Parapsychological Association Presidential Address "Everybody knows parapsychology is not a real science": Public understanding of parapsychology
Introduction: Parapsychologists purport to apply scientific method to the investigation of commonly reported exceptional experiences and phenomena. Despite over a hundred years of associated research effort, "the status of parapsychology as a scientific endeavor is disputed by a substantial sec...
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| Published in: | The Journal of parapsychology 2022-04, Vol.86 (1), p.18-19 |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | eng |
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| Online Access: | Get full text |
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| Summary: | Introduction: Parapsychologists purport to apply scientific method to the investigation of commonly reported exceptional experiences and phenomena. Despite over a hundred years of associated research effort, "the status of parapsychology as a scientific endeavor is disputed by a substantial section of the contemporary mainstream scientific community" (Irwin, 2007). This situation seems less regrettable when it is placed in a larger context. In fact, many people perceive the study of human behavior as unscientific (Lilienfeld, 2012). This author argued that psychological science is experiencing a public perception problem that has been caused by both public misconceptions about psychology, as well as the psychological science community's failure to distinguish itself from pop psychology and question-able therapeutic practices. Ferguson's article (2015) used this quote in its title: "Everybody knows psychology is not a real science", and currently several researchers are searching to document this public skepticism of psychology. For instance, Newman, Bakina, and Tang (2012) developed this framework to understand (a) the forms that skepticism about psychological science can take, (b) the roots of such skepticism, and (c) how one might address or even undermine it. My purpose is to encourage the development of a similar perspective, within the research topic of "public understanding of science," but regarding the skepticism against parapsychology as a matter worth of empirical studies. The scientific legitimacy of parapsychology has been shown to be rejected most strongly by some members of the 'scientific elite' (McClenon, 1982), and more strongly by psychologists than by other scientists (Wagner & Monnet, 1979). This does not have to be taken a priori as the result of a specific demarcation expertise, because a closer look reveals the presence of numerous biases. In Wagner and Monnet's survey, this skepticism is most often based on prejudices about to the impossibility of such phenomena. Butzer (2020) conducted a study of the bias in the evaluation of identical abstracts framed as parapsychological or as "neuroscientific". The results revealed that participants rated the neuro-science abstract as having stronger findings and as being more valid and reliable than the parapsychology abstract, despite the fact that the two abstracts were identical. Preferred beliefs reinforced these biases. This confirmed the notion that belief-contradictory information is res |
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| ISSN: | 0022-3387 |