishing executive, journalist, and historian to demonstrate “leakage” of this prejudicial skepticism into popular discourse.

Keywords: PB (Paranormal Belief), belief formation, parapsychology, psi, ESP, conspiracy beliefs, skeptics, skepticism, extra-physicality, nonlocality, anomalous cognitions

Highlights:

• Scholarly literature in the social sciences from 2018 to 2024 demonstrates predominant inclination to pathologize individual beliefs in extra-physicality and anomalous cognitions.

• Most researchers’ premises of the paranormal or anomalous are either undefined, subjective, sentimental, or all three.

• Recent scholarly papers routinely venture undefined linkage of paranormal and conspiracy outlooks.

• In particular, holders of “paranormal belief,” or PB, are vaguely defined.

• Most researchers fail to cite or demonstrate awareness of recent scholarly studies that document replicated evidence for anomalous cognitions or extrasensory perception (ESP).

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In my late twenties, I visited a therapist to gain insight on some recurring relationship issues. I mentioned to him that I sometimes pray. He surmised, in what seemed a non sequitur, that I had obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). What symptoms do you see? I asked. “I don't know,” he said taking a sip of Diet Pepsi, “maybe you feel driven to pray.”

From time to time, I encountered this attitude, with greater subtlety, in other therapeutic settings. In early 2025, about thirty years after my initial experience, I was unexpectedly reminded of it when surveying the latest and most prominent social-science literature about belief formation, particularly in areas of the paranormal, which I define as incidences of extra-physicality or non-localism that violate common observation. (That such things sometimes, or often, have mundane explanations does not necessary exclude them from this definition, which is variously experiential, empirical, or both.)

Another bit of background. For Christmas 2024, my partner’s mother, a doctor of physical therapy, gave me a thumb drive chockablock with recent scholarly literature on the paranormal. Except that I noticed something odd. Virtually all of the articles were skewed in terms described by parapsychologist Dean Radin, a friend and collaborator, which I encountered four months later: “A cursory survey of the hundreds of journal articles on belief in the paranormal shows that most psychologists apparently assume that those who maintain such beliefs are suffering from one or more cognitive or emotional deficits” (Radin, 2022). I was not looking for this topic: it showed up. Evidence unsought is evidence most convincing, it seems to me.

My review in this paper encompasses thirty-four recent journal articles, all of which are referenced in tandem with adjacent studies and media. In sum, I found that scholarly literature published from about 2018 to 2024 reveals predominant inclination within the social sciences to pathologize individual validation of extra-physicality, ranging from anomalous cognitions to general theism.

As I demonstrate in this paper, most researchers’ premises are reducible to “everyone knows” that extra-physicality is delusional, with cursory support from papers or other works by career skeptics—and virtually no acknowledgment of countervailing scholarly literature. Further, many researchers deploy tendentious terms like “ghosts,” “superstitions,” “magic,” or “faith,” implying emotionalism versus analysis. Again, Radin: “Because beliefs can arise through personal experiences, a case can be made that widespread belief in psychic phenomena is not exclusively due to cognitive deficits or wishful thinking, but rather some of it comes from first-hand knowledge” (Radin, 2022). This consideration, whatever its merits, is almost wholly absent from dominant literature.

Moreover, whatever the studies’ technical prowess—sometimes good, sometimes mediocre—most researchers’ premises of the paranormal are either undefined, prejudicial, sentimental, or all three.

There also appears routine and undefined linkage of paranormal and conspiracy outlooks, a conundrum that opens my specific considerations. A 2024 paper in the prestigious Royal Society Open Science states as an unsourced hypothesis: “Conspiracy beliefs are positively associated with paranormal beliefs” (Hoogeveen et al., 2024). Researchers in PLOS ONE write in 2024: “Specific examples allied to belief in the paranormal are endorsement of alternative medicine, anti-vaccination, and conspiracies” (Drinkwater et al., 2024b).

