Missing a trick: How Psychology could benefit more from the paranormal

In the late 1950s, British psychical researcher Tony Cornell wanted to discover how people would respond if they saw a ghost. Aware of the difficulties associated with summoning a genuine spirit, Cornell thought he could observe their reaction to a fake ghost. 

In initial studies, Cornell donned a white sheet and spent six nights wandering around a popular but dimly lit park in Cambridge. Cornell's co-experimenters noted that although about 80 people were in a position to spot the strange figure, none appeared to notice anything odd. They then conducted a similar set of studies in a well-lit graveyard during the late evening, and this time lots of drivers, cyclists and pedestrians were in a position to see the figure, but only four of them noticed the apparition. 

Later, Cornell and his team staged a version of the study in a cinema. This time, he donned his white sheet and repeatedly walked across the stage while a trailer was being shown. Everyone in the auditorium was then asked if they had spotted anything unusual and around a third of the audience reported not having noticed the fake spirit. 

Perhaps you're reading this and thinking you have spotted similarities with famous, and later, studies in Psychology. You would be right. On our journeys in Parapsychology, we have come across numerous examples of where psychical research and parapsychology were ahead of the curve. And yet many psychologists are unaware of this research.

In the late 19th century, psychical researchers studied a wide range of seemingly paranormal phenomena, such as telepathy, prophesy, ghosts, out-of-body experiences, and the survival of bodily death. This work generated many books and articles, and involved several well-known scholars, including William James, Hugo Münsterberg, and Joseph Jastrow. In the 1930s, American biologist Joseph Banks Rhine adopted the term 'parapsychology' to describe experimental work focusing on the possible existence of extrasensory perception (the awareness of information outside of the known senses) and psychokinesis (the ability to move or to modify objects by mental effort alone). In addition to examining the existence of paranormal phenomena, psychical research and parapsychology also explore related topics, including the formation and maintenance of belief in the paranormal (e.g. Irwin, 2009) and the psychological impact of anomalous experiences (e.g. Kennedy et al., 1994). 

Greater recognition of such work into alleged paranormal phenomena may accelerate advances in mainstream science and prevent researchers from unknowingly re-inventing the wheel many years later. So here, we look at three example areas: eyewitness testimony, inattentional blindness and Registered Reports.  

Eyewitness testimony

In 1902, the German criminologist Franz von Liszt arranged for two students to have a mock argument towards the end of a lecture. During the stunt, one student pulled out a gun, the professor attempted to intervene, a shot was heard, and the professor fell. Those attending the lecture were asked to describe what they had seen and frequently failed to recall important details. Psychologists often describe von Liszt as the first academic to demonstrate the inaccuracy of eyewitness testimony for real-world events (Doyle, 2014; Memon et al., 2008; Sporer, 2008). However, psychical researchers investigated the topic long before von Liszt. 

In the late 1800s, many people attended séances and reported witnessing strange phenomena, including tables moving, spirit messages appearing on school slates, and the materialisation of ghostly forms. Curious about the evidential nature of such reports, magician S. J. Davey and psychical researcher Richard Hodgson conducted a ground-breaking study. Davey learned how to fake séance phenomena, invited small groups of people to witness his feats, and asked everyone to provide a written description of what they had seen. 

Davey and Hodgson's detailed analysis of the resulting accounts showed that many people forgot or misremembered information that was central to the phenomena. For example, during one séance, Davey placed a blank school slate under the table, removed it, replaced it, and then revealed a ghostly message. The removal and replacement of the slate were essential to the secret of the trick. However, those attending the séance tended to state that the slate had been placed under the table and remained there until the appearance of the ghostly writing. 

Hodgson and Davey published lengthy articles about their study in both the Journal and Proceedings of The Society for Psychical Research (Davey, 1887; Hodgson, & Davey, 1887; Hodgson, 1892). These papers (which included the verbatim testimony of attendees along with commentaries documenting the inaccuracy of their recall) appeared over a decade before similar research in mainstream psychology. Had psychologists been aware of this work when it was first published, they may have been inspired to conduct studies, and to create theories, that only emerged many years later. Even today, the pioneering nature of Hodgson and Davey's studies is rarely recognised (Wiseman et al., 2003; Pankrantz, 2008; Tompkins, 2019) and there might be further important lessons within this intriguing and comprehensive dataset.

Inattentional blindness

During inattentional blindness people fail to see a surprising and obvious stimulus because their attention is engaged elsewhere. Many psychologists note that Ulric Neisser was the first to publish experimental work into this curious phenomenon (e.g., Jensen et al., 2011; Levin & Baker, 2015; Mack & Rock, 1998). In the 1970s, Neisser asked people to attend to events taking place in one of two superimposed films and discovered that they often didn't notice unusual events in the other film (Neisser & Becklen, 1975; Neisser, 1979). Neisser inspired others to create similar tasks, with perhaps the most famous of these being the 'basketball-gorilla' demonstration (Simons & Chabris, 1999). One of the few real-world investigations of inattentional blindness reported that people talking on a mobile telephone were less likely than others to notice a unicycling clown (Hyman et al., 2009).

