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A Brief Introduction to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)

Martin Parkinson
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A Brief Introduction to NLP (Neuro Linguistic Programming)

A critical analysis of the background of NLP
Published in The Skeptic, Volume 16, Issue 3 (2003)

Widely claimed to be indispensable for anyone who wishes to communicate better, NLP tempted Martin Parkinson to enter the jargon-jungle and find out more.

NLP is the next generation of psychology … it may be as profound a step forward as the invention of language (O’Connor & Seymour, 1995).

IT GOES WITHOUT saying (or else why would there be an article in The Skeptic about it?) that ‘Neuro Linguistic Programming’ is a misnomer. It has nothing to do with neurology or neurolinguistics. The name is sometimes justified by vague gestures towards hemispheric specialisation, and the first book on NLP (The Structure of Magic I, Bandler & Grinder, 1975) makes an unconvincing tie-in with transformational grammar (co-founder John Grinder was a student of Chomsky’s). ‘Programming’ is a piece of science-fiction fluff designed to give the impression that human behaviour can be changed as reliably as programming a computer. A more accurate name would be something like ‘mind/language/hypnosis games’.

It claims to be a set of techniques (‘toolkit’ and ‘technology’ are favoured terms) which will radically improve your work and personal life. It has its origins in an attempt to copy the work of particular psychotherapists who were held (by some) to be so effective that their work seemed to amount to ‘magic’: hence the title mentioned above. Although it has spread far beyond its roots in 1970s psychotherapy, there is still a specific school of NLP therapy in the UK which is trying to get itself accepted by the NHS (Weaver, 1999).

My initial reaction to NLP was one of frustration because I could see no underlying coherence. It is basically a ragbag of dodges, tricks, and tips: some genuinely helpful, others banal space-fillers. This makes it difficult to cover properly in a short article – for example I do not have the space to examine the place of hypnosis in NLP. However, NLP does propose a fairly scientific psychological model which sheds a glow of plausibility over everything else. It is further claimed that this model can give us a reliable way to understand and influence people (and to manipulate one’s own behaviour). NLP is therefore marketed to salesmen, psychotherapists, educators, managers (oops, sorry, I mean ‘leaders’), and those seeking self-help advice. Some of the hype is extraordinary: the quote at the head of this article is not unusual (and I would put the authors at the more respectable end of the spectrum – they were at least embarrassed enough to hide that assertion away on p. 205).

There is no single definitive version of NLP, but accounts are broadly consistent. The box contains my summary of NLP theory derived from all materials read, especially Bandler &Grinder (1976 & 1979) and O’Connor & Seymour (1995).

1. Our internal representations (how we experience the present, remember the past and plan the future) show a broad preference for a particular sensory modality (the Preferred/Primary Representation System, or PRS). e.g. one can be a ‘visual-’ , ‘auditory-’, or ‘kinaesthetic thinker’. Gustatory and olfactory PRSs are rare.

2. PRS is expressed in language. For example, a visual thinker will tend to say “I  see what you mean, it  looks OK …”; whereas an auditory thinker says “I hear what you’re saying and it rings a bell …” Overall, a visual thinker will use a greater proportion of words related to seeing, etc.

3. Eye movements during cognition also indicate PRS. These “automatic, unconscious eye movements, or ‘eye accessing cues’, often accompany particular thought processes, and indicate the access and use of particular representational systems” (Dilts, 1998). For example if a (right- handed?) person is asked to remember the colour of, say, their grandparents’ front door, you will see their eyes move up and to the right of the viewer.

(Some authors hold that PRS is also expressed in global body language: for example, an auditory thinker will tend to stand with their head tilted to one side, as if listening)

4. Putting the foregoing points together gives us a straightforward and reliable way to influence people. Deducing a person’s PRS using verbal and eye-movement clues and tailoring one’s language to it by matching their preferred modality will result in them feeling you’re ‘on the same wave- length’ or ‘seeing eye to eye’ and hence more amenable to your machinations.

(The word ‘rapport’ is given a technical meaning within NLP to refer to this pseudo-intimacy. It is held that ‘gaining rapport’ can also be achieved by mirroring the body language, tone, speed of voice and breathing patterns of one’s interlocutor. (See Singer & Lalich, 1996, pp. 173-174 for some examples of this in practice.)

I think NLP theory looks pretty plausible, at first blush. So how testable is it in principle? Presumably brain imaging could tell us something about Point 1, but I am not aware that any relevant work of this kind    has been done – doubtless the NLP people would have told us if it had. In the absence of that, the place to start is Point 2: does most individuals’ language-use have clear modality ‘winners’? If so, this possibly says something about their internal representations.

One might approach Point 3 by first, having established an individual’s preferred ‘language-modality’, looking for a ‘preferred eye-movement’, and then looking for correspondences across individuals (i.e. most people who prefer the same modality as expressed in language also prefer to move their eyes in the same way as each other). Point 1 would then be an interesting speculative inference drawn from Points 2 and 3. The more I think about this, the more tenuous it seems, and the chain of speculation rests ultimately on an implicit assumption about the transparency of language. However, even if points 2 and 3 could be clearly demonstrated, and Point 1 accepted as a potentially fruitful working hypothesis, Point 4 does not logically follow (maybe if I was a visual thinker I would be more persuadable by non- visual language because it would have a forceful freshness for me). Equally, even if Point 4 were independently demonstrated it would provide no support for Points 1, 2, or 3 – language matching might work for quite other reasons.

NLP books contain detailed diagrams linking eye movements to internal states and the claim is some- times made that one can derive a sure- fire method for telling when someone is lying from this information (e.g. Dilts, 1998). Certainly, it needs no rigorous experiments to demonstrate that language and body language give us detailed information about people’s beliefs, intentions, emotions etc. – we ‘read minds’ in this way all the time and normal social interaction depends on it. Some individuals are clearly better at it than others. It wouldn’t be stretching a point to suppose that practice might improve one’s ‘mind-reading’ ability, because practice improves most complex skills and there might indeed be methods of improving ‘mind-reading’ that work unusually well. However the NLP claim is much stronger than this: in effect it says it has found an infallible ‘body-language dictionary’. Has it?

There is a body of experimental research, mostly published in the Journal of Counselling Psychology, investigating the PRS theory. There are two comprehensive reviews of this literature, both published in 1988. The first was in a report by “The Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance” which was commissioned by the US army to examine various techniques including NLP. In addition to reviewing the research literature they talked to co-founder Richard Bandler. Here are some of their comments:

“The underpinnings of NLP are not a set of findings and propositions arranged so that they imply the NLP statements of structure; instead, they are a series of concatenated anecdotes and facts that lead to no particular conclusion …

In brief, the NLP system of eye, posture, tone and language patterns as indexing representational patterns is not derived or derivable from known scientific work”  (Druckman & Swets, 1988, pp. 141-142).

In the UK Dr Michael Heap of Sheffield University and Sheffield Health Authority approached NLP from the angle of its potential therapeutic usefulness. His conclusion was:  “The present author is satisfied that the assertions of NLP writers concerning representational systems have been objectively and fairly investigated and found to be lacking … it may well be appropriate now to conclude that there is not, and never has been any substance to the conjecture that people represent their world internally in a preferred mode which may be inferred from their choice of predicates and from their eye movements” (Heap, 1988, p. 275).

Well, that seems pretty definite. Nonetheless, PRS is presented as established knowledge in books ranging from the serious (McDermott & Jago, 2001) to the silly (Heskell, 2001).

Partway through the American Commission’s investigation, they were informed by Richard Bandler:

“…that PRS was no longer considered an important component. He said that NLP had been revised …Bandler stated that NLP was a system based on modelling not theory” (Druckman & Swets, 1988, p. 140).

It would take too long to give a proper discussion of NLP modelling here. It is sometimes used in a sense in which PRS theory is used to model someone’s expertise. But this sense slides into a sense closer to that of ‘role model’ and it is the looser sense that seems to be most commonly used. This latter sense, as far as I can see, doesn’t amount to much more than the most basic of all human learning methods: copying someone else in such a way that one is in effect pretending to be them. This is done unselfconsciously by children and undoubtedly has its uses for adults; NLP is implicitly claiming that it has found some reliable and systematic method of improving this skill, but I am so far unconvinced. (I prefer acting classes myself, but then my adult dignity does not require the reassurance of obfuscatory jargon and a quasi-corporate setting.)

