Are you one of those that would look at daily horoscope and believes that today is your lucky day? Do you believe in fortune-telling? Or are particularly superstitious about something? I am absolutely not a superstitious person nor someone that would belief in paranormal stuff. However, I am always curious about what kind of people would believe in it and how does these belief affect certain people. A research showed that people who believe in paranormal phenomenons tend to have a higher external locus of control.

As a Chinese, there are many superstitious people around me and I always wondered what made them believe in Fengshui or other things. Few years ago, a good friend of mine was diagnosed a tumor on her spinal cord and she will loose her life if the condition is worsened. Got the shocking news, my friend’s mom and dad went to a fortune-teller and they were told that it was my friend’s first name which caused her bad luck. The fortune-teller gave them a new name for their two daughters and they went through legal procedure to change the name for my friend and her sister. After a surgery and a long period of recovery time, my friend finally got better. Her parents believe that it was her new name which saved her.

I came across an interesting research paper titled “Personality correlates of paranormal belief: Locus control and Sensation seeking”. The hypothesis of the research suggests that the more people believes in paranormal phenomenon (x-variables), the more they are likely to have a higher external locus control and more sensation seeking behaviors (y-variables). Participants of the research were 81 women students and 9 male students with the age range from 17 to 47. Questionnaires were given to the participants and Tobacyk and Milford used their own “Paranormal Belief Scale”, which provides measures of “belief in traditional religion, belief in phi phenomenon, witchcraft, superstitious, spiritualism, extraordinary lifeforms, and precognition”.

The research result proved the hypothesis that the more a person believes in paranormal phenomenon (especially spiritualism and precognition with correlation coefficients of -0.36 and -0.44), the greater is their external locus control, which I am not surprised. However, not every form of paranormal belief is negatively correlated with locus control. Out of my expectation, the result shows that the more a person believes in superstition, the greater is their internal locus control. The definition according to Tobacyk and Milford is that “individuals can engage in superstitious behavior and thereby exert control by avoiding back luck.” This make me think of my friend’s parents changing their daughter’s name. What I also found surprising is that the research did not show a significant relationship between belief in paranormal phenomenon and sensation seeking. As I always see videos of people shooting paranormal activities they experienced on YouTube, it definitely a result I did not expect.

However, because the putative causal variable is not manipulated, this study cannot avoid reverse causality and confounding variables. There may be reverse causality because it is possible that when a person has a more external locus control, he/she will be more easily influenced by other factors such as friends’ persuasion and online source, which cause him/her to believe in those paranormal phenomenons, or when a person firmly believes in paranormal phenomenon, he/she believes that he/she does not have the control of their own life. There are also some confounding variables in the experiment such as the gender of the participants, and participants’ self-cognition. The participants are mostly female and they might tend to be more easily influenced by others or more likely to be superstitious. I believe there might be a difference in the result when the questionnaire was carried out to all male participants. Also, the participants’ self-cognition can influence the study result as everyone has different self-perception and they may think of themselves differently. Moreover, the way the questionnaire is constructed can also influence the result. When I did my further research on the topic, I came across a revised “Paranormal Belief Scale” by Tobacyk, which I think is a better way of measuring people’s belief of paranormal phenomenon because it used more subjective questions. Lastly, of course, we can never eliminate chance.

I believe that I am in control of my life and I do not believe in paranormal phenomenons, but as we have discuss in class, science can easily prove something to be wrong but can hardly prove something to be right. This research showed that there is correlation between belief in paranormal phenomenon and personality but there is no certainty. I cannot say that my friend’s parents have more external locus control because of that one incident. Belief in paranormal phenomenon must be related to many other factor and I am really interested in knowing more.

Work Cited:

Tobacyk, Jerome J. “A Revised Paranormal Belief Scale.” PsycTESTS Dataset(2011): n. pag. Web.

Marnat, Gary Groth, and Julie Ann Pegden. “Personality Correlates of Paranormal Belief: Locus of Control and Sensation Seeking.” Social Behavior & Personality: An International Journal (1998): 291-96. Web

http://study.com/academy/lesson/locus-of-control-definition-and-examples-of-internal-and-external.html