However, all this overlooks that 1950s research by Tony Cornell, who you met at the start of our article. Cornell's studies (Cornell, 1959; 1960) constitute an early investigation into inattentional blindness in a real-world setting. Remarkably, they were carried out over 15 years before Neisser's experiments and 50 years before Hyman and colleagues examined the phenomenon within a realistic context. It's only relatively recently that the ground-breaking nature of Cornell's work has been recognised (Simons, 2010; Ruffles, 2010; Tompkins, 2016) and an earlier appreciation of his studies might have helped progress the area.

Registered Reports

Psychological research can suffer from Questionable Research Practices (QRPs), such as publication bias and p-hacking. To help address the issue, some researchers have suggested that experimenters submit key aspects of their intended study (e.g., hypotheses, number of participants, and analyses) to a journal for peer review prior to data collection (Chambers & Munafo, 2013; van 't Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016). Chambers (2012) coined the term 'Registered Report' (RR) to refer to this form of preregistration, and several authors have claimed that the journal​s Cortex and ​Perspectives on Psychological Science were the first to propose the scheme in 2012 ​(e.g., van 't Veer & Giner-Sorolla, 2016; Chambers, 2017). 

A much earlier version of RRs was implemented by parapsychologist Martin Johnson. Johnson (1975) initially noted how QRPs could affect the outcome of studies and suggested that the issue be minimised by researchers submitting their experimental plans prior to data collection. In the 1970s, Johnson teamed up with another parapsychologist, Sybo Schouten, to implement a prototype of this procedure in the European Journal of Parapsychology (EJP). The EJP's publication policy urged researchers to submit a document outlining various study details (e.g. its rationale, hypotheses, number of participants, number of trials, and analyses) for review before they collected any data (Johnson & Schouten, 1975). The EJP editors and reviewers then decided whether to accept the study based on this information. The EJP published a mix of RRs and non-RRs between 1976 and 1993.

This use of RRs was overlooked by psychologists prior to 2020, with Chambers and Tzavella (2022) noting that it was remarkable that the long-running scheme was '…unknown to mainstream science' (p.30). Earlier recognition of the EJP's ground-breaking publication policy within mainstream psychology may have encouraged mainstream journals to adopt the procedure long before 2012. There may also be important lessons to be learned from the EJP data. For instance, Wiseman and colleagues (2019) recently showed that the number of supported hypotheses in the EJP's RRs was significantly lower than in the non-RRs, thus supporting the notion that the procedure reduced QRPs. 

Towards a greater appreciation

These three examples highlight a small percentage of the pioneering and innovative work conducted by psychical researchers and parapsychologists. They were chosen to illustrate how studies drawn from different eras uncovered a range of novel effects and methods. Moreover, they demonstrate how psychologists in the past could have benefitted from such investigations and how present-day researchers may still have something to gain from them. 

So, why might psychologists remain unacquainted with the aspects of psychical research and parapsychology that are relevant to their specialism?

First, they may believe that these disciplines only examine the possible existence of paranormal phenomena and therefore hold no interest for them. In reality, both parapsychologists and psychical researchers often investigate a variety of psychology-related topics (including perception, memory, consciousness, and clinical psychology), and work into the existence of the paranormal has yielded conceptual, methodological and statistical advances that are relevant to mainstream science (Watt, 2005).

Second, some psychologists may avoid the areas because both parapsychology and psychical research are often marginalised within mainstream science (e.g., Cardeña et al., 2017). Although much of this criticism is justified – like any area of research, both fields contain some poor-quality work – aspects of this marginalisation are unwarranted. This stigma could be minimised by increasing awareness of the pioneering work carried out within psychical research and parapsychology, and psychologists reading literature from the area itself rather than relying on secondary sources (Treadway & McCloskey, 1987). 

Finally, psychical researchers and parapsychologists often present at specialised conferences and publish in dedicated journals. Traditionally, psychologists may have found this material challenging to obtain. However, this work is now increasingly available in online searchable databases such as Google Scholar and Lexscien (which contains full sets of the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, Journal of Parapsychology, European Journal of Parapsychology, etc.). 

We believe that parapsychology and psychical research contain a large amount of untapped potential for psychology. Indeed, the relatively small number of mainstream researchers who turned their attention to the paranormal have often uncovered new and interesting phenomena. For instance, in the late 1930s psychologist Louis Goodfellow studied the results of a mass participation Extrasensory Perception study and discovered some of the first evidence for population stereotypes and sequential dependency in human guessing (Goodfellow, 1938: Hyman, 1992). Bertram Forer's (1949) research into why people were impressed with horoscopes resulted in him discovering hindsight bias. Also, Leo Festinger's classic study into how believers in UFOs coped after a prophesied apocalypse didn't take place helped him to develop ideas relating to cognitive dissonance (Festinger et al., 1956).

In short, psychical researchers and parapsychologists are often ahead of the curve and conduct pioneering studies into topics that are relevant to mainstream psychology. This work tends to be overlooked by psychologists, which is unfortunate as it has the potential to highlight new topics and to accelerate scientific progress. This kind of research can also help in the teaching of psychology because, in our experience, students are often interested in work about the paranormal. Gaining a greater appreciation of parapsychology and psychical research is straightforward, and we suspect that psychologists and students alike will benefit from probing the paranormal.

- Richard Wiseman is Professor of the Public Understanding of Psychology at the University of Hertfordshire
Caroline Watt is Professor Emeritus at the University of Edinburgh

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