I was surprised by the degree of cultural penetration NLP has achieved. It pops up (not always attributed) in all sorts of materials related to communication and management – and just take a look at this gem from the non-commercial Living NLP website:

“Teachers and children at Tyssen School will be able to learn NLP and have their teaching integrated with NLP skills and techniques, and the centre will also provide a resource base for other educators, parents and adult learners. Headmaster Martin Webb, a Master Practitioner in NLP: Ever since he read Frogs into Princes he realised how important NLP would be for education. His staff are now looking forward to working with the founders of the NLP Education Network …” (The Central London NLP Group, 1999).

This brings me to my final point. So many things about NLP scream that it is just a clever scam: the strident appeal to one’s inner toddler (one book is actually called NLP: The new art & science of getting what want (Alder, 1994); Richard Bandler’s desperate legal attempts to hog NLP as his intellectual property; the absurd claims of transcendent efficacy; the sheer nastiness of the name itself. Yet there are genuinely intelligent, altruistic and sincere people involved in it who have vowed to use their NLP powers solely for good. It is quite possible, probable even, that people attending training courses do gain some benefits. Tyssen Primary School is in one of the most deprived boroughs in the country, so voluntary help from some keen extra teach- ers can do it nothing but good. But this does not in itself demonstrate anything about the validity of NLP’s theoretical claims. And if the theoretical claims evapo- rate, what is there to make it stand out from the crowd?

Martin Parkinson is the originator of Psycho-Ludemics™, a powerful technique which will make you socially invincible in any situation! Fascinated and inspired by the work of acting guru Keith Johnstone and mould-breaking jazz composer Ornette Coleman, Martin synthesised this central axiom: “Make it up as you go along”.

Ability to detect unseen staring

Phil
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Ability to detect unseen staring

Published in The Skeptic, Volume 16, Issue 3 (2003)

David Marks concludes a three-part critical review of parapsychology, with this article focusing on some claims by Rupert Sheldrake.

RUPERT SHELDRAKE (1994) proposed an ‘Alice through the looking-glass’ vision of things that might be so but probably are not. Sheldrake advocates the collective participation of non-scientists who have the “freedom to explore new areas of research.”  Sheldrake has a radically new theory of perception. We do not see images of things inside our brains; the images may be outside us: “Vision may involve a two-way process, an inward movement of light and an outward projection of mental images.” Imagine, for example, that as you read this page rays of light are travelling from the paper and print in front of you, into your eyes, and from there into the visual processing centres in your brain. At the same time that this is happening, Sheldrake suggests, images and perceptions are being projected outwards through your eyes into the world, ending up exactly where the page and print are.

This process of outward projection of images has some interesting implications.  If our minds reach out and ‘touch’ what we look at, then we may affect what we look at.  For example, when we stare at somebody from behind they may be able to feel that we are staring on the back of their neck. This feeling of being stared at is of strain and pressure from skin, muscle, tendon and joint. The psychologist Titchener (1898) reported the phenomenon over a century ago and described the feeling as “a state of unpleasant tingling, which gathers in volume and intensity until a movement which shall relieve it becomes inevitable” (p. 895). More recently, Colwell, Schroeder & Sladen (2000) have reviewed the literature on psychic staring and carried out some empirical tests. The idea that ‘unseen’ staring can be detected has been apparently supported in some research with incidence rates as high as 68-86% (Coover, 1913), 74% (Williams, 1983) and 92% (Braud, Shafer, & Andrews, 1993).  Titchener rejected the idea that the staring effect was based on telepathy and suggested the hypothesis that the eye is attracted to movement and the starer’s gaze is therefore attracted to the staree’s head turning in his direction. Titchener attributed the cause of the feeling of being stared at to the staree, not the starer, and so the attribution of causality to the starer is false, a misinterpretation of fact (Colwell et al., 2000).

Sheldrake (1994) has conducted new experiments on he staring phenomenon and encouraged school children and other members of the public to participate in his research programme. Experimental kits can be downloaded from the New Scientist web site including n interesting list of 24 supposedly ‘random’ sequences or use in experimental trials. Sheldrake suggests that ach child in a group is tested with a different sequence, or uses sequences determined by tosses of a coin.  The results are being compiled by Sheldrake into a pooled data set. Unfortunately, the sequences used turned out not to be truly random.

A colleague, John Colwell, decided to put the Sheldrake findings to rigorous test under controlled laboratory conditions (Colwell et al., 2000). On the basis of Sheldrake’s observations, it was decided to investigate the staring effect both with and without feedback.  Colwell’s team carried out two experiments. The results of the first experiment suggested that the participants in the staring research are able to score above chance as a consequence of being able to learn the non-random patterns in the sequences using the feedback. This idea receives support from the literature on ‘implicit learning’ which suggests that the learning can take place incidentally without conscious awareness (Reber, 1989). There is a huge literature on ‘probability learning’ that suggests people are very good at learning the global and local probabilities in the patterning of events (e.g., Servan-Schreiber & Anderson, 1990). The tendency of the participants to show negative recency by avoiding multiple repetitions was well matched by Sheldrake’s sequences that showed exactly the same property.  The fact that starees can guess when staring is occurring at above chance levels therefore demonstrates nothing other than an ability to notice patterns.  This is a low-level ability that even a mouse could manage.

John Colwell and his team repeated the experiment with one main difference. They used 10 properly randomised sequences taken from random number tables instead of Sheldrake’s non-random sequences. The results of this experiment support the hypothesis that the improvement in accuracy during staring episodes observed in Experiment One was due to pattern learning.  When no feedback was provided and pattern learning was blocked (Experiment One, blocks 1-3), no ability to detect staring was observed and also no learning.  The data collected by Colwell et al. (2000) therefore suggest that there is no  evidence of a general ability to detect unseen staring.  The only positive results were obtained were in the context of feedback and the non-random sequences generated by Sheldrake.

Summary:  Sheldrake has made the bold claim that people are able to detect unseen staring at above chance levels. Unfortunately the sequences he has used in his research are completely unsuitable.  They follow the same patterning that people who guess and gamble like to follow.  These guessing patterns have relatively few long runs and many alternations.   The biased nature of Sheldrake’s sequences has several unfortunate implications. Firstly, it leads to implicit or explicit pattern learning when feedback is provided but to a lesser extent or not at all otherwise.  This fits the results obtained by Sheldrake and by the Colwell team. When the patterns being guessed mirror naturally occurring guessing patterns the results can go above or below chance levels even without feedback. Thus significant results might occur purely from non-random guessing. The evidence reviewed here provides no support to the claim that people can detect unseen staring.

Pets’ ESP ability
Are animals psychic?  Since time immemorial human beings have attributed supernatural powers to animals. Cats, dogs, foxes, bats, frogs, toads, turtles, dolphins and birds have all been thought to have such powers at different times and places. The latest example of a long tradition of paranormal claims on behalf of our animal friends is the ‘psychic pet’. For example, a pet dog is claimed to be able to use psychic powers to detect when its owner is returning home.  This has been the subject of Rupert Sheldrake’s (1999) Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home. Sheldrake believes that a dog called Jaytee (JT) uses its ‘sixth sense’ of telepathy to determine its owner’s decision to return home. According to Sheldrake, many pet owners claim the ability in their pets to know when a member of the household is about to come home.  The dog goes and waits for the owner at a door or window, in a driveway, or even at a bus stop. Sheldrake has conducted three random household surveys in Britain and the United States that indicate that 45 to 52 percent of dog owners have noticed this behaviour (Sheldrake & Smart, 1997; Sheldrake, Turney, & Lawlor, 1998; Brown & Sheldrake, 1998). In over three-quarters of such cases the psychic anticipation is specific to the person to whom the dog is most closely attached (Sheldrake, 1999). Dog owners often refer to this ability as a ‘sixth sense’, or as telepathy.

Pamela Smart (PS), JT’s owner, volunteered to participate in some research.  Sheldrake claims that on 100 different occasions between May 1994 and February 1995 when she left JT with her parents and went out, 85 times JT reacted by going to the window before PS returned, usually at least 10 minutes in advance of PS’s decision to set off for home. The anticipatory behaviour occurred regardless of distance or vehicle used. However, as Sheldrake acknowledges, the ‘anticipatory signalling’ behaviour of JT could have been cued by the expectations of PS’s parents, William and Muriel, as they consciously or unconsciously cued JT that PS would be home soon.  It was necessary to conduct trials in which PS set off for home at randomly selected times that were unknown to William and Muriel.

The story took an interesting twist in 1995 when Rupert Sheldrake (RS) invited Richard Wiseman to investigate JT (Wiseman, Smith, & Milton, 1998). Richard Wiseman’s team proposed eight normal explanations for the ‘psychic pet’ phenomenon that controlled studies would need to take into account: responding to routine; sensory cueing from the owner; sensory cueing from the people remaining with the pet; selective memory; multiple guesses; multiple return points; misremembering; and selective matching.