For more than twenty years, I worked as a publishing executive in areas of metaphysics, self-help, and New Age at Penguin Random House, where I was a vice president and division editor-in-chief. For a near-equal span, I have published as a historian of alternative spirituality. I have visited and spoken at most growth centers in the U.S. Without question, a fraction of New Age believers—I define New Age as a radically ecumenical culture of therapeutic spirituality—harbor some variant of the beliefs / practices named by Hoogeveen et al. and Drinkwater et al.; but nowhere near a majority. To assume otherwise, in the former case sans sourcing, reflects unfamiliarity. And where sourcing does appear, as in Drinkwater et al., it retreads subjective claims that belie current academic parapsychology research, e.g., “Paranormal beliefs have been measured in a variety of ways but typically include superstition (e.g., luck, rabbit’s foot, or Friday the 13^th), parapsychology (e.g., telepathy, extrasensory perception, or psychokinesis), and occultism or spiritualism (e.g., astrology, magic, astral projection)…Religious and paranormal beliefs are similar in that they focus on nonempirical or nonscientific phenomena” (Corcoran et al., 2022).

Upon release of Corcoran et al., a headline in West Virginia University’s WVU Today stated: “People with paranormal beliefs spooked by science and the COVID-19 vaccine, WVU sociologists suggest” (Stump, 2022). The article quoted the study’s corresponding author: “’We were interested in looking at how religion, science and what we call “the enchanted worldview” relate to each other,’ said Corcoran, associate professor of sociology in the Eberly College of Arts and Sciences, explaining that the enchanted worldview incorporates traditional religious beliefs, like beliefs in angels, God, demons and spirits” (Stump, 2022).

Not only do paranormal and conspiracy theses differ in nature / content but, astoundingly, many researchers, as above, fail to critically describe them. Similar to Corcoran et al., researchers write in 2023 in Nature: “Believers in the paranormal believe in phenomena that violate the scientifically founded principles of nature, such as beliefs in ghosts, magic, supernatural powers, entities or energies...” (Müller & Hartmann, 2023). Nomenclature aside, this description arguably encompasses quantum theory and computing (i.e., multiverse, many-worlds theory, string theory), neuroplasticity (i.e., physical impact of thought on brain biology), and longstanding empirical validation of anomalous cognitions (Cardeña, 2018).

To cite a recent and influential example of multiverse theorizing, on December 9, 2024, Google issued a statement about a trial-run of its quantum-computing processer Willow: “Willow’s performance on this benchmark is astonishing: It performed a computation in under five minutes that would take one of today’s fastest supercomputers 10²⁵ or 10 septillion years. If you want to write it out, it’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years. This mind-boggling number exceeds known timescales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe. It lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes, in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse, a prediction first made by David Deutsch [E.g., The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes—and Its Implications (1997)]” (Neven, 2024).

In 1957, physicist Hugh Everett III (1930–1982) postulated the “many-worlds” theory of quantum mechanics. This is the inceptive model on which Google’s statement rests. I must add that Google’s engineers were, of course, aiming to design a superfast computer—not seeking evidence for the multiverse. Again, evidence unsought is evidence most convincing.

Returning to researchers’ equation of paranormalism and conspiracism: this poorly supported linkage also finds expression in popular works, such as psychologist Steven Pinker’s 2021 bestseller Rationality: “The people who are open to evidence are resistant to weird beliefs. They reject conspiracy theories, witchcraft, astrology, telepathy, omens, and the Loch Ness monster, together with a personal God, creationism, a young earth, a vaccine–autism link, and a denial of anthropogenic climate change” (Pinker, 2021). Pinker’s approach typifies a methodological problem identified by Radin in his 2022 editorial in Explore: “…confusion can arise when a survey designed to measure belief in the paranormal lumps together topics that are untestable with those that are testable” (Radin, 2022).

Pinker, one of today’s most widely read public intellectuals, wrote contemporaneously on a popular bibliophile site, Shepherd (“Books are magic”), that Enlightenment rationalist David Hume (1711-1776) “explained why we shouldn’t believe in miracles” (Pinker, n.d.). In fact, the volume Pinker cites, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, states that only when opposing arguments to a claimed miracle grow unlikelier than the event itself does rationalism weigh on the side of the miraculous. Pinker’s selective reading of Hume (whom he references thirty-two times in Rationality) is not dissimilar to what Radin describes elsewhere among academic skeptics: “Besides adopting an utterly backwards interpretation of [epistemologist C.D.] Broad’s position, some authors also fail to appreciate the depth of the relevant experimental literature” (Radin, 2022).

Radin continues:

But one might also ask about experiences labeled paranormal that are perfectly amenable to controlled scientific tests. This includes experiences called telepathy (mind to mind communication), clairvoyance (perception that transcends space), precognition (perception that transcends time), and psychokinesis (direct mind-matter interactions). These four classes of frequently reported experiences have been systematically studied using scientific methods for over a century, and in the process a substantial empirical database has been amassed that supports the reality of these phenomena.

