Episode Four – On Women And Paranormal Beliefs (Part One)
Sorry again about the delay – looks like the problem is fixed!
One of the big questions that is asked about paranormal belief (and often quite controversial) – is whether men or women are more likely to believe. Which sex is more likely to be superstitious? There’s a lot of research and results point to both ‘nature and nurture’, enough to make this the first part of several investigations into the topic!
Transcript and references follow:
The popular website Yahoo Answers (at http://answers.yahoo.com) has a response to the question ‘Why are men always more skeptical than women?’ – apparently men are ’smarter and not as naïve’.
This was voted the best response to the question, on a site visited by hundreds of thousands of people, with no references or detailed discussion regarding the contributor’s conclusion: when women believe in ‘weird things’ they lack a skeptical-savviness and are burdened with a dearth of intelligence. What do we know about whether women have a tendency to be more skeptically-minded or not?
Psychological research demonstrates that cognitive differences do not equal cognitive deficiencies – in the case of paranormal and supernatural beliefs, there is certainly evidence that women are more likely to affirm their beliefs, but it does not mean that they are definitely more credulous or lacking in intellect. From statistical analysis of surveys to a recent article published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience on the presence of dopamine and its influence on the brain, we naturally learn more and more over time about belief in the paranormal.
The paranormal is a term that generally refers to alleged phenomena or events asserted to be outside the range of ordinarily accepted forces (Lett, 1990) and belief in the paranormal is no longer considered an eccentricity in the modern world. We can find ‘psychic readings’ in popular women’s magazines and thousands of people attend the ‘speaking with the dead’ extravaganzas of John Edward and Sylvia Browne. Paranormal beliefs are often associated with practices of the occult, magic (as opposed to dramatic performances, sleight-of-hand and dextrous manipulation of items to create illusions), and superstitions. Studies of paranormal beliefs are often done in conjunction with pseudoscientific beliefs, which, according to Preece and Baxter (2000), involves a set of ideas or theories which are claimed to be scientific but which are contrary to standard science and have failed empirical tests (or which cannot in principle be tested), such as the claims of ‘new age’ practices like crystal healing or reiki.
The study of sex differences in science refers to biological differences such as chromosomes and internal and external sex organs; ‘gender’ describes characteristics that an individual’s society defines as masculine or feminine (Unger & Crawford, 1992). Research into believers of paranormal and pseudoscientific claims often compare how males and females respond to surveys on the existence of UFOs, ghosts, whether astrology accurately reflects our lives and so forth (Gallup & Newport, 1991; Wolfradt, 1997; Shermer, 2001).
For example; in 2007, a representative quota sample of 1,005 adults in Great Britain aged from 16 years and upward were interviewed via telephone, demonstrating that within the sample belief in telepathy was very strong amongst women (47%) with one in four consulting their horoscope regularly and one in four of those believing ‘that horoscopes accurately predicted events in their lives’ (Ipsos-MORI, 2007).
Research drawn upon in‘The Psychology of Paranormal Belief’ by Harvey J Irwin, concludes that the endorsement of most, but certainly not all, paranormal beliefs is slightly stronger among women than among men. Paranormal beliefs can be influenced by cultural factors such as family, peer groups, media influences, and the persuasive power of social institutions (e.g., religious or cultural groups) and education (Clark, 2002; Díaz-Vilela & Álvarez-González, 2004; Schriever, 2000). We cannot ignore how class, caste, religion and ethnic biases impact upon what people believe.
Mason, Webber, Singleton and Hughes (2006) recorded a modern-day Australian shift towards secular views of the world, some of which do incorporate new age beliefs and practices. In Irwin’s book, he mentions how one analysis from the 1990s (Schlitz, 1994) suggests that the link between gender differences in paranormal belief and power relations within contemporary Western society could very well lend itself to endorsing practices because they subvert the male-dominated power structure. Somewhat liberating career oportuntities such as spiritualist mediumship during the 19th century and women’s involvement is one such example. Irwin, however, stresses that paranormal beliefs may serve more complext psychological functions in the lives of both sexes than just social marginalisation.
