Paranormal Beliefs, Spoken and Unspoken

Abstract

Recent social psychological research raises the possibility that some attitudes and beliefs may be implicit or inaccessible to articulation. In this study a measure of implicit paranormal beliefs was constructed and administered to a sample of 105 Australian adults as an online project. Significant relationships were found between implicit and explicit (self-reported) paranormal beliefs, offering support for the validity of the concept of implicit paranormal beliefs. While explicit beliefs were found to be correlated with thinking style, no such correlations were evident for implicit beliefs. Some speculations on the origins of implicit paranormal beliefs are offered.