Yet with oven-mitt finesse, scholar-skeptics frequently define holders of “paranormal belief,” or PB in nomenclature, with fuzziness and generality, as in this 2024 paper in Frontiers in Psychology: “Believers can process / reason at a high evaluative level but employ flawed reasoning in the context of the paranormal. Hence, errors arise because judgements derive from personal (rather than objective) appraisal of evidence” (Dagnall et al., 2024). Nor are PB holders distinguished from mainstream religious congregants. Not that mainline congregants are necessarily spared acontextual treatment. A 2021 paper in Cognitive Science notes, “Believers often mentally represent God as a personified social agent, with many of the same perceptual capabilities, personality traits, and moral values that humans possess” (White et al., 2021). Historically, this description, rather than capturing the thought architecture of contemporary belief, reflects nearly all forms of recorded religion from time immemorial; it is less cognitive model than human commonality.

To address a related and delicate topic, I again cite professional experience. From 2011 to 2016, I published three works by close-encounter memoirist Whitley Strieber, best known for Communion (1987). He coauthored one of the titles, The Super Natural (2016), with scholar of religion Jeffrey J. Kripal. Due to Strieber’s abductee testimonies, journalists or casual querents sometimes ask me: “Isn’t he crazy?” I typically reply, “He raises a family, delivers quality work on deadline, holds myriad interests, and sustains long-term relationships, both personal and professional (he and I still collaborate). He also wrote a few modern perennials, both nonfiction and novels. How are you defining ‘crazy’? To me, it amounts to conduct.”

Yet contemporary researchers repeatedly fail to demonstrate assumed linkage between paranormal beliefs and conduct, which they presumably consider ruinous behavior. E.g., researchers in Nature in 2023 write, “Paranormal believers are most likely to show poor inhibitory control compared to skeptics…” (Narmashiri et al, 2023a), to which I must (playfully) query whether these researchers have logged onto social media. The same study somewhat chillingly summarizes “that paranormal belief is related to the reduced power of the alpha, beta, and gamma frequency bands, and reduced inhibitory control” (Narmashiri et al., 2023a). An equally sweeping 2022 paper by the same authors in Basic and Clinical Neuroscience concludes: “EEG coherence the frontal lobes [sic] predicted paranormal beliefs.” This scholarly prediction and the quotes that immediately precede it rely on a sample of twenty participants (Narmashiri et al., 2022).

On a similar tack, the same journal and authors produced a 2023 paper, “The Role of Cognitive Control in Paranormal Beliefs.” Its bulleted highlights state: “Believers show weak cognitive control. Skeptics perform better in accuracy and reaction time. Paranormal beliefs linked to poor cognitive control” (Narmashiri et al., 2023b).

Insofar as devising a brain model for religious believers, even scholar-skeptics concede “many findings in the literature often appear to be contradictory, lack appropriate methods and analyses, and the results are inconclusive (e.g., Schjoedt, 2009). Furthermore, there is currently no up-to-date review and integrative framework that accounts for the different findings that have been reported in the literature” (van Elk & Aleman, 2017).

I add a related note, with emphasis mine: “Interpretation of these [anomalous] experiences as real has been ridiculed by critics because they assert that such phenomena must violate one or more physical laws (Carroll, 2008), or because claims of such experiences are due to mental deficits, ignorance of scientific principles, or fraud” (Kauffman & Radin, 2023). Although the topic exceeds my focus here, I reckon that the violation argument is anachronistic, as various points in this paper suggest. E.g., “In addition, concerns about supposed violation of physical laws would be justified if the world only consisted of classical physics. But of course, that is not the case” (Kauffman & Radin, 2023). Kauffman and Radin capture my premise that within the subset of belief-formation papers I consider, real danger exists of pathologizing the querent.

* * *

What I describe “leaks” into popular discourse, potentially confusing readers and, in my estimate, deepening our cultural divide. As an example, I return to the field of trade publishing. In January 2014, I published my second book, One Simple Idea, a critical history and analysis of the positive-thinking movement. It contained this passage:

Where did Word of Faith evangelists get the idea that God is a “positive thinker” who wishes material happiness for man? Many Word of Faith devotees point to the Scriptural passage 3 John 2: “I wish above all things that thou mayest prosper and be in health, even as thy soul prospereth.”