Wiseman et al.  (1998) conducted four studies with the full co-operation of PS and RS based on the above safeguards and precautions.  In none of these studies did JT detect accurately when PS set off to return home. If this pet dog had any psychic ability at all, it did not appear in this study.

Rupert Sheldrake (1999) reports a series of observations carried out in a pre-planned series of 12 ‘experiments’ in which JT’s behaviour was recorded throughout PS’s absences on time-recorded videotape. In these trials PS came home at randomly selected times that were not known to PS in advance. A third party (usually RS) selected the return time and bleeped PS on a pager.

The resulting observations were analysed in two ways.  First, by plotting the percentage of time that JT spent by the window for three periods:
1. The first ten minutes following the bleep: 55%
2. The 10 minute period prior to PS’s return: 23%
3. The main period when PS was absent prior to the pre-return period that varied between 110 and 150 minutes: 4%.

It would be a common sense interpretation of Sheldrake’s data to assume that JT could learn the timing of PS’s returns.  This is exactly what happens. The results of Sheldrake’s tests are therefore not convincing.  Why Sheldrake chose to use a pre-arranged bleep period that started between 80 and 170 minutes after PS had left is unclear.  This restricted range for the bleep means that the return is more predictable.  A colleague, John Colwell, estimated the return periods following the bleep by examining Sheldrake’s plots of the data.  He found that PS always returned within  a period of 110–200 minutes following her departure, 10 of the returns (83%) occurring during a 40 minute period between 120 and 160 minutes after departure. This means that JT may have learned when PS could be expected home and signalled accordingly. This hypothesis assumes no psychic powers, only the power of memory. The procedures used by Wiseman had allowed the return to occur at any time following PS’s departure. This procedure stopped JT from learning a simple routine based on timing similar to the situation that pertained when PS had followed a daily routine of reliable departures and returns.

Summary:  Observations by Wiseman et al. (1998) of JT over four periods when its owner, PS, was away from home found no evidence of psychic powers. These findings are in stark contrast to the claims of RS and PS that JT has a strong psychic ability to signal its owner’s decision to return home. It has been concluded that JT’s expectancies are probably based on learning rather than psychic powers. There are many other dogs and other species yet to be tested (cats, parrots, horses etc), in many more settings, with many more owners and many more procedures. A final verdict on ‘psychic pets’ will have to wait until all of these possibilities have been tested. Currently, apart from the anecdotes of thousands of pet owners, and Sheldrake’s claim to have verified them, there is no solid evidence to support the psychic pet hypothesis. However, like the other claims, this is not a claim that will stop being made simply because science cannot confirm it. Paranormal beliefs have a life of their own, independent of objective facts.

The genesis of P Theory
In the four examples of exceptional experience (EE) discussed in the two previous parts of this article and above, a normal or ‘N’-theory interpretation (NIE) has proved to be a perfectly adequate explanation making any form of paranormal or ‘P’-theory interpretation (PIE) redundant or superfluous. This rather pessimistic conclusion about the validity of PIEs is not purely a negative exercise, however. Psychological and statistical studies of EEs have yielded an interesting account of how the everyday operation of the processes of attention, perception and decision-making promote PIE thinking even when the alternative and more rational NIE-thinking can do perfectly well with the same experiential data. These analyses have revealed processes that make the genesis and high prevalence of PIEs understandable from a psychological viewpoint.

Subjective validation: This is a powerful effect of belief and selective attention. Subjective validation occurs when support for one’s beliefs is found in a piece of evidence independent of any objective support. This process is also known as ‘confirmation bias’.

Coincidences as ‘odd matches’: Another psychological mechanism is the compelling and widespread tendency to believe that coincidences cannot occur purely by chance. An ‘odd match’ is an association between two events that appears to lack a causal explanation. Kammann and I (Marks & Kammann, 1980) referred to the belief that such odd matches cannot arise by chance as Koestler’s Fallacy, after the most famous of its proponents (Koestler, 1972). In fact, odd matches can and do occur by chance. ‘One-in-a-million’ odd matches occur with a probability of precisely one in a million. The problem is that you and I are unaware of the million-minus-one combinations that do not strike us as vivid odd matches.

The principle of the odd match can be illustrated by considering odd matches in everyday events. Assume that at the end of an ordinary day a person can recall 100 distinct events. This gives 4,950 pairs of events. In 10 years and 1,000 people we have 18 billion pairs of events. This generates 18,000 ‘one-in-a-million’ events, some of which will be very striking.  The numbers of ‘one-in-a-million’ experiences over the entire human population become impressively large. From the statistical viewpoint, it is inevitable that these experiences happen. From a psychological viewpoint, it is equally inevitable that the individuals concerned will have difficulty dealing with the experience without a fatalistic or paranormal interpretation. If a few exceptional experiences inspire their authors to write about them in their full paranormal regalia (e.g. Koestler, 1972), we have discovered the genesis of parapsychology itself. The reason parapsychologists continue to work in their chosen field is not the often disappointing results they obtain from their formal studies, but their compelling personal experiences that have a PIE attached.

USP, not ESP By USP, I refer to ‘Urgent and Serious Problems’. The resources for scientific research are finite and it is a sensible strategy to target urgent and serious problems. This would be a wiser investment than further studies of relatively trivial phenomena such as ESP. Five examples of USP are: the endangerment of global life support systems and the possible impact on human survival; population growth; non-sustainable consumption of energy; poverty; and the rapidly increasing prevalence of Alzheimer’s disease. There are plenty of others – please add your own topics to the list and think how your own work can target one or more of these problems. Parapsychologists, this is your wake-up call.

In conclusion, NIEs are consistent with the evidence – PIEs are not. If we wait another thousand years, ESP and other paranormal phenomena will remain as elusive, evanescent and evasive as ever before. More research is needed on USP.

Full bibliographic references are available in the printed article.

Inspirational, motivational business speakers: coming soon to an office near you…

Martin Parkinson
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Inspirational, motivational business speakers: coming soon to an office near you…

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 16, Issue 1, from 2003.

I became interested in the sceptical project in mid-2001 while working for a political organisation. A colleague (the colleague – it is a very small outfit, albeit with a relatively high public profile) had recently started work and had distinguished himself in my eyes by his thumpingly patronising air towards me and breathtaking smarminess toward everyone else. Actually, that is terribly unfair, because my thoughts about him were pretty patronising too: I was sanguine about his Reiki training, but I wrinkled my nose when he said he was about to take a weekend course with “one of my favourite motivational speakers, who’s over in London at the moment”. Didn’t he realise how unaesthetic that sort of thing is? Wasn’t he aware that intellectual snobs such as myself might snigger?

On the day after the course he did something strange. I had idly commented that there were no serious prospects for small political parties such as ourselves in the absence of proportional representation, and he replied that “people keep saying that but it isn’t true …”. He then stood up, made fixed eye contact with me, slightly dropped the pitch of his voice, slowed down his delivery and started reciting what sounded like a prepared speech. The content of his speech might best be described as cod-Nietzschean drivel: twaddle about Greatness, History, We Are Great Individuals, We Can Make History, We Are Making History. Oh no, I inwardly groaned, he’s bonkers; we’ve attracted another David Icke. As he was leaving no pauses for me to say anything (and what polite thing was there to say?) I just mumbled “I have to go” and walked out of his office.

The thing is, I was actually quite disturbed by this: I felt oddly assaulted and slightly shaky. What was all that about? Some urgent web research was in order. The American motivational speaker of whom my colleague was a fan is Anthony Robbins. He is ubiquitous in the US: he flogs his books, videos and courses via endless late night ‘infomercials’, he is casually mentioned on TV programs such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he makes a short appearance in the recent Hollywood film Shallow Hal (he kicks off the plot by giving a hypnotic suggestion to the main character, causing him to fall in love with Gwyneth Paltrow in a fat suit). Robbins seems to have started out as a Neuro Linguistic Programming disciple, then branched out into firewalking, and is now a ‘Personal Development’ guru. A current Robbins buzzword is ‘leadership’. This explains my colleague’s behaviour: he was ‘modelling’ Robbins and being an inspirational Leader, presumably because I was a Sad Little Follower. (But is use of the word ‘Leadership’ any more than a way of making middle managers feel heroic?) Apart from that, his general line is familiar: you have not fulfilled your potential, if you believe in yourself you can do anything, don’t let yourself be held back by people with no imagination. Unleash your awesome personal power. Oh, and eat more fruit (really).

