Belief in God may be declining, but ghosts and paranormal stories are alive and well. Here's why humans tend to believe them.
While many scoff at tales of the supernatural, academia has not fully dismissed them. Specialists, like Christopher French, a psychologist heading up the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at London’s Goldsmiths University, investigates seemingly paranormal experiences to find the non-paranormal explanations behind them.
Consider a Stone Age man hearing a rustling in the bushes: “He can either immediately assume it’s a threat, some kind of predator, and get the hell out of there to survive another day,” French explains. “Or he can rely on system two, the slower, reliant-on-evidence kind of approach, and he may end up as lunch,” French explains.
Pareidolia, the tendency to see recognizable patterns or objects in things, such as a face in a cloud, is another example. People are predisposed to seeing ghosts and ghouls where there aren’t any. “There is a whole pot of biases and psychological priming there for the picking. If you go looking for a ghost, you’re probably going to find a ghost,” Stevens says.
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