Studies using intelligence tests in conjunction with belief in the paranormal have yielded mixed findings, with some failing to find a relationship (e.g., Wiseman & Watt, 2004) and others demonstrating higher IQ scores in believers than disbelievers (Jones, Russell, & Nickel, 1977). Otis and Alcock (1982) found that an individual’s level of skepticism is negatively related to superstitious beliefs and individuals in certain academic fields may possess a greater level of skepticism than others. Individuals from the natural sciences have been found to be more skeptical than individuals from the humanities, arts, and education, while individuals working in the arts and humanities tend to be relatively more superstitious than individuals in other academic fields (Happs, 1987; Otis & Alcock, 1982; Shermer, 1997). If we take into consideration how traditionally men dominate the fields of science and mathematics, women may be at a disadvantage when it comes to developing a ‘skeptical mindset’.
In an earlier episode of the Token Skeptic, I recommended reading Stuart Vyse’s ‘Believing in Magic – the Psychology of Superstition’. In chapter 2 ‘the superstitious person’, he constructs a profile of an ideally superstitious person and the synopsis is what he calls a ‘Bride of Frankenstein’ – because it draws upon studies used from different sources and has some inconsistent aspects.
What Vyse does say about gender in creating the profile, is that it is clearly a controversial and politically charged topic – even the notion that there may be a biological basis as to ‘why people believe’ gets quite a reaction at times! Vyse suggests that research on gender and locus of control may provide a clue. Locus of Control refers to the extent to which individuals believe that they can control events that affect them. Individuals with a high internal locus of control believe that events result primarily from their own behavior and actions. Those with a high external locus of control believe that powerful others, fate, or chance primarily determine events.
In childhood and early adolescence, boys and girls do not differ much in locus of control, but in college and late adolescence onwards, women begin to show a greater dependence on external locus of control than men, and thus more susceptible to superstitous and paranormal belief. Vyse points out that the rough outline of a typical superstitious person also has to take into account how various experience build superstitious acts and gestures.
While formal education increases the likelihood of skepticism and a reduction in superstition (Vyse, 1997), Aarnio and Lindeman’s (2006) study of 239 Finnish volunteers demonstrated a disassociation between intuitive thinking (rather than analytical thinking) and skepticism. Paranormal-believing participants demonstrated less emotional stability and assigned more purpose to artificial and random events, thereby pointing to a problem with confusion of core knowledge (knowledge learned without instruction, in terms of intuitive comprehension of physical, biological and psychological entities as well as their processes). Bruce M. Hood’s book ‘Supersense’ (2009) argues that females (as biologically defined) are more inclined as a group towards intuitive reasoning, involving genetic predisposition.
His theory of the ‘supersense’, or the human brain’s pre-wiring towards supporting intuitions and superstitions, is suggested as a key to understanding how we can rationalise beliefs. There is also a commonly-held stereotype that women demonstrate better performances on social cognition tests, such as face processing and theory of mind in comparison to men, leading to women demonstrating social skills and understanding other’s perspectives more easily.
Current research includes a very recent study using a drug called L-dopa (sometimes applied in treatment of Parkinson’s disease by raising levels of the neurotransmitter dopamine in the brain), which led experimenters to infer that its presence decreased sensitivity to perceptual-cognitive decisions and promoted conservative in the sample of skeptically-minded participants (Krummenacher, Mohr, Haker & Brugger, 2009). These results led to the possibility that paranormal ideation might profoundly modulate pain assessment, assessment of risky scenarios, recognition of patterns and decision making. An earlier study by Mohr, Graves, Gianotti, Pizzagalli, and Brugger (2001) also contributed to investigating what commonalities there are between creative thinking, paranormal belief and delusional ideation – leading to further questions as to whether dopamine is the “gullibility neurotransmitter” for non-skeptical people (particularly when the first study only used males and the second used a small number of subjects).
As research continues into the origins and influences upon paranormal and pseudoscientific belief, the contributions of cognitive neuroscience and technology brings us closer to understanding better the need to believe in ‘weird things’. Creative thinking, intuition and highly-developed interpersonal skills cannot be discounted as useless, yet the potential for paranormal and pseudoscientific beliefs to lead members of either sex towards dangerous practices shouldn’t be ignored either.
In the meantime, the summation provided by a popular site like Yahoo Answers about what makes a woman believe in the paranormal – is hardly conclusive – nor complimentary.
I obviously haven’t been paying attention and just saw your new site mentioned over at Sean’s. Congratulations and good luck (can you say that to a sceptic?).
I can’t often download podcasts but I’ll be dropping in from time to time to read your transcripts.
Thanks for the comment. I think any investigation of gender differences in skepticism cannot ignore the fact that women are more religious than men.
“I think any investigation of gender differences in skepticism cannot ignore the fact that women are more religious than men.”
