Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience by Professor Christopher French and Anna Stone
In My Library
Anomalistic psychology "attempts to explain paranormal and related beliefs and ostensibly paranormal experiences in terms of known (or knowable) psychological and physical factors." In this comprehensive and entertaining introductory text, Christopher C. French and Anna Stone draw upon many of the other sub-disciplines of psychology - including clinical, cognitive, developmental, evolutionary and social - in their thorough exploration of the subject. This approach provides the structure of the book and a fascinating overview of pretty much the whole of psychology. Also invaluable is the emphasis throughout on critical thinking skills, which are useful in all walks of life and not just for detecting errors in syllogistic reasoning that may be at the root of some paranormal beliefs.
There's no shortage of material for study since paranormal beliefs and experiences can be found in every society. Less common is the scepticism of anomalistic psychologists, who "generally adopt the working hypothesis that paranormal forces do not exist" but who are open to the possibility that they do. (Sceptics are sometimes accused of being closed minded, and yet it is often believers in the paranormal who refuse to consider non-paranormal causes.) This is the position taken by the authors (summed up neatly in their reference to a series about haunted houses as "so-called reality TV"). Even if ghosts don't exist, many people think that they do, and so, in one sense, this whole book is directed at a far more interesting psychological question: "why do people believe in paranormal and related phenomenon?"
While experimental parapsychologists tend to confine themselves to the study of extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK) and life after death, the media and the general public have a much broader conception of the paranormal, which is shared by anomalistic psychology. The authors therefore get to examine a wide range of beliefs (from the frankly weird to the surprisingly common) and to put forward naturalistic explanations that often also apply to non-paranormal situations. For example, although few of us will ever construct a false memory that we've been abducted by aliens, we all know how memory can play tricks on us. As well as making us more sceptical of paranormal claims, understanding the constructive nature of memory should also make us more cautious towards accepting the truth of eyewitness testimony.
This counterbalancing by anomalistic psychology of colourful but often wildly inaccurate cultural interpretations is a valuable public service, since many of the scientific explanations we now have "do not seem to be particularly well known in the general population." Someone who experiences night-time visual hallucinations, for example, may be terrified by them, especially if all they have available is local folklore. Knowing that the cause may be sleep paralysis and that many people the world over have similar experiences is much more likely to alleviate anxiety than being told the hallucination is a witch.
Of course, not everyone who has anomalous experiences wants a naturalistic explanation. In Religious Experience, Wayne Proudfoot examines the idea held by many apologists (including the great psychologist William James) that such experiences are beyond the reach of scientific inquiry. The temptation, encouraged by the immediacy of the experience, is to think that it's "not dependent on other cognitions" (Proudfoot's phrase). The mistake here is to overlook non-conscious processing, "the fact that vast amounts of mental activity (involved in perception, recognition, reasoning, decision-making, memory recall, and so on) occur without our conscious awareness" (French and Stone's phrase). Like Proudfoot, anomalistic psychologists insist that "experiences must be reliably described before they can be explained" but that explanations are not limited by the subject's own beliefs and perceptions (an approach Proudfoot calls "explanatory reductionism").
I have a few criticisms, more from a philosophical than a psychological perspective, the least of which are the misuse of the phrase "begs the question" (which should be "raises the question") and the absence of "spiritual" from the glossary (perhaps because it's too slippery a term).
A more substantive criticism concerns the description of paranormal experiences as "subjective rather than objective" when it's surely the case that all experiences exist metaphysically subjectively. Whether or not the contents of the experience - the apple or the alien - exist metaphysically objectively is another question altogether. In ordinary language "objective" often has epistemic snob value over "subjective" when assessing the truth value of a claim, even though epistemologically objective statements ("an alien landed in Lewisham") can be false while epistemologically subjective claims ("Jim prefers vanilla to chocolate ice cream") can be true.
The authors don't need to use "subjective" as an epistemic slur to describe paranormal experiences: we simply need to remember that a subject can be mistaken about the cause of their experience, whether or not the paranormal is said to be involved. If paranormal causes are alleged, we can then appeal to the principle that extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.
However, at "the conventionally accepted significance level of .05" it seems unlikely that parapsychologists will ever acquire the extraordinary evidence they are seeking. In Has Science Found God?: The Latest Results in the Search for Purpose in the Universe, Victor Stenger compares the significance level of .05 with the threshold of 0.0001 typical in the physical sciences and concludes that "those who search for psi phenomena should be bound by the stricter standards of physics, which also deal with extraordinary phenomena."
If parapsychology can never, in principle, produce a statistically credible result sufficient to overturn a single law of physics, let alone an entire scientific world-view, is it more pseudo-science than science? French and Stone's position is that it's "unjustified to classify parapsychology as a pseudo-science." They rightly emphasize that science, however we may define it, is more than stamp collecting. (In Ignorance: How It Drives Science, Stuart Firestein agrees that science is not just about accumulating facts; he thinks "facts serve mainly to access the ignorance" that drives science.) However, is there any scientific discipline that, after over 100 years of continuous effort, not only has not generated an established body of knowledge but has not even produced a single fact? Science may be "a method for approaching the truth" - and the best one we have ever devised - but we also expect it, occasionally, to arrive at its destination.
In support of their defence of the scientific status of parapsychology, French and Stone cite a curious study by Marie-Catherine Mousseau, who compares "fringe" journals with their more mainstream counterparts and finds that parapsychology seems to score "higher" on certain measures than the mainstream sciences. However, that each score can also be interpreted as being consistent with the hypothesis that parapsychology is a pseudo-science. For example, "over a third of citations in fringe journals were of articles in mainstream science journals, such as physics, psychology, and neuroscience journals" while mainstream science articles overwhelmingly cited articles in the same field (at a rate of 99 per cent in the physics journals). If one characteristic of pseudo-science is that there is no overlap with other fields of research, then experiments in parapsychology would seem to be "more" scientific than those at, say, CERN.
The figure of 99% may be explained by the fact that the physical sciences have built up such a body of knowledge about how the universe works that there's plenty to go at within its own, huge domain. Parapsychology, in contrast, has no such comparable body of knowledge, and so is more likely to cite results from beyond its boundaries (which may also serve to bolster its scientific credentials).
Readers will arrive at their own conclusions regarding the scientific status of parapsychology, entirely in line with the sceptical spirit of this excellent book. French and Stone encourage an informed scepticism, providing extensive citations of both primary and secondary sources throughout the text and a comprehensive bibliography at the end of the book. References include Bering (The God Instinct: The Psychology of Souls, Destiny and the Meaning of Life), Boyer (Religion Explained: The Human Instincts That Fashion Gods, Spirits and Ancestors), Gilovich (How We Know What isn't So: Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life), Hood (Super-sense: From Superstition to Religion - The Brain Science of Belief) and Kahneman (Thinking, Fast and Slow). Less intimidating, perhaps for both the student and the general reader, are short lists of further reading at the end of each chapter.
Although the newly emerging sub-discipline of anomalistic psychology is much less likely to generate sensational stories for the tabloids, it has made far more scientific progress, and in a much shorter time, than parapsychology. The omens are that anomalistic psychology will go from strength to strength.