Modeling Precognitive Dreams as Meaningful Coincidences

Houran, James; Lange, Rense

doi:10.2466/pr0.1998.83.3f.1411

Cited by 10 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…We found 46.3% of participants had had at least one precognitive dream: Rattet and Bursik (2001) had found this for 44.8% of their sample, and Glicksohn (1990) for 22%. Number of precognitive dreams was positively associated with the degree of paranormal belief about these dreams (r ¼ 0.42), which accords with the correlation between these of r ¼ 0.48 found by Glicksohn (1990) and r ¼ 0.37 found by Houran and Lange (1998), and supports the view of Glicksohn, and also Blackmore and Tro s scianko (1985) and Ayeroff and Abelson (1976), that paranormal belief is related to personal experience. We found that higher education levels were related to lower paranormal belief, although this does not indicate the direction of causation.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Probabilistic reasoning, affirmative bias and belief in precognitive dreams

Blagrove

French

Jones

2006

Appl. Cognit. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Three hundred and eighty-six participants were interviewed about their experience of dreams that seem to predict an event in the future, and their belief about whether such dreams can be explained naturally or paranormally. For those without university education, participants who had had a dream that seemed to predict the future (termed experiencers) and believers in paranormal explanations for such dreams (termed believers) made more errors on a probabilistic reasoning task about a lottery. Contrary to the chance baseline shift hypothesis experiencers and believers did not give lower estimates than non-experiencers and non-believers for the frequency with which others would answer three simple personal questions affirmatively. However, they were more likely to answer the three simple personal questions affirmatively about themselves than were non-experiencers and nonbelievers, which suggests an affirmative bias. This affirmative bias either affects paranormal experience and belief, or is a confound in the methods used in assessing experience and belief.

show abstract

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 84%

Probabilistic reasoning, affirmative bias and belief in precognitive dreams

Blagrove

French

Jones

2006

Appl. Cognit. Psychol.

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To also assess phenomena of the esoteric scene, such as the belief in remedies of ''faithhealers'', ''the energy of stones'', ''astrology'' or ''palm-reading'' one extra scale with seven items was constructed (labelled ''Esotericism'') and one further item for the scale ''Superstition'' (''Broken glass brings luck'') in the hope of improving the reliability of the scale. The Poltergeist Experience Checklist (Houran & Lange, 1998) was also included in the study. Field dependence/independence was assessed with the EFT (Witkin et al, 1971) and for part of the sample also with the GWT (Hergovich & Ho¨rndler, 1994).…”

Section: Studymentioning

confidence: 99%

Field dependence, suggestibility and belief in paranormal phenomena

Hergovich

2003

Personality and Individual Differences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper examines the relationships between field dependence, suggestibility and belief in paranormal phenomena. In Experiment 1, 91 subjects underwent an hypnosis session to determine their suggestibility. They also completed a paranormal belief scale and a computer test of field dependence. It was shown that suggestibility and field dependence had positive and significant correlations with the belief in paranormal phenomena. In a second experiment (n=39), the interrogative suggestibility of the subjects was assessed. Field dependence/independence was measured using the Embedded Figures Test (EFT) (Witkin, Oltman, Raskin, & Karp, 1971) and the degree of paranormal belief using the paranormal belief scale of Tobacyk and Milford (1983). The results confirmed the hypothesis that more field-dependent and suggestible subjects have a greater belief in paranormal phenomena than field-independent and non-suggestible subjects, although the relationship only held for the subscale ''Superstition''. The findings with respect to field dependence as measured with the EFT were replicated in a third study (n=150). Field dependence had a main effect on the amount of belief in ''Superstition'' across three different instructions. An effect of the different instructions suggesting that paranormal phenomena are scientifically proven (unproven) or an interaction between instructions and cognitive style of the subjects could not be found. In summary, the findings indicate a sustantial relationship between suggestibility and field dependence with belief in paranormal phenomena which could be explained by different coping mechanisms with regard to uncertainty in the external world. #

show abstract

“…This may explain why paranormal believers often see coincidences as more meaningful (e.g. Brugger & Taylor, 2003;Houran & Lange, 1998). Further, it implies that paranormal believers base their probability judgements on what they perceive is typical of randomness and thus that they are especially prone to representativeness biases (Kahneman & Tversky, 1972;1983).…”

mentioning

confidence: 98%

Paranormal belief and the conjunction fallacy: Controlling for temporal relatedness and potential surprise differentials in component events

Rogers

Fisk

Wiltshire

2011

Applied Cognitive Psychology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Recent research suggests paranormal believers are especially prone to the 'conjunction fallacy'. The current study extends this work by presenting believers and non-believers with eight paranormal plus eight non-paranormal scenarios. Participants were given either a paranormal or virtually identical non-paranormal version of each scenario. Of these, half incorporated component events which were (virtually) co-occurring with half including components which were temporally disjointed. Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA; controlling for gender and maths/stats/psychology qualifications) found believers made more conjunction errors than non-believers. Neither event type (paranormal vs. non-paranormal) nor components' temporal relationship (co-occurring vs. disjointed) had a significant effect on conjunction biases. Believers' tendency to produce larger conjunctive estimates was unrelated to group differences in component probability estimates (surprise values) and further, could not be attributed to group differences in the perceived functional relationship between component and conjunctive events. Possible explanations are discussed.

show abstract

Modeling Precognitive Dreams as Meaningful Coincidences

Cited by 10 publications

References 8 publications

Probabilistic reasoning, affirmative bias and belief in precognitive dreams

Probabilistic reasoning, affirmative bias and belief in precognitive dreams

Field dependence, suggestibility and belief in paranormal phenomena

Paranormal belief and the conjunction fallacy: Controlling for temporal relatedness and potential surprise differentials in component events

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About