This is genuinely beguiling stuff and it does contain some truth: many people do have unfulfilled potential, attitude can make a huge difference to performance, and there is scope for  manipulating one’s own attitudes. So why did I remain unbeguiled? And am I losing out by being such a spoilsport? When I look at Robbins I do not see a person who has unleashed his awesome personal power and is driven to share his discoveries with humanity. I see an immensely astute multi-millionaire salesman with an airbrush tan and too many teeth. His product probably does have some value: I’m sure his seminars are inspiring. Anyone who has undergone even a small amount of drama training will have experienced the emotional energy that can be generated by a well-directed group: if that energy is created in a particular context and then focused in a particular direction you can convince participants that … well you can convince them of almost anything, at least for a while.

Robbins is relatively harmless. My ex-colleague is also harmless: he attempted to impose a hypnotic suggestion on a co-worker and failed to realise that not only was this unlikely to work outside the fevered atmosphere of a self-improvement seminar, but that most people would be hugely insulted by what the attempt implied. His behaviour was clueless, not dangerous, and I’d just love to see it used as a canvassing technique in the next council elections were it not for the fact that I still support the political organisation concerned. (It will be obvious to some readers which party I’m talking about – I must stress that typical members are intelligent and independent-minded and the few people who have obtained office are seriously talented. Trees are hugged, occasionally, but only when the trees consent.)

Robbins may be harmless, but my research into him pulled up incidental references to all manner of wacky beliefs, cults and pseudoscience. Because the enthusiasm of his fans and the techniques used in his seminars are somewhat ‘cultoid’, the territory he occupies abuts onto the land of the distinctly dodgy. This was new to me: I had not known how unaware people can be about how their own minds and emotions work; about how literal-minded people can be. (I entertain my own share of dippy new age ideas, but ‘entertain’ is an apt word for my relationship to them; they belong to the play area of my mind; I value fiction greatly, but I do appreciate the distinction between fiction and reality.) Scary.

P.S. When I wrote this article I had been absent from the mainstream world of work for a couple of years. Now that I’ve started to get out more, I realise that the use of the future tense in the title is wrong: it has come to a workplace near you. Books on hypnosis have become readily available in the same mainstream bookshops which now contain whole sections labelled “leadership”. Centres for ‘leadership’ in this and that are proliferating, and I’ve overheard suits in the street having earnest conversations about “I really need to work on my Leadership”. And “Vision”. Well yes, it’s a Good Thing I suppose, but it now seems to have become compulsory for everyone to have a Vision and tell others about it, as if they were Joan of Arc.

I was, and am, basically sympathetic to the view that language affects thought and thought affects action, which changes things in the real world (a writer has a vested interest in stressing the power of words). Yet observing these cultural trends has made me much more sceptical about how much can be achieved merely by minding one’s language. I doubt if the constant repetition of “Leadership”, “Vision”, and “Excellence” actually generates these rare qualities: it is more likely that automatic repetition may drain the words of meaning while giving the false impression that things are actually being achieved. In short, I have become aware of the ubiquity of magical thinking.

Distinguishable from intelligence? Don’t mistake technology with superiority

Wendy M. Grossman
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Distinguishable from intelligence? Don’t mistake technology with superiority

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 16, Issue 1, from 2003.

Probably everyone has heard Arthur C Clarke’s most famous saying: “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Michael Shermer, editor of the LA-based magazine Skeptic magazine (whose birth postdates our The Skeptic), in a column for Scientific American, extends this to argue that “Any sufficiently advanced extraterrestrial intelligence is indistinguishable from God.”

Shermer goes on to say that if an ETI ever dropped in on us,

It will be as though a million-year old Homo erectus were dropped into the 21st century, given a computer and cellphone and instructed to communicate with us. The ETI would be to us as we would be to this early hominid – godlike.

He also figures that Moore’s Law means that by 2050 computational power will be, from our perspective, nearly infinite and therefore indistinguishable from omniscience.

Well, now, let’s think about this. The first thing is that the person who wrote this can’t be very familiar with technology. Computational power in and of itself means nothing. The £1,000 computer I have on my desk right now is many times more powerful than the first mainframe (and a tiny fraction of the size), but that doesn’t make it more intelligent. It just makes the computer more capable of doing really stupid things much, much faster. Why, on this here computer, I can 1) play a word game, 2) work on an article, 3) research on the Web in a dozen browser windows, 4) chat with friends, 5) play music, 6) check email, 7) keep track of my schedule, and 8) manage my finances, all at the same time. None of that makes it more intelligent, just a more versatile tool. I don’t see it, for example, offering to help write my article for me. It is no closer to thinking creatively than my toaster.

The second thing is that I’m not convinced we’d seem remotely intelligent to an early hominid.

Remember Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court? Or H G Wells’ “The Country of the Blind”? No? In both those stories the protagonist figured he had the advantage, the Connecticut Yankee by virtue of the increased intelligence he imagined a 19th century denizen had over one of the 6th century, the sighted man because of his ability to see in a country full of blind people. It more or less worked for Twain’s character, who had the good fortune to remember the date of an imminent eclipse, but poorly for Wells’s character, who was threatened with the prospect of having his eyes put out to bring him into conformity with the rest of the populace, who thought his claims to be able to ‘see’ were the product of lunacy.

A person making fire with sticks

In our own case, it’s arguable that an early hominid would find us helpless and stupid about the simplest necessities for survival. Could you find food in the jungle? Build a waterproof shelter out of nothing more than mud and twigs? Entertain yourself and others with no light or electrical power? Meantime, many of the things we do know how to do would simply be incomprehensible to him. We’re making marks on a lighted screen? (And that’s assuming you can find some electricity to run your computer off.) What’s that about? Mobile phones, computers, TVs, and those other paraphernalia of modern life would surely seem quite mad. Even the clothes: you’re walking around your house in a T-shirt and shorts? Don’t you know it’s winter? And so on.

I’m not convinced, in other words, that the progress of technology says that we are innately more intelligent than our forebears. The people who first thought up knitting and weaving, figured out how to make a wheel, invented tools, painstakingly devised writing systems … those people must have had giant creative reasoning abilities. Before the 1960s, one of my friends likes to say, everyone thought the Greeks had everything pretty much figured out. It’s only since then that we’ve adopted the arrogant presumption that we are the smartest humans that ever lived. Chronocentrist, another friend calls it.

Thirdly, imagine that a being from a million years hence dropped in. Would he even be able to figure out how to use our mobile phones and computers? These gadgets are not intuitive, and being able to use them has nothing to do with intelligence. Some of the brightest people can’t figure out that F1 on a PC means Help – because that’s not something you can reason your way to, it’s merely a convention that has grown up over the last decade. And that’s presuming you know the language. Do you think today’s English speakers can learn French faster than King Arthur’s courtiers could? I say that the guy from a million years hence gets here and seems stupid to us. He won’t know the language, he won’t understand the technology, he’ll miss the comforts of his no doubt advanced home, and he’ll be arrogant with it because he’ll think we’re the ones who need to get with the program. He’ll be as obnoxious as the American tourist who gets here and complains he can’t find an ice-cold Budweiser.

God-like? Yeah. If God is, like, really annoying.

Dopamine and religiosity: keep taking the tablets…

Steve Donnelly
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Dopamine and religiosity: keep taking the tablets…

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 15, Issue 4, from 2002.

I have always had great difficulty in understanding why so many otherwise rational and reasonable people have beliefs in aspects of the paranormal. Even more difficult for me is understanding the fact that some of my fellow scientists are also capable of embracing zany paranormal beliefs ranging from faith healing through astrology and clairvoyance to close encounters of the third kind. They maintain these beliefs despite their years of training in the scientific method and their professional activity in which (one hopes) they draw logical conclusions from the results of well-designed experiments.

I feel equally perplexed when I discover that scientists whom I admire have strong (and in my view irrational) religious beliefs. I can perhaps make an exception for believers in ‘God the Utterly Indifferent’ but otherwise, the incorporation of firm beliefs extracted from ancient scriptures into the same brain that handles quantum mechanics or molecular biology surpasses my ability to understand human behaviour.

Or perhaps I should say “did surpass my ability to understand human behaviour” as some recent research has shed some light on the differences between believers and sceptics and indicates that a tendency towards scepticism may just be a question of brain chemistry – sceptics (and believers) may be born rather than made.

Neurologist Peter Brugger and his colleagues at the University Hospital in Zurich carried out experiments on 20 self-confessed sceptics and 20 believers in which they asked the participants to distinguish between real faces and scrambled-up ones as the images fleetingly appeared on a screen. A second experiment involved distinguishing between real words and nonsense words which also briefly appeared in front of them.