Women are not more religious than men. Much like the intelligence difference issue, there’s a palpable irony in the fact that the statistics of such studies are so often approached by men with exactly the kind of lazily intuitive thinking that the data ostensibly suggest women are the more prone to.
As far as I can tell there appears to be a tenacious trend indicating that for every 7 in 10 fellas who are religious (depending on the strength of definition) maybe 8 in 10 women are. At best, that suggests there is a slightly higher likelihood that a randomly sampled woman will be “religious”, which is a completely different conclusion than “women are more religious than men” (which is demonstrably false).
Nevertheless, a difference of 1 in 10, whether it passes muster according to a given statistical model or not (and notwithstanding the hell of controlling for all the biases in the study), is still a pretty lousy difference, and certainly not one upon which a physiological argument from gender can be clearly made.
Statistics 101: just because a difference is significant doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s significant.
edit “At best, that suggests there is a slightly higher likelihood that a randomly sampled woman will be “religious” than a randomly sampled man“
You need to provide evidence to support your claim that a statistically 14% difference is not significant
14% is very much bigger than what is found in many studies whose results are accepted as uncontroversial
Furthermore, the finding holds true across a wide variety of metrics:
http://www.livescience.com/7689-women-religious-men.html
“The percent of women (and then men) who:
* Are affiliated with a religion: 86 (79).
* Have absolutely certain belief in a God or universal spirit: 77 (65).
* Pray at least daily: 66 (49).
* Have absolutely certain belief in a personal God: 58 (45).”
This gender disparity also shows up across 7 decades of polls.
All this points to a remarkably robust result which requires, at the least, a great deal of explanation to challenge.
“You need to provide evidence to support your claim that a statistically 14% difference is not significant”
Well, I was being facetious, but with regard to providing evidence for a particular arbitrary interpretation of statistical data versus another… is there evidence that appealing to p<0.05 provides for more accurate conclusions than p<0.01? Type I or Type II error, one must choose one's poison.
Of course, whether an absolute but relatively small difference that appears unlikely to be due to random variance in single population (P<0.whathaveyou) is, for want of a separate word, informative, is thoroughly context-dependent (and no where is this a more important issue to acknowledge than in the already dubious realm of evopsych).
Here’s some arguments for why the hypothesis that this small difference between men and women is due to some intrinsic biological predisposition towards religiosity should be taken with a pinch of salt. First, relative to the kinds of differences we usually attribute to the XY/hormonal differences underpinning the separation of man and woman, the differences highlighted above are not very compelling and even less informative. In the context of sex differences, which are usually profound (e.g. differences in endocrine function, skeletal structure, chromosome configuration &C) it can at least be said that for a given property, either most women have it and most men don’t or vice versa. In this instance, most men and women have it (religious leanings), but we still want to conclude that the slightly increased chance of a woman being religious is indicative of a biologically based gender distinction. That, in a room with 10 men and 10 women, we will find that there will be one more woman with religious tendencies than there are men. That might be informative if, of the 20 individuals, only a single woman had any religious leanings at all, although even here it would indicate that religiosity was merely an aberration that was sex specific, rather than a norm for that sex. But in a room in which 7/10 men and 8/10 women are religious… well, it’s not quite time to start digging deeply into the psychology of women for want of an explanation for their irrational leanings, imho. To think otherwise is to be guilty of the kind of shoddy inductive reasoning that has plagued psychology for centuries all the way up to the middle of the last one (and more often than not to the detriment of women and minorities incidentally).
Second, there is the highly important issue of adequately controlling for other factors that might equally contribute to these small differences. Crucially, there is no population of women that we can turn to to provide a control group of females that has existed in state of complete and total equality with their male counterparts, and thus by which we could reasonable remove the social baggage that invariably taints such investigations.
Third, but related to the second, religious institutions are almost all patriarchal, and almost all hang on the prophesies, testimonies, miracles and other arcane meanderings of… men. Which puts a big bloody question mark over the idea that women are, by pure voluntary association, more likely to be religious. The shadow of coercion, so neatly emphasized by such thrilling events as the Salem Witch trials, is strong and it is thoroughly male. That the religious leanings of that extra woman in the group of 20 are due to a profound social pressure does not seem like an outrageous hypothesis. Certainly a better one than “Women are more religious than men because they’re women”.