Some of the sharpest critics of Word of Faith theology came from Oral Roberts University, but minister Oral Roberts himself—a figure of almost unrivaled influence in evangelism in the latter twentieth century—pointed to his discovery of 3 John 2 as a turnaround in his religious life. That Biblical passage, he explained, led him to see God not as a punitive figure but as a source of joy and prosperity. Roberts’s discovery opened the door to a new, positive-themed Christian expression in the second half of the twentieth century (Horowitz, 2014a).

In the final line quoted, I originally referenced “Roberts’s analysis.” A copy editor urged that I substitute “belief for “analysis.” This altered my point, I explained, and diminihshed Roberts’s process. In the wending ways of publishing, where many cooks exit and enter the kitchen, at some juncture the term “analysis” was changed to “discovery,” which is fair enough but reducing of Roberts’s intellectual efforts (and my initial point).

In a further example of how American letters mishandles non-physicalist thought, Carol Tavris, a social psychologist and fellow at the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, wrote in 2014 in The Wall Street Journal (emphasis mine): “One Simple Idea concludes with familiar New Age invocations of quantum mechanics, fMRI brain studies and mistaken claims that ESP has been demonstrated in the lab—all evidence, believers claim, that the mind can control the universe” (Tavris, 2014). Wall Street Journal editors took the rare step of running my letter of rejoinder to one of Tavris’s inaccuracies, which typify how “invincible prejudice” (Broad, 1949) toward questions of parapsychology weaken critical standards. It reads in full:

In her review of my “One Simple Idea: How Positive Thinking Reshaped Modern Life” (“The Power of Positive Piffle,” Books, Jan. 25), Carol Tavris writes of my assessment of President Ronald Reagan: “But Mr. Horowitz doesn't mind Reagan’s lapses of critical thinking. Positive thinking is apparently all America needed.”

I write that while positive thinking may have helped Reagan personally, it could be detrimental to the nation, concluding: “That outlook [i.e., positive thinking] may have helped a poor Depression-era boy adopt a powerful (and needed) faith in self. But it could reflect a dangerous self-indulgence in the realm of policy making (Horowitz, 2014b).

I could have documented further errors but, in my experience, one sound objection provides a core sample.

Relatedly, among the papers I survey, perhaps none demonstrates laxer standards for defining premises than a 2019 study in Europe’s Journal of Psychology. Researcher Marija Branković opens—opens—with dismissal of ESP based on reported failure of participants in soi-disant skeptic James Randi's “One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” sourced to the magician’s James Randi Educational Foundation (JREF).

Branković writes: “The One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge was an offer of 1 million US dollars to anyone who can demonstrate a paranormal ability under scientific testing conditions. From 1964 to 2015, when the competition was terminated, not a single person of over thousand [sic] applicants succeeded in proving their supernatural ability.”

My 2020 article “The Man Who Destroyed Skepticism” evaluates Randi’s educational foundation and the “scientific testing conditions” of his challenge:

Another case was Randi’s yearly “million-dollar challenge,” often held in Las Vegas, in which he tempted psychics with a cash prize. For years it was an annual charade to which virtually no serious observer or claimant would venture near. Journalist and NPR producer Stacy Horn, who wrote about [parapsychologist J.B.] Rhine’s lab at Duke University in her 2009 book Unbelievable, queried Randi in June 2008 about his million-dollar prize. She told me: “I had an exchange with Randi because I was going to have the following sentences about his million-dollar prize in my book: To date, Randi’s million-dollar prize has not been awarded, but according to Chris Carter, author of Parapsychology and the Skeptics, Randi backs off from any serious challenge. ‘I always have an out,’ he has been quoted as saying. I sent that to Randi to ask him if he really said that…He wrote back saying that the quote was true, but incomplete. What he really said was, ‘I always have an out—I’m right!’

“It seemed like he thought he was being amusing, but I didn’t really know a lot about him yet. But it also seemed to indicate that the million-dollar prize might not really be a serious offer. So I asked him how a decision was made, was there a committee and who was on it?…He replied, ‘If someone claims they can fly by flapping their arms, the results don’t need any “decision.” What “committee”? Why would a committee be required? I don’t understand the question.’ At that point I wrote him off and decided to not mention his prize in my book since it just seemed like a publicity stunt for Randi.”

