Paranormal Beliefs and Conspiracy Theories

Vocabulary-style flashcards covering personality factors in paranormal belief, conspiracy theories, facilitated communication, neurological explanations for NDEs, and skeptical approaches to sociological and medical claims.

Dogmatism

An unwillingness to evaluate evidence and change existing beliefs.

Credulity

A disposition to be over ready to believe on weak or insufficient grounds.

Critical thinking ability

The skills required to critically evaluate arguments and evidence.

Illusionary pattern perception

The phenomenon of finding meaningful patterns in unrelated stimuli, often resulting in a thrill in “discovering” patterns no one else sees.

Coincidence over-attribution

The tendency to put causal attributions on chance occurrences.

Collective narcissism

The belief that one's own group is exceptional.

Facilitated communication

A method where a facilitator physically supports a nonspeaking person's hand, wrist, or elbow while they type or point to a board; it has been treated as discredited pseudoscience since the mid 90s.

Double-Blind Message Passing

An experiment where a facilitator and nonspeaking person are shown different objects without knowing what the other saw to determine the actual source of typed messages.

Ideomotor effect

Unconscious muscular movement in response to thought or expectation, documented in psychology since the 19th century.

Clever Hans

A horse in the early 90s thought to do math which was actually responding to unconscious posture clues from its questioner.

Epistemic islands

Separate worlds of beliefs that rarely talk to each other.

Great replacement theory (GRT)

A claim that powerful elites are intentionally trying to replace one cultural group with immigrants or minorities to protect identity and status.

Identity-protective cognition

A psychological state where individuals adjust facts to fit their sense of identity rather than adjusting their identity to fit the facts.

Relative status loss

A sociological force where dominant groups interpret the loss of exclusivity as discrimination against them.

Therapeutic touch

An alternative health practice where practitioners detect and massage a human energy field by holding hands above a patient's body without physical contact.

Telepathy

A form of ESP involving mind to mind communication.

Clairvoyance

A form of ESP defined as knowing about distant events that the regular senses do not experience.

Precognition

A form of ESP defined as knowing the future.

Psychokinesis

A form of ESP defined as moving objects with the mind.

Ganzfeld studies

ESP research emerging in the 70s where participants have regular senses suppressed while trying to guess what someone in another room is thinking.

REM intrusion

A neurological phenomenon where REM sleep bleeds into waking or semi-conscious states, found at higher rates in people who report NDEs.

Dying brain surge

A paradoxical surge in high frequency brain waves observed in dying brains.