Ghosts, scepticism and challenging beliefs

The importance of keeping an open-mind — no matter how difficult it seems

I’ve long been fascinated by the paranormal.

However, at the same time, I can’t help being incredibly sceptical about it — especially considering the poor quality of the evidence often put forward for it.

Ghost stories still have the ability to send a shiver down my spine. I’ve spent many hours reading through historical cases of apparitions on Wikipedia that, even when a natural explanation is provided, have left me feeling slightly spooked and left me struggling to sleep that night.

No matter how many cases I see debunked, I can’t help shake the feeling that it might just be something in it.

It seems pretty obvious that a lot of reports of ghostly activity are probably down to little more than pareidolia: the tendency to see patterns in inanimate objects — like seeing shapes in clouds or the face of Jesus in burnt toast.

Some have theorised that this stems from a kind of Hyperactive Agency Detection Device in the brain. We’re hard-wired, so the theory goes, to see agency where none exists. This is probably an evolutionary safety mechanism: It’s far safer to mistake a bush for a puma than a puma for a bush.

This may be why so many ghost sightings happen under conditions where our senses are at their weakest (at night, in strange and darkened locations, etc).

It’s also telling that ghosts have apparently evolved down the centuries. Early accounts have ghosts as fairly solid beings (that were easy to mistake for the living) who tended to hang around the places they were buried. Over time, they have become much less tangible and connected much more with the places they lived (often tied to some emotional trauma).

You only have to watch one of the many paranormal “investigation” shows to see just how slippery the modern ghoul has become. Where we once had full-bodied apparitions wandering around graveyards, rattling their chains and bemoaning their fate, we now get orbs, EVP and strange noises just off-camera.

None of this is proof that ghosts don’t exist. But it’s easy to see why so many people are so cynical about it.

Even though I’m happy to dismiss the majority of ghost sightings as bunk, I think that the attitude of many sceptics towards those who believe in ghosts is ill-spirited and ultimately counter-productive.

Both believers and sceptics should agree that it’s important to challenge poor evidence. Simply attacking and