A p-value of 5% is standard in social science and is a good compromise between Type I and Type II errors. That’s the reason why good research must be replicable – and 7 decades of polls is surely sufficient for that. In any event, this is a very simple research finding (very unlike studies of whether drugs are more effective than placebos) with an effect size larger than what you typically find in research, so I am sure the p-value is far below 1%.
As for biological differences, when did they come into the picture?! What I was referring to was the very uncontroversial finding that women are *more religious* than men, not that there’re inherent biological reasons why this is so. There are various theories put forward to explain why women are more religious than men, and not all of them are biologically grounded.
When you sample size is 20 – 10 in each population – I would not draw any strong conclusions. Yet when we crank up the sample size – in theory 30 is the minimum you need to get a reasonably accurate result – and more importantly, replicate the findings multiple times, attempts at denying findings you don’t like look more and more like delusion (the social baggage that invariably taints such investigations is not always on the part of those seeking to draw conclusions from research).
I’m assuming that you don’t think very highly of social science research in general, since more or less all of it can be objected to on similar grounds.
I have no general aversion to social science. Arguably the best and the worst use of statistics occurs within that discipline. (Your last post suggests that you might be of a frequentist disposition, which is interesting because this approach is currently under pressure in the social sciences, assailed as it is by the Bayes brigade.
However, as I understand it the majority of these studies have not been conducted to the standards of a serious quantitative study by a team of social science researchers anyway; mostly basic Q&A based polls from Gallup and similar outfits. Outfits that have been notoriously wrong in there poll-based predictions for more concrete things like voting patterns. These also tend to return the kinds of numbers that are ripe for cooking in all sorts of ways to yield different strengths of interpretation. e.g. for the following:
* Are affiliated with a religion: 86 (79)
* Have absolutely certain belief in a God or universal spirit: 77 (65).
* Pray at least daily: 66 (49).
* Have absolutely certain belief in a personal God: 58 (45).”,
Assuming equal sampling of men vs women, the female fraction of religiously affiliated, God believing, and praying are 52, 55, and 57% respectively. Suddenly, the differences aren’t so striking, and when we consider that the latter three questions are a little vague (what exactly does an individual consider to be “God” or a “universal spirit” and what constitutes prayer?) they’re even less so simply by virtue of being difficult to parse meaningfully.
At best we can say that there is possibly a weak but persistent trend indicative of higher probability of a randomly selected woman being religious than for man. But simply stating a frequency statistic that, “More of the religious are women” is very different from the statement and conclusion that, “Women are more religious than men”. Given as a hypothesis, the latter is as immediately falsifiable as the statement, “Men are taller than women”.
Again, your objections are not unique to Gallup and other pollsters. Yes they have been wrong in the past, but just because you are wrong sometimes does not mean that your results cannot be trusted.
Election polling is especially noticed when it is wrong. Which means that it is right often enough for us to place weight on it. Indeed, the record of election polling is generally good (and almost always right in the results of the election, even if not in the margins of victory: http://www.gallup.com/poll/9442/election-polls-accuracy-record-presidential-elections.aspx)
The widely accepted test size of 5%, after all, means that there is a 5% chance of getting the results in question even if your null hypothesis is true. I’m assuming your bar for “a serious quantitative study” is really high, and would disqualify a good deal of research; despite repeating the mantra of “correlation is not causation” when they don’t like particular research findings, I still see researchers fall prey to it – especially when they like what they find (one example: TV violence).
And just mentioning Bayesianism does not mean that women are somehow not more religious than men – after all, the statistics show that more women are religious than men, which will update your prior probability
While definitions of prayer and gods differ, we are not trying to investigate the research question, “Do more women than men hold to the Nicene Creed” but simply “Are women more religious than men?”. What sort of questions would you ask to determine religiosity, if not these?
Also, differences do not have to be overwhelming in order to make a difference. To turn it around, the gender wage gap in 2008 was 77:100 (this is ignoring very important factors like education, experience, occupation, industry and union membership). So the female fraction of earnings in 2008 was only 44%. Yet, if I said “Suddenly, the difference is not so striking” or that “at best we can say that there is possibly a weak but persistent trend indicative of higher probability of a randomly selected woman earning less than a man”, you can imagine the frosty reception I would receive.
Lastly no one (except those flogging straw men) seriously thinks that the statement “Men are taller than women” means that all men are taller than all women, or that “Women are more religious than men” means that all women are more religious than all men, any more than anyone would say that the claim that “there is racism against blacks in the United States” is falsified by there being a black President.