The participants then took the drug L-dopa which is normally used in the treatment of Parkinson’s disease and works by increasing levels of dopamine in the brain. Under the influence of the drug, both sceptics and believers became less accurate in their identification of real words and faces but, intriguingly, the sceptics became more likely to interpret scrambled words or faces as the real thing.

Brugger concludes from this that “dopamine seems to help people see patterns”, and suggests that paranormal beliefs are associated with high levels of dopamine in the brain. By increasing dopamine levels in sceptics they become more likely to believe in irrational things. For the believers, though, the drug did not significantly increase their pattern-making tendencies, perhaps indicating that there is a plateau effect such that, above a certain concentration, additional dopamine has no further effect.

Dopamine is an important neurotransmitter which, when present in normal quantities, facilitates important brain functions; however, imbalanced dopamine activity may result in brain dysfunction. For more than 30 years the effect of dopamine has been an important area of medical research and, in particular, scientists have studied the connections between dopamine levels and two major illnesses of the central nervous system: schizophrenia and Parkinson’s disease. Somewhat more recently, research has also indicated that dopamine neurotransmission plays a role in drug and alcohol abuse. Knowledge gleaned from this research may lead to new treatments in which dopaminergic drugs are used to affect a variety of behaviours.

I find all of this is slightly disturbing for a number of reasons. For instance, does the research imply that sceptics have abnormally low levels of dopamine and that scepticism is, therefore, some kind of brain dysfunction? Or is it that believers have abnormally high levels of dopamine and it is they whose brains are dysfunctional (to me a much more acceptable hypothesis!).

On perhaps a more serious note, if scepticism is associated with lower than ‘normal’ levels of dopamine neurotransmission (and I’m not sure that one can draw this conclusion from the research findings), does this mean that sceptics may have a greater tendency towards diseases of the central nervous system than believers? Or for that matter, are sceptics more likely to suffer from problems with drug and alcohol dependency?

I seem to remember, from some time ago, a study that indicated that church-goers (in the US I think) had, in general, better health and better life-expectancies than non-church-goers but I don’t think the study contained information on the type of ailments likely to be suffered by both groups. Could this also be linked to dopamine levels, I wonder?

So the next time that you are cornered in a pub by someone who has regular conversations with aliens or who wants to discuss his latest design for a perpetual motion, antigravity machine I suggest that rather than take it with a pinch of salt, you try a pinch of L-dopa.

The Psychological Reality of Haunts and Poltergeists – Part II: An Advanced Model

James Houran
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The Psychological Reality of Haunts and Poltergeists – Part II: An Advanced Model

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 15, Issue 4, from 2002.

In our previous article on this subject, we outlined the path model, and how it highlights the major features of paranormal belief and experience. However, this type of linear modelling is ill-suited to test the notion that people face a basic choice between belief and fear. Therefore, we tackled this issue using nonlinear models derived from catastrophe theory (for an overview, see Guastello, 1995).

Specifically, analogous to the sudden buckling of a beam under a gradually increasing load, we argued that fear of the paranormal and belief in the paranormal create a polarity such that percipients can suddenly switch from being fearful to believing in paranormal causes due to relatively minor changes in their environments (Lange, 1998a).

This hypothesis was tested using the GEM-CAT II catastrophe software (Lange, 1998b; Lange, Oliva, & McDade, 2000), which allows researchers to combine several ‘indicator’ variables linearly into the basic (‘latent’) components of a catastrophe model. GEM-CAT II also provides estimates of the statistical significance of the indicator variables using modern resampling techniques (bootstrap and jacknife).

We discovered that delusions of the paranormal can be seen as a three-dimensional ‘cusp’ catastrophe model. The proposed cusp model entails that intolerance of ambiguity is the major variable to force a choice between fear and paranormal belief. That is, fear and belief play little role for ambiguity tolerant individuals as their beliefs are not fixed, and curiosity rather than fear dominates. However, those with low ambiguity tolerance need to be sure: they either fear the paranormal or they embrace it – but not both. Thus, for ambiguity-intolerant individuals, belief and fear define two states: one in which belief dominates fear, and one in which fear dominates belief.

The transition from fear to belief is not a gradual process for those intolerant of ambiguity. Rather, paranormal belief results from a sudden reversal away from the fear induced by ambiguity intolerance.

The system has a “memory” in the form of hysteresis. That is, assume that someone perceives a series of increasing (and, for the sake of argument, equally spaced in terms of magnitude) ambiguous events “E1 < E2 < …< Et-4 < … < Et-1 < Et” that suggest a paranormal explanation given an appropriate context. Further, assume that the shift toward paranormal belief occurs in response to Et – i.e., the ambiguous experience that acts as the proverbial straw to break the camel’s back. Now, if (somehow) the subjective evidence for a paranormal explanation decreases, the person will not relinquish his or her paranormal beliefs at the point Et (or even Et-1) where such beliefs first started. Rather, depending on the person’s ambiguity intolerance, a much lower level is needed to obtain the reverse switch (say, Et-4).

It seems impossible that one’s cognitive system ever exactly returns to a previous state. Nevertheless, it explains nicely why the same evidence can simultaneously be seen by sceptics as “too little to warrant any conclusions” and as “too much to be ignored” by a believer.

There are good reasons to believe that shifts from the belief state back to fear state are quite unlikely. Firstly, the adoption of a paranormal perspective provides great perceived explanatory power (analogous to a revelation or religious experience). Secondly, any remaining doubts are alleviated by the discovery of additional supporting evidence for a paranormal point of view that previously went unnoticed. Thus, new believers undertake a reinterpretation of their environments, sometimes resulting in the type of perceptual contagion that was discussed in an earlier section. Thirdly, a shift away from belief is likely to reinstate the fears that induced such beliefs in the first place.

Lacking longitudinal data, it is not clear if, and how often, percipients move between fear and belief. Also, whereas it seems likely that fear can be used to stimulate delusions of the paranormal, it is not clear how such delusions can be suppressed. Nevertheless, the notion that paranormal delusions are the result of an approach-avoidance type of phenomenon revolving around a conflict between fears and beliefs must seriously be entertained at this point. In particular, the model suggests that increasing believers’ tolerance of ambiguity and lowering fear might provide a strategy to change paranormal beliefs.

In addition to providing a coherent account of poltergeists, our analyses may also explain other delusions. We are particularly impressed by the similarity between descriptions of poltergeist-like episodes and contagious psychogenic illnesses. For instance, analogous to poltergeist outbreaks, contagious psychogenic illnesses are characterized by ambiguous stimulants that trigger a sudden onset and cessation of dramatic symptoms, predominantly in young females, and during times of psychosocial stress. Also, the interpretation of the contagious episode changes according to the context. For instance, Engs, McKaig & Jacobs (1996, p. 197) reported the following case:

The incident began around 6:00 p.m. during the first week of school, a time when students are beginning to form support networks. The weather during the week had been extremely hot and humid, making most of this all-female non-air-conditioned residence facility uncomfortable. While waiting in line in the snack bar, a student reported that she had seen some dusty substance in the air; another student began to feel very ill and went to the food manager to report this information. Almost immediately, other students reported symptoms similar to the first student and claimed that they smelled a bad odor. The reported symptoms included shortness of breath, eye and skin irritation, and a general feeling of sickness… In all, 69 students and workers, about 8%of the total population, reported symptoms… An exact cause of the ailments of the students who took
ill was not determined.


It is also interesting to note that Windholz & Diamant (1974) observed nearly thirty years ago that believers in the paranormal score higher than non-believers on measures of neuroticism and hypochondriasis, i.e., complaints about bodily ailments and a subjective state of suffering.

We have since conceptually replicated this result and have found that somatic complaints and hypochondriacal tendencies, among other personality variables, help to distinguish experients of haunts from non-experients. Thus, there does seem to be a strong rationale for likening haunt and poltergeist outbreaks to episodes of psychogenic illness.

It may seem peculiar to some readers that people would express conscious or unconscious psychological distress in terms of paranormal experiences. Sigmund Freud, and theorists that followed such as C. G. Jung, viewed human behaviour as the manifestation of an underlying drama within our unconscious mind. The unconscious is the seat of suppressed impulses, ideations, and emotion, and without our awareness, it can express itself through everyday behavior, dreams and mental illness. While those views have been largely superseded by more fitting theories, some theorists suggest that unconscious motivations and processes underlie paranormal experiences as well, and this may explain why self-reported apparitions, haunts, and poltergeist experiences consistently correlate with “transliminality” (the hypothesized tendency for psychological material to cross thresholds into or out consciousness).