The Telegraph’s [Will] Storr wondered what—besides organizing the yearly Vegas conference (discontinued in 2015)—Randi’s nonprofit JREF actually does: “More recently I’ve begun to wonder about his educational foundation, the JREF, which claims tax exempt status in the US and is partly dependant on public donations. I wondered what actual educative work the organisation—which between 2011 and 2013 had an average revenue of $1.2 million per year—did. Financial documents reveal just $5,100, on average, being spent on grants.

“There are some e-books, videos and lesson plans on subjects such as fairies on their website. They organise an annual fan convention. James Randi, over that period, has been paid an average annual salary of $195,000. My requests for details of the educational foundation’s educational activities, over the last 12 months, were dodged and then ignored.”

The two years that follow, according to public filings, show executive compensation at an average of over $197,000, more than 20% of the Foundation’s total yearly revenue. According to a contemporaneous analysis of 100,000 nonprofit CEO salaries, this figure nearly triples the average compensation in JREF’s revenue class.

“Beliefs in ESP phenomena are interesting,” Branković writes, in a tee-up of the term interesting, “because they are seemingly a more ‘modern’ form of paranormal belief, perhaps more in line with the current worldviews, compared to more traditional forms of superstitious beliefs or religious beliefs.”

At what stage does a researcher’s definition of paranormal belief connote willful omission of juried, replicated phenomena mapped in academic parapsychology studies, such as precognition (Radin et al., 2011; Bem et al., 2016, last updated 2020), thus implicating career skeptics in skewed belief architecture themselves? In a common refrain of psi skeptics, in a 2022 paper in Frontiers in Psychology, “Proximate and ultimate causes of supernatural beliefs,” researcher Michiel van Elk write: “In this perspective paper I will provide a critical examination of the existing literature on this topic, especially in light of the so-called replication crisis: many published findings in the scientific literature turned out not to be replicable (Nosek et al., 2015)” (van Elk, 2022). The 2015 Nosek et al. citation, however, does not mention parapsychological topics but rather the overall crisis in replicability. Moreover, this asscosiative indictment of psi replicability was already busted by a wide-ranging confirmatory analysis of academic psi-research findings, encompassing more than a thousand experiments in eleven categories, published one year before Branković and four years before van Elk in the flagship journal of the American Psychological Association: “The Experimental Evidence for Parapsychological Phenomena: A Review” by Etzel Cardeña (Cardeña, 2018). In a more recent development, a team of researchers endeavored to evaluate the CIA’s remote-viewing (RV), or putative psychic-spying, program, which ran from 1972 to 1995. In 2023, they wrote in Brain and Behavior that the chief thrust of the program, whose material was “progressively declassified” between 1995 and 2003, proved empirically valid and replicable:

Numerous experiments on anomalous cognitions have yielded results statistically favorable (see the original experiments of Maier et al., 2014) and unfavorable (see the replication of Ritchie et al., 2012) to the psi hypothesis. In the case of RV, experiments with significant results greatly predominate (e.g., see another Nature publication, Tart et al., 1980, and the contributions of Dunne & Jahn, 2007; Roe et al., 2020; Schmidt et al., 2019) over unsuccessful statistical replications (e.g., Escolà-Gascón, 2022a; Marks & Kammann, 1978) (Escolà‐Gascón et al. 2023).

This type of critical engagement with psi abounds in the work of the “father of American psychology” William James (1842-1910), including in his 1902 classic The Varieties of Religious Experience. In matters of parapsychology, many of today’s researchers into spiritual or parapsychological belief formation reflect a pale shadow of the scholar-seeker who initiated their field in the U.S. James understood the spiritual encounter as highly individualistic and often empirically efficacious.

So low has the field trended, however, that the aforementioned 2022 article from Frontiers In Psychology, “Proximate and ultimate causes of supernatural beliefs,” fails, in its search for “ultimate causes” (van Elk, 2022) to once acknowledge validating studies for psi despite “properly designed and executed experiments…successfully replicated and published in peer-reviewed journals” (Kauffman & Radin, 2022) including in areas ranging from anomalous cognitions (Cardeña, 2018) to reincarnation hypotheses (Stevenson, 1980) to cognitive retrocausality (Bem et al., 2016, last updated 2020) to remote viewing (Escolà‐Gascón et al., 2023).

Instead, researcher van Elk confidently notes:

Rather than being rooted in deeply engrained tendencies for agency detection, mentalizing, reduced conflict detection or dualistic reasoning, the available evidence [emphasis mine] points toward the role of cultural scaffolding and explicit teaching for endorsing supernatural beliefs…Once these supernatural beliefs have been acquired, they encourage a self-sustaining loop by fostering agency-detection experiences, dualistic thinking, and encouraging a more intuitive processing style, providing a feeling of control and even having a protective effect on one's mental and physical health.

