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It is clear that a wide range of situations exist that can potentially lead people to believe that they have experienced the paranormal when in fact they have not. The question regarding possible differences between believers and non-believers in the paranormal in terms of proneness to cognitive biases can now be answered rather more definitively than has been possible previously. Believers in the paranormal tend to be poorer at syllogistic reasoning, have a more distorted concept of randomness leading them to see meaning where there is none, are more susceptible to experiencing anomalous sensations and are, in certain circumstances, more suggestible. Memory biases in the accuracy of eyewitness testimony for ostensibly paranormal events have also often been reported, and evidence is beginning to accumulate that believers may be more prone to false memories.

There are many examples of believers in spiritualism coming to similarly strange conclusions. They can be seen as glaring illustrations of how people can base their beliefs upon a lack of critical thinking, and as evidence to support a very old argument that continues to this day: that belief in the paranormal is the product of ignorance, gullibility and wishful thinking. The history of the paranormal illustrates that there are all sorts of people who believe in the paranormal, as there are all sorts of people who disbelieve. Meanwhile, disbelief in the paranormal has also been based upon ignorance, gullibility and wishful thinking, and paranormal phenomena have been not only supported but also rejected by appealing to misleading evidence. It may be that there is an overall difference between believers and disbelievers in terms of how they observe and think, but the findings at present are, at best, inconclusive.

This chapter analyzes paranormalism as a “deviant discipline” violating the consensus of established science. It discusses the five types of pseudoscientific belief systems: beliefs that depend on a client–practitioner relationship; paranormal belief systems that begin within a religious tradition and are sustained by a religious institution; a form of pseudoscience that is kept alive by a core of researchers who practice what seems to be the form but not the content of science; paranormal belief systems that can be characterized as grassroots in nature; and paranormal beliefs originating from the mind of a social isolate, a single person with an unusual, implausible, scientifically unworkable vision of how nature works. The chapter then presents case studies on astrology and parapsychology.

Belief in the supernatural remained strong, especially among women, albeit a hybrid of orthodoxy, heterodoxy, and folklore, individually or communally customized in a ‘pick-and-mix’ of convictions and habits, often only loosely connected with institutional religion. Sample surveys shed some light on this world. Belief in God exceeded three-quarters, but support for a personal God diminished. Likewise, belief in Jesus Christ was steady at four-fifths, but His divinity was increasingly doubted. Belief in an afterlife was less pervasive, held by about one-half, with hell dropping out of, and reincarnation coming into, fashion. Some paranormal beliefs appealed to one in two people, others to only one-tenth, although more paid lip-service than believed, especially when it came to practising superstitions or reading horoscopes. Alternative beliefs notably attracted the young. A minority of the population claimed to have had a ‘religious’ experience, usually just once or twice, and often not obviously religious.

This chapter looks at E.R. Dodds’s engagement with the paranormal. Dodds’s career in psychic research had three distinct phases: before, during, and after his tenure of the Oxford chair. His own paranormal beliefs, however, solidified early and remained consistent over his long career in the field. Telepathy was real, an innate part of human development, and a default explanation for other forms of clairvoyance and mediumship. On the other hand, disembodied intelligences—including demons, ghosts, and spirit guides—were a delusion. Though marginalized in modern histories of psychic studies, Dodds’s long and active association with the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) made him a central figure in the history of twentieth-century paranormal research in Britain, and one of the most thoughtful and hard-nosed embedded observers of its journey from the Victorian parlour to eventual extinction in the laboratory environment he had spent his adult life advocating.