To be sure, the idea that images, visions, and apparitions are manifestations of unconscious or preconscious material can already be found in nineteenth century texts. Likewise, parapsychological theories of apparitions emphasize the influence of psychological factors on the perception of apparitions. Thus, regardless of the ultimate source of apparitions, the psychological background of the experient cannot be dismissed.

For example, Zeanah (1988) discussed the effects of unresolved mourning as a source of imagery during hypnogogic states. In more extreme instances, it is not difficult to imagine how such psychological dramas might be responsible for some bereavement apparitions and deathbed visions. Furthermore, “paranormal” expressions of distress may also occur during normal waking states. A case study by Sabatini, Gaud, & Guillemarre-Alzieu (1987) detailed a woman who was hospitalized after a suicide attempt prompted by an argument with her lover. In telling the attending psychiatrists her life history, the woman described her place of employment as haunted by a presence connected with an old family secret.

Hess similarly characterized haunts and poltergeists as idioms of distress. Apparently, themes related to “ghosts” and “demons” are effective mediums with which to tell many types of stories. Therefore, it is not surprising that ghosts may be universal personifications of troubled psyches. Siegel & Marion (1973) even noted that some psychiatric patients perceive images of ghosts on the projective Rorschach psychological test.

None of the preceding contradicts the models summarized in these articles, albeit that these only reflect the outcomes of unconsciousness processes, not the processes themselves. Moreover, the models agree with research findings on mass delusions, as they identify fear as the primary factor in the genesis of delusions of the paranormal. Further, the finding that percipients’ reaction to ostensibly paranormal events can be described in terms of a clear dichotomy (i.e., fear vs. belief ) strongly suggests that delusions create “attractors” in percipients’ cognitions which serve to neutralize otherwise threatening experiences.

It is our current hypothesis that the nature of this attractor is difficult to define as it is largely determined by the unconscious processes outlined above. There is some evidence that such processes result in attentional biases. For instance, we found that the perception of poltergeist-like experiences within individual cases follows a power law type frequency distribution with recognizable musical properties. Also, the time between discrete observations of paranormal happenings proved highly predictable. It does not seem impossible therefore that the unconscious motivations alter the way information is attended to and interpreted – i.e., percipients might literally “operate on a different wave-length”.

In our years of research on this topic we have come to one major conclusion and that is that ghosts, haunts, and poltergeists are clearly mostly social facts, perhaps guided by our physiological makeup. Yet, they are real in the same sense that music, art, emotion, and language are real constructs. If our ideas on what generate and sustain these experiences are correct, then the study of ghosts may well provide the basis for a more comprehensive model of cognition — in the living of course!

A Rael Expert

Phil
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Volume 15 Number 2, Summer 2002

Rhyme and Reason

Steve Donnelly

To quote the broadcaster, Terry Wogan: “Is it me? or is the world just going mad?”

I am an inveterate listener to BBC Radio 4, especially the flagship Today programme. (Yes, I know Wogan’s programme is on Radio 2 — I listen to that sometimes, as well). In particular, I am always interested to hear scientific topics being addressed by John Humphrys, Sue MacGregor (now sadly retired), and the rest of the crew (despite the occasional inanity of the questions) and it is always good to hear my fellow scientists doing a good job of explaining their interests to 6 million radio listeners. And so, as the redoubtable John Humphrys introduced an item on cloning a couple of weeks ago, I was wondering which academic expert the Today programme researchers would have selected to discuss this scientifically — and ethically — challenging topic. Professor Steve Jones perhaps? Or that standard fallback “our science correspondant, Pallab Ghosh”? No, neither of the above — instead the chosen expert was . . . Rael.

Who?

Well let me give you a bit of biographical background on the BBC’s chosen expert on human cloning.

In December 1973, French motor racing journalist, Claude Vorilhon was driving through the extinct volcanoes of the Massif Central near Clermont-Ferrand when he happened upon a landed UFO and a group of friendly aliens with whom he engaged in conversation (as one does). It transpired that these friendly, scientifically and spiritually advanced folk were eager to get in contact with mankind but had been waiting for the right French freelance journalist to come along. What they needed, you see, was someone to set up a terrestrial embassy through which they could easily make contact with mankind on a regular basis without favouring any particular nation, culture or creed. (By the way, it is not clear to me what the Aetherius Society had, or have, to say about this, as their founder, taxi-driver — and later Prince and Archbishop — George King, was declared to be Earth’s voice on the Interplanetary Parliament back in May 1954). But continuing with M. Vorilhon’s story — the aliens, known as the Elohim, wished to help mankind create “a world of leisure, creativity and fulfilment, free from the burden of money and the need to work . . .” They certainly helped our journalist friend achieve these latter two objectives by getting him to change his name to Rael and to found the Raelian religion to which members donate a goodly chunk of their income. A major objective of the Raelian movement is to obtain the funding and an appropriate piece of real estate near Jerusalem (on the Gaza strip maybe?) to enable the construction of Earth’s intergalactic embassy. The Elohim have kindly provided a detailed specification for the embassy building which should be constructed in the middle of a park and should include (amongst other things) a swimming pool and a dining room capable of seating 21 people. The grounds surrounding the embassy (minimum 1050 metres in radius) must have the status of an “extra-territoriality” — a bit like the Vatican — and the Elohim must, of course, have free transit rights through the airspace above it.

But what on Earth (or elsewhere) has this got to do with human cloning? Well, the connection is that rather than being the products of Darwinian evolution, we (i.e. the human race) were manufactured in a test tube by the Elohim many millennia ago. Primitive man then understandably regarded our lab-coated creators as gods and — superstitious people that they were — worshipped them and founded the many different world religions, the better to extol their glory. Now that we have entered the 21st century, however, and are capable of creating life in test tubes ourselves, the time has come to abandon our mantle of superstitious religious belief and get back in contact with our creators, through the good auspices of Rael. And given the fact that he is the recipient of the Elohim’s advanced and ever so ancient knowledge of the creation of life — the very knowledge that gave rise to the creation of mankind itself — who better could the BBC consult as an expert on human cloning?

When I met Rael on a Central TV programme many years ago, he was dressed entirely in white, was relaxed and smiling and was surrounded by a number of adoring, attractive young women half his age. I was feeling rather irate at the idea that anyone could possibly take this nonsense seriously and one of Rael’s vestal virgins shouted at me “Are you happy? You don’t look happy! But we’re happy!”. Thinking about it, with the prospect of soon having a beautiful embassy building somewhere warm (with swimming pool and dining room for 21 people), being surrounded by adoring young twenty-somethings and never having to work again — and now being a scientific expert to the BBC on human cloning, I suspect that Claude Vorilhon made a better career decision in December 1973 than I have ever made.

Notes

Further information about the Raelian movement can be found at: http://www.rael.org/

Steve Donnelly is a former editor of the The Skeptic magazine and Professor of Experimental Physics at the University of Salford.

The Psychological Reality of Hauntings and Poltergeists – Part I: An Initial Model

James Houran
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The Psychological Reality of Hauntings and Poltergeists – Part I: An Initial Model

This article originally appeared in The Skeptic, Volume 15, Issue 3, from 2002.

Many people worldwide report inexplicable experiences of apparitions, sounds, smells, sensed presences, bodily sensations, and physical manifestations that suggest paranormal origins (Haraldsson, 1985; Ross & Joshi, 1992). These phenomena are usually referred to as “haunts” when they seem tied to a particular location and as “poltergeists” when there is an outbreak of such phenomena in the presence of a specific person or persons (called a focal person or agent). All too often, the public is presented information on ghosts and poltergeists by self-styled “ghost hunters” or spiritualist teachers. In short, hauntings and poltergeists are a fertile breeding ground for quackery, deception, self-deception, frauds, and hoaxes.

We produced our edited book, Hauntings and Poltergeists: Multidisciplinary Perspectives (Houran & Lange, 2001) to provide a reliable anthology that discusses what is really known about these phenomena. The book has contributions by a variety of authors, each of whom has their own version of what constitutes hauntings and poltergeists — some take a believer’s perspective, some are sceptics. Regardless of one’s persuasion, we believe that it is instructive to see the case that can be made for each perspective.

In our own chapter we conclude that ghostly outbreaks tell us more about the living than the dead. That is, these experiences offer a unique opportunity to study how magical thinking, hallucination, suggestion, and responses to subtle environmental stimuli operate in unusual, but naturalistic, settings. As we have repeatedly argued (Lange & Houran, 1998, 1999, 2001a; Houran, Kumar, Thalbourne, & Lavertue, submitted), we believe that the study of haunts and poltergeists shares many features with other controversial phenomena such as contagious (mass) psychogenic illness, sick building syndrome, and other forms of alleged “environmental illness” (Lundberg, 1998).

The preceding does not make haunts and poltergeists any less mysterious or intriguing. Instead, it signifies hope that we can eventually understand and control these experiences, which often elicit deep, negative, and long-lasting effects on people’s lives. In short, we ignore all “for” and “against” debates, and rather try to determine what haunts and poltergeists may teach us about people. The following summarizes our work thus far.

Haunts and Poltergeists as Social Facts

Poltergeist-like episodes may be characterized as clustered perceptions of ambiguous psychological experiences and physical manifestations that often focus around adolescents, and particularly females, during periods of psychophysical stress. Similar sensory experiences and physical phenomena that persist over long periods of time at a particular location are called hauntings (Roll, 1977; Gauld & Cornell, 1979).

Hauntings and poltergeists have been reported in nearly all cultures throughout history, and their interpretation and the way people cope with them seem to be related to psychological, social, and cultural conditions (Roll, 1977; Hess, 1988). For instance, Carrington and Fodor (1951) collected incidents of “stone-throwing” poltergeists from as early as A.D. 530 up through the medieval period. Pliny the Younger (1751) wrote a report of a haunted house that came to his attention, and A. R. G. Owen (1964) published summaries of poltergeist-like episodes from the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Perhaps the first scientist to take these experiences seriously was the British physicist and chemist Robert Boyle. He encouraged a Protestant minister named Francis Perrault to publish a treatise on “the devil in Mascon,” which chronicled inexplicable noises and movements of objects that suddenly began in Perrault’s home in 1612 (Thurston, 1954). Modern cases have appeared in mainstream journals (e.g., Leon, 1975; Persinger, Koren, & O’Connor, 2001), but most are published in the parapsychological literature. For example, McHarg (1973, pp. 17-18) reported a relatively recent case in which a 13-year-old girl in the Midlands, England, began having hallucinations of people:

At first she saw an old man, who was taken to be her long-deceased grandfather. Then, in 1971, she repeatedly saw a young girl who claimed to have been strangled in 1808 and who wished to be buried in consecrated ground…Involvement of the rest of the family and of friends began when they witnessed ostensible poltergeist phenomena such as doors and curtains opening and shutting, objects moving… Apparitions… then began to be seen by others, both singly and collectively. These were not only of dead persons, but also of persons known to be alive. Dogs, bears, birds and devilish “horny things” were also seen – a coldness was usually experienced in the part of the body nearest to the apparition. Shared apparitions sometimes appeared, to different observers, to be differently dressed.

Although these types of experiences are depicted comically in movies like Ghostbusters and Beetlejuice, they often invoke fear and anxiety in real life (Rogo, 1974; Hufford, 1982). In fact, the development of the “Religious or Spiritual Problem” diagnostic code in the DSM-IV (see Turner, Lukoff, Barnhouse, & Lu, 1995), coupled with publications discussing how to address anomalous experiences in psychotherapy (e.g., Hoyt, 1980; Hastings, 1983; Kauffman, 1993; Peteet, 1994), reflects that “paranormal” experiences are increasingly recognized as legitimate issues in clinical psychology and psychiatry.

Why Do People Experience Haunting and Poltergeist Outbreaks?

Some argue that this question is not a topic for serious inquiry and readily dismiss accounts as fraud or symptoms of mental illness. Indeed, deliberate deceit (see e.g., Owen, 1964) and self-deception (see e.g., Eastham, 1988) can explain some cases, and experiences typical of haunting and poltergeist outbreaks are also commonly encountered in schizophrenia and affective disorder. However, Cox (1961) noted that some fraudulent cases also contain manifestations that do not seem manufactured. Moreover, psychopathology is implausible as a general explanation since up to 10% of the people in the general population worldwide have experienced a ghost or poltergeist (Haraldsson, 1985; Ross & Joshi, 1992).

It should not be surprising that no general consensus exists concerning the aetiology of hauntings and poltergeists. The most popular explanation for hauntings and poltergeists is that of discarnate agency (Stevenson, 1972), i.e., the notion that an organism can survive bodily death. Since the evidence offered in support of these survival points of view is generally ambiguous and subjective (Gauld, 1977), Stevenson (1972) argued that discarnate agency is evidenced only by phenomena reflecting intelligence and purpose – i.e., as opposed to manifestations such as explosive sounds or random movements of objects. Even if this reasoning is accepted, however, it appears that cases involving apparitions (and therefore presumably discarnate agents) were not significantly more likely to involve “intelligent or purposeful” manifestations (Alvarado & Zingrone, 1995).

Psychokinesis (PK), i.e., the idea that anomalies result from interactions between shifts in the consciousness of living human beings and the physical environment (Roll, 1977; Radin & Rebman, 1996), can be seen as a contemporary version of the above. Although some experimental evidence for PK is suggestive (e.g., Radin, 1997; Jahn, Dunne, Nelson, Dobyns, & Bradish, 1997), the putative effect sizes are far too small to account for the large-scale phenomena often reported during haunts and poltergeist-like episodes (flying objects, moving furniture, etc.).

It has been argued therefore that PK effects can be magnified under certain conditions (yet to be described), thereby producing dramatic physical phenomena. However, explanations invoking large-scale PK (also called macro-PK or recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis, RSPK) are moot until definitive evidence is presented.

Other researchers adhere to more conventional explanations. A nice summary is provided by Tandy and Lawrence (1998, p. 360) who listed

… water hammer in pipes and radiators (noises), electrical faults (fires, phone calls, video problems), structural faults (draughts, cold spots, damp spots, noises), seismic activity (object movement/destruction, noises), electromagnetic anomalies (hallucinations), and exotic organic phenomena (rats scratching, beetles ticking).

Interestingly, they also reported that standing air waves can elicit sensory experiences suggestive of ghosts, a natural cause which had not been documented previously.

As we have argued in several places (Lange & Houran, 1998, 1999, 2001a), there is a multitude of ambiguous psychological and physical phenomena which, given the proper context, can be interpreted as paranormal (for extensive discussions of ambiguous stimuli, see e.g., Houran & Lange, 1996c; Houran, 1997a; Houran & Lange, 1998). Like other authors (e.g., Cone, 1995; Maher, 1988), we argue that a more fruitful approach to establishing a general theory of haunts and poltergeists is to study the affective and cognitive dynamics of people’s interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. According to this view, ambiguous phenomena such as listed by Tandy and Lawrence become paranormal only after being interpreted as such against the backdrop of a shared human reality. In this sense, hauntings and poltergeist-like episodes are delusions. The remainder of this article outlines the body of empirical research that has led us to this conclusion. For additional information and more detailed discussions the reader is referred to Lange and Houran (2001a).

Modelling Poltergeist-like Episodes as Delusions

While performing content analyses of accounts of haunts and poltergeist-like experiences (Lange, Houran, Harte & Havens, 1996), we were struck by the fact that many percipients seemed eager to draw very definite and far-reaching conclusions from very limited and ambiguous information. Although percipients may insist that their experiences reflect consensual reality, it became increasingly clear that the contents and modalities of a wide variety of paranormal experiences are consistently and predictably shaped by “contextual variables” in the environment. This was true not only for haunts and poltergeists; similar conclusions were reached in analyses of angelic encounters (Lange & Houran, 1996), deathbed visions (Houran & Lange, 1997a), and anomalous photographic effects (Lange & Houran, 1997a). For a meta-analysis of these studies, see Houran (2000).

Subsequent research (Houran & Lange, 1996a, 1997b; Houran, 1997c) indicated that percipients’ experiences and beliefs concerning poltergeist-like phenomena also vary with their tolerance of ambiguity. Tolerance of ambiguity is an emotional and perceptual personality variable first described by Frenkel-Brunswick (1949). She described intolerance of ambiguity as the tendency to resort to black and white solutions characterized by premature closure, often at the neglect of reality. In essence, intolerance of ambiguity results in rapid and overconfident judgment of ambiguous stimuli or events. Budner (1962) considered tolerance of ambiguity as a motivating factor for individuals in social situations as well. In particular, he defined intolerance of ambiguity as the tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as threatening, whereas tolerance of ambiguity denoted the tendency to perceive ambiguous situations as desirable.

The question arose therefore how contextual variables and tolerance of ambiguity interact to guide percipients’ perceptions of the paranormal. Integration is obtained by approaching the perception of poltergeists and kindred phenomena within an attribution theory framework – i.e., such phenomena are seen as delusions involving an interaction among paranormal beliefs, paranormal experiences, and fear of the paranormal. We extended earlier views on this topic (Kihlstrom & Hoyt, 1988; Maher, 1988; Reed, 1988) by incorporating contextual variables, and factors like percipients’ age, gender, and tolerance of ambiguity into a single process model.

"Figure 1: A Process Model of Poltergeist Delusions" - at the top "Contextual variables" with the options "paranormal beliefs" or "paranormal experiences". These feed into "fear of the paranormal" and are influenced by "sex", "age" and "tolerance of ambiguity"

This model was first proposed in Lange and Houran (1998; cf. Lange & Houran, 1999. This diagram shows the nature and direction of the relations among these variables, as indicated by the directional arrows. For simplicity, only the signs (as indicated by the + and – labels), but not the magnitudes, of the various regression weights are shown. For instance, links of the form A + B indicate that variable A produces an increase in variable B, whereas links like A – B indicate that variable A inhibits variable B.

This model has been replicated in two separate studies reported in Lange and Houran (1998) and it is based on the responses of people who claimed to have had at least one haunting or poltergeist experience as originally defined in Lange et al. (1996, p. 757). Paranormal belief, experience, and fear were measured by the Anomalous Experiences Inventory (Kumar, Pekala & Gallagher, 1994), whereas tolerance of ambiguity was assessed by MacDonald’s (1970, p. 793) AT-20 scale. Although contextual variables are shown in Figure 1, they were not directly measured in the path analysis studies. Instead, their effects are inferred from the results of other studies (Lange et al., 1996; Lange & Houran, 1996; Houran & Lange, 1997a). To facilitate the presentation of the model, three types of variables are distinguished:

1. Contextual Variables

Just as the same ambiguous round shape can be perceived as an orange or a cup of water depending upon whether the person is hungry or thirsty (Horowitz, 1975), so can an apparition be perceived as a demon, an angel, or a deceased loved one, based on environmental influences such as embedded cues, demand characteristics, symbolic-metaphorical references, as well as an individual’s psychophysical state or prior beliefs (for a review, see Lange et al., 1996, pp. 755-758). We found that the more specific aspects of paranormal experiences are congruent with contextual variables as well. For instance, a person in an empty ballroom might hear the sound of waltz music and see people dancing, whereas a person in a room with a prominent lavender hue might report the smell of lilacs. Moreover, the number of experiential modalities increased with the number of contextual variables. That is, when one contextual variable is present percipients might only see an apparition, whereas the introduction of additional contextual variables might induce them to hear or smell something as well.

Most of our work on contextual variables involved content analyses of percipients’ personal accounts. However, it is not difficult to demonstrate context effects experimentally. For instance, in one study (Lange & Houran, 1997b) individual participants were taken on a tour of a performance theatre under renovation, and afterwards they completed an experiential questionnaire by Green, Parks, Green, Guyer, Fahrion and Coyne (1992, pp. 74-78). In the control condition the theatre was said to be undergoing remodelling, whereas in the “informed” condition the participant had been told that the theatre was haunted and to be aware of any unusual experiences. As expected, this manipulation elicited a considerably greater number of physical, extrapersonal, and transpersonal experiences relative to the control group. Since contextual variables guide the interpretation of ambiguous stimuli, Figure 1 shows a link from contextual variables to paranormal experiences. The link to paranormal beliefs was included because such beliefs are an integral part of the context. Our theatre experiment further showed that those in the “informed” condition experienced significantly more intense emotional responses, a finding that is consistent with the process described next.

2. Process Variables

Attribution theory explains delusions as a byproduct of a percipient’s failure to find a standard explanation for ambiguous stimuli. In particular, such theories assume that certain intense ambiguous experiences may be interpreted as personally significant to the perceiver, and that a lack of a consensual explanation for these experiences leads to the arousal of fear. Often, such fears can be reduced through essentially “normal” reasoning. However, if no standard explanation can be found then contextual variables may suggest a paranormal explanation. Once fear of the anomalous is reduced in this way, the resulting explanation persists as a defence mechanism, thereby becoming virtually immune to persuasion and counter-argument.

The above account is consistent with the finding of the negative-feedback loop shown in the top part of Figure 1. According to this figure, any increases (decreases) in belief and experience are accompanied by a corresponding decrease (increase) in fear, thereby neutralizing the initial changes. However, variations in the environment provide a continuous source of ambiguous stimuli in need of an interpretation, and thus a person’s beliefs and fears are unlikely to remain stable. Also, there is evidence that experiences, beliefs, and fears may be affected by self-reinforcing attentional biases at the social (Colligan, Pennebaker & Murphy, 1982; Wessely, 1987) as well as at the individual level.

For instance, in one study (Houran & Lange, 1996b) we asked a married couple to chronicle the frequency of strange or unusual events in their unhaunted residence for a period of thirty days. The observed events included complex and repeated movements of a particular object (a souvenir voodoo mask), erratic functioning of a telephone in the same general area of the house, and a mysterious voice. Although few anomalous events were observed over days 1 through 5, the frequency increased dramatically over days 6 through 15, only to die out thereafter. Since the distribution of events conformed to the logistic growth curve typical of infectious processes, we dubbed the effect “perceptual contagion”. Interestingly, research on real poltergeists also showed such clustering effects (Roll, 1968, 1969, 1970), thus suggesting that perceptual contagion may play a role in these cases as well (see Jones & Jones, 1994, p. 38).

Note that the negative-feedback loop in Figure 1 implies that beliefs directly induce experiences (and not vice-versa), and similar conclusions were reached in our research on death anxiety (Lange & Houran, 1997c). At first sight, these findings contradict Irwin’s (1993) review of the literature indicating that a direct link between experience and belief cannot be excluded. However, this contradiction may be more apparent than real. First, although experiences lead to a decrease in fear through belief, beliefs are also fuelled by ambiguity intolerance. Thus, the net effect of an increase in paranormal experiences on paranormal beliefs may be negligible. Second, the presence of contextual variables affects paranormal beliefs and experiences simultaneously and in a

similar fashion. It is not surprising, therefore, that belief and experience scales should show a positive correlation. Third, we believe that it is difficult, if not impossible, to induce paranormal beliefs without simultaneously introducing paranormal experiences, and vice-versa. Hence, the question whether beliefs or experiences are primary cannot really be answered. Instead, we prefer to interpret the circular relation between paranormal beliefs and experiences as characteristic of the delusional process.

3. Exogenous Variables

The bottom part of Figure 1 shows that paranormal experiences and beliefs are related to more stable characteristics of the percipients such as age, gender, and tolerance of ambiguity. That is, fear of the paranormal is greater for women, older people, and those with a low tolerance of ambiguity. Remember that anecdotal reports suggest that poltergeist-like experiences focus around young women (Owen, 1964; Roll, 1977; Gauld & Cornell, 1979). This notion is consistent with our finding that being female is associated with a greater fear of the paranormal as well as a lower tolerance of ambiguity. Unfortunately, our samples contained very few adolescents and no measures of psychological stress were obtained, and it was not possible to verify the focusing effect in its entirety. However, Keinan (1994) has already shown that intolerance of ambiguity is associated with enhanced magical thinking, especially during times of stress. By contrast, those with a greater tolerance of ambiguity solve problems through logical analysis and are more successful in coping with stress (Kuypers, 1972; Parkes, 1984).

Figure 1 further shows that belief in the paranormal is both positively and negatively affected by tolerance of ambiguity, suggesting the existence of two different underlying processes. For instance, those with a high tolerance of ambiguity might consider poltergeists (and other paranormal phenomena) to be no more than an interesting or amusing curiosity. Thus, rather than inducing fear, paranormal experiences might inspire feelings of admiration, awe, or wonder in those with a high tolerance of ambiguity, perhaps not unlike the experiences of some artists (Zausner, 1998).

By contrast, it would appear that a fear of the paranormal presupposes the perception of a clear boundary between what is “normal” and what is not. Hence, the attribution explanation summarized earlier should apply mainly to individuals with a low tolerance of ambiguity.

Such individuals face the choice between two conflicting alternatives: they can maintain their preferred “normal” view of the world while incurring an increase in fear, or they can avoid this fear at the cost of having to accept an undesirable paranormal explanation. Paranormal explanations might be undesirable for a variety of reasons. Not only could such explanations threaten one’s peace of mind, they might also lead to negative social consequences when expressed publicly.

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