I see no reason why this “self-sustaining loop” may not apply to career skeptics, an inquiry at the heart of my 2023 article, “The Crisis of Professional Skepticism.” E.g., “When I documented [J.B.] Rhine’s legacy in 2022 [Horowitz, 2022], a tenured social scientist and psi skeptic summarily posted: “Card tricks? Magicians have a million of ‘em.” My respondent’s faculty biography notes his aim of facilitating an intellectual environment of open exchange and exploration of the broadest possible breadth of ideas. To honor Rhine’s principle ‘to encourage respect for proper personal rights,’ I am forgoing name and affiliation” (Horowitz, 2023). My interlocutor, tenured at a public university in the Midwest, dodged my debate invitation.

Finally, although most career skeptics are unaware, parapsychologists do, in fact, collaborate with stage magicians and illusionists to guard against deceptive practices (Kauffman & Radin, 2023).

* * *

I do not wish to leave the impression of a entirely barren landscape in studies of spiritual or extra-physical belief formation. In a remarkable exception, researchers in 2023 in Explore (Woollacott et al., 2023) write:

To summarize, while the mind does utilize sensory information processed by the brain, the neurons of our body and all the physical connections within them, awareness is not limited to these physical structures. The mind potentially has access to a supremely expanded consciousness, seen as a vast and unlimited expanse of awareness that is not constrained by time and space. Many research studies give evidence supporting the mind’s ability to expand its awareness to include perception of objects and events not available to the five senses, and often situated at a great distance, as exemplified by remote viewing data. The mind’s expansiveness also extends to moments in the future, and experiments verify its ability to access information about coming events whether seconds or days in advance of the occurrence.

I believe, perhaps optimistically, that our culture is undergoing realignment where the guild scholarship I track, and its leakage, will receive fuller scrutiny from motivated laypeople (like me), if not always from journalists and ad-hoc Wikipedia editors. On the last count, for any who despair over opinion-skepticism marring parapsychology articles on Wiki (Horowitz, 2023), there exists a viable prospect that various forms of AI may in several years supersede the crowd-sourced reference vehicle in online searches. Meanwhile, the Psi Encyclopedia, maintained by the Society for Psychical Research, while disadvantaged in search rankings, is a excellent critical alternative to Wiki on topics of parapsychology.

Moreover, I advise general readers who encounter debunking headlines like The New Yorker’s “The Powerlessness of Positive Thinking” (Alter, 2014) to look more closely; read the study or abstract and highlights; and question the elevation of career-skeptic social science in prestige journalism and on Wiki. E.g., I explore the aforementioned piece in an earlier article (Horowitz, 2015a):

In 2014, The New Yorker ran a critique of positive thinking in which researchers concluded that affirmative-mind mechanics make you lazy or inert. The piece opened (spoiler alert) with a swipe at The Secret, and went on to quote Heather Barry Kappes, a management professor at the London School of Economics: “Imagining a positive outcome conveys the sense that you’re approaching your goals, which takes the edge off the need to achieve.”

I wonder how many people who have immersed themselves in positive-mind metaphysics—as opposed to the students who participated in Kappes’ two-week study [Kappes & Oettingen, 2011]—would recognize their experience in her statement? I don’t see my personal experience in it. I didn’t publish my first books until I was well into my forties—and the result grew from years of labor, visualizing, prayer, focus, and affirmation…If this two-week experiment had continued for say, two years, maybe Kappes’ undergraduate subjects would have learned things about themselves. Perhaps they would have discovered that a mixture of self-affirmation, action, and meditation is helpful. But who can derive corrective lessons from a week of visualization and another of viewing the results? Even an informal study that I recently proposed in Science of Mind magazine [Horowitz, 2015b] lasted thirty days.

The practices that I survey among scholar-skeptics may pass muster in peer-reviewed journals for the same reason that the social sciences face dual crises of replicability and fraud (Carey, 2015; Nosek et al., 2015), or so I argue: unlike the ostensive hard sciences—and parapsychology itself—many of the social sciences have no laws. Although the topic exceeds my theme here, I posit seven laws of parapsychology. supported by several references herein, for exploration in a future article:

1. Information exchange occurs outside common sensory experience or known technology.

2. This exchange occurs beyond classical boundaries of mass, space, or linearity.

3. Cognitive events in the perceived future are backwardly causative in the perceived present—or retrocausal.

4. Retrocausality is governed by quantum mechanics not by the “arrow of time” or second law of thermodynamics.

5. Hypnagogia or sensory deprivation heightens extrasensory exchange.

6. The aforementioned effects are replicable throughout the population though variable by individual.

7. The aforementioned effects are non-violative of special relativity or quantum mechanics, notwithstanding contradictions between both.

Hence, in the absence of natural laws (or consensus theories), most social-science characterizations of paranormal belief reflect researcher taste, sentiment, and prejudice.

Another “possible answer is that psychologists (in particular) tend to have a naïve understanding of the ‘deep’ physical world as described by modern physics…A second answer is that many college textbooks provide such garbled descriptions of the relevant experimental literature that it is little wonder why psychology professors and generations of their students end up believing the false meme that this domain of research [parapsychology] is untrustworthy, or that the evidence is inadequate” (Radin, 2022).

In that light, I venture that the common tools of bias detection—e.g., “illusory pattern perception” (van Elk, 2013; van Prooijen, 2017), “false memory” (Gray & Gallo, 2015), and “weak cognitive control” (Narmashiri et al., 2023)—should apply to the scholar-skeptics who, sometimes flimsily, pin them on the seeking public.

* * *

I originally intended to end this paper as above—but I believe that something further is at stake. In this piece, I have used admittedly polemical tones—I hope with high standards of reportage. But the stakes exceed the urge of winning a debate or firing an intellectual salvo.

We as a human community cannot move past the ennui many of us feel, or the academic debates that have coarsened our culture, unless we constructively engage overwhelmingly rational, replicated proofs for extra-physical and nonlocal phenomena, such as those noted in the previously quoted (and, in my estimation, seminal) 2023 paper, “Quantum aspects of the brain-mind relationship: A hypothesis with supporting evidence” by Stuart A. Kauffman and Dean Radin:

Physicalism, the dominant philosophy in science today, proposes that all is physical, and mind is somehow an expression of physical matter. It proposes that in sufficiently complex, classical physical neural networks, e.g., brains, that consciousness spontaneously emerges. This view underlies neuroscience’s focus on the neural correlates of consciousness. However, it remains unclear how neural correlates resolve the hard problem of qualia and free will (as much as some have tried to provide answers) (Dennett, 1991). For example, a classical universal computer can, in principle, be made of connected water tumblers or tin cans. There seems to be no clear reason why a network of tin cans, in any configuration, could gain a sense of subjective self-awareness (Kauffman & Radin, 2023).

These areas of legitimate query pose myriad questions and no ready answers; sustaining them at least acknowledges who we are versus safeguarding a sentimental, steam-age portrait of strict physicalism, which in our quantum era is as blinkered a construct as any fundamentalist doctrine.

Imagine if Darwin’s theories—which united decades of disparate empiricism—were repeatedly dismissed due to academic taste. We have straddled a new precipice for decades. The time to move forward is long past.

Mitch Horowitz is a PEN Award-winning historian with bylines in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, Politico, and Time. A former vice president and division editor-in-chief at Penguin Random House, Horowitz’s books include Occult America, One Simple Idea, The Miracle Club, Daydream Believer, Uncertain Places, Modern Occultism, and Practical Magick. His previous scholarly paper, “The New Age and Gnosticism,” appeared in Gnosis: Journal of Gnostic Studies 4, 2019. He plays himself as a historian-commentator in AMC-Shudder’s V/H/S/Beyond, a 2025 Critics Choice Awards nominee for best movie made for television. Horowitz’s writing, published in more than twelve languages, is censored in China.

Acknowledgments

Although this piece is not “peer reviewed” in the sausage-mill sense, I am indebted to Etzel Cardeña, Thorsen Professor of Psychology at Lund University (Sweden ) and Director of the Centre for Research on Consciousness and Anomalous Psychology (CERCAP), who first suggested its expansion from a smaller note and whose critical comments strengthened it. I am likewise grateful to Dean Radin, chief scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences and Associated Distinguished Professor at the California Institute of Integral Studies, whose reading and research suggestions proved, as usual, indispensable. Sally Drucker, former editor of The Journal of Parapsychology, provided a critical and thoughtful reading. The thumb drive I reference was curated by Dawn Castel, DPT, whose gift gave rise to this paper.

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