AP-GfK polls Americans' belief in the paranormal

[Mr. Morden]

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/24/study-democrats-are-more-likely-than-republicans-to-believe-in-fortune-telling-astrology-and-ghosts/?TID=SM_FB

[pbrower2a]

Damn! Are we $crewed as a nation or people!

[True Federalist (진정한 연방 주의자)]

I'd quibble with the description "things that are not real" except they used the same color to indicate Republicans.

More seriously, while I myself don't believe in any of the purple things (except maybe the dreams and even there I don't have a paranormal explanation) for a number of them I'm willing to accept the possibility and thus would have preferred a description of "things not scientifically established to be true".

(When it comes to dreams, I think our dreams are often a result of our sleeping brain trying to process the data of the previous day and that during that processing, it at times will run simulations of what might happen.  But the resulting prediction of the future is just an extrapolation from known data rather than any sort of paranormal prognostication.)

[dead0man]

It's not just Americans that believe in stupid sh**t.
Australia is full of crazies too

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You'll find the same kind of numbers around Europe too and I'd assume S.America, Africa and Asia are right there with us.

You may now return to "lol 'murica".

[Mr. Morden]

It's not just Americans that believe in stupid sh**t.
Australia is full of crazies too

You must be logged in to read this quote.

You'll find the same kind of numbers around Europe too and I'd assume S.America, Africa and Asia are right there with us.

You may now return to "lol 'murica".

For the record, I'm American, and I wasn't posting this as "lol 'murica".

Maybe "lol humanity" I guess, but even that's not right.  It doesn't actually bother me that people believe in some weird stuff, and in any case a lot of this is probably highly dependent on question wording.  Plenty of people might agree that the Earth is billions of years old, but don't know the exact number, so wouldn't feel comfortable agreeing with "are confident the Earth is 4.5 billion years old".

Really, this is more just to give people here some context about this stuff.  I imagine that many of the people responding to this poll don't even really have fixed opinions on many of these questions.  They're not the sort of things that most folks think about in everyday life.  To quote Muon in this other thread about the common man's scientific ignorance:

As someone who teaches astronomy, I can say I'm not surprised, and it's not about religion or politics. Moderate has part of the answer - people generally don't retain facts that don't apply to their everyday lives.

But many people posting here don't seem to understand that, and assume that the average person walks around looking at the world like an Atlas poster would, interested in abstract notions that don't apply to their everyday life and trying to develop some kind of consistent set of "beliefs" about the world.

[Mr. Morden]

More seriously, while I myself don't believe in any of the purple things (except maybe the dreams and even there I don't have a paranormal explanation) for a number of them I'm willing to accept the possibility and thus would have preferred a description of "things not scientifically established to be true".

Agreed on that.  I'd prefer a different graphic, but am not going to remake the graphic myself. 

[bedstuy]

I think these polls are methodologically screwy because the poll questions are entirely open to interpretation.

For example, "You can influence the physical world with positive thought."  If your positive thoughts lead to positive actions, of course positive thoughts can influence the world.  You also have things like the placebo effect where your thoughts lead to physical effects.  That could be true for positive thinking as well, not to say positive thinking is always a good thing.

Or, "dreams can foretell the future."  Sure, they can, in retrospect. They can also not.

And, "what's an advanced civilization like Atlantis" anyway?  Do Ancient Rome or Greece qualify as advanced?

[Beezer]

Magic everywhere in this b*tch!

[dead0man]

f@cking magnets, how do they work?

[ElectionsGuy]

Good god, that is one scary graph.

[Mr. Morden]

Here's a "paranormal" poll by Gallup from 2005, in which the questions are a little more focused:

http://www.gallup.com/poll/16915/three-four-americans-believe-paranormal.aspx

[Person Man]

I wish a lot of those things were real. Does that count? I would be like "wololo! bitches!"

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

The reason the Democrats score higher in the "paranormal" is because a lot of those things would be considered "witchery" or "dark-sided" by Christians.  You mentioned anything Christian (in this case, Satan) and those GOPers are right back in the lead. 

Still... ghastly (no pun intended) results from this poll, although humans are conditioned by biology (we are more likely to accept a wrong explanation than none at all) to believe in this crap.  Hell, my own sister swears in the paranormal and "hates" skeptics because she hallucinated a couple of times.

[Gustaf]

The questions seem asymmetric. Surely, you can't compare "being confident in..." with "believing". Seems to me that they're trying to make it more dramatic than it is?

[Starbucks Union Thug HokeyPuck]

The questions seem asymmetric. Surely, you can't compare "being confident in..." with "believing". Seems to me that they're trying to make it more dramatic than it is?

What's going to get you more hits on your site? 

"Americans widely believe in the paranormal"

or

"Americans have tepid skepticism about the supernatural"

[tik 🪀✨]

The questions seem asymmetric. Surely, you can't compare "being confident in..." with "believing". Seems to me that they're trying to make it more dramatic than it is?

What's going to get you more hits on your site?  

"Americans widely believe in the paranormal"

or

"Americans have tepid skepticism about the supernatural"

"7 in 10 Americans believe someone can change the contents of these graphs by thinkin' real hard."

Humans tend to only focus on and remember instances where their ideas turned out to be true (or seem to), and we'd rather have a dumb explanation than none at all. Then again, evolution, the current explanation for the birth of the universe, and global warming all have plenty of evidence but still aren't believed by as many. Maybe people are just a bunch of sh**theads.

[IceSpear]

The reason the Democrats score higher in the "paranormal" is because a lot of those things would be considered "witchery" or "dark-sided" by Christians. 

You mean "dork sided"?

http://youtu.be/bOpva_iit-8

[Rockefeller GOP]

The reason the Democrats score higher in the "paranormal" is because a lot of those things would be considered "witchery" or "dark-sided" by Christians.  You mentioned anything Christian (in this case, Satan) and those GOPers are right back in the lead. 

Still... ghastly (no pun intended) results from this poll, although humans are conditioned by biology (we are more likely to accept a wrong explanation than none at all) to believe in this crap.  Hell, my own sister swears in the paranormal and "hates" skeptics because she hallucinated a couple of times.

Yeah, because a huge majority of Democrats aren't Christians...

[anvi]

Well, I don't believe in any of that stuff either.  But I'm getting to the point where I really don't blame others for it.  Why shouldn't people believe in the paranormal when the normal has become so unworthy of belief?

[GaussLaw]

So basically, US Republicans are largely Bible-believing Christians [and thus believe Satan is responsible for evil and may doubt evolution/age of the Earth], while Democrats are mostly Christian but also have a greater influence of "mystics" and other forms of spirituality. 


HockeyDude is right that many of us would consider astrology and other "magic" forces immoral, hence why we don't believe in them. 

IIRC, positive thinking shaping events has some basis in quantum mechanics, so I'm not sure "not real" is an appropriate label for that.  I remember a movie in which a picture of water before a monk and after a monk blessed it was shown, and the two pictures (at the molecular level) looked completely different. 

Obviously, I quibble with the argument that Satan isn't real, though I do consider him more as the origin of evil rather than the one responsible for each evil act.

[Cobbler]

Sad that Bigfoot isn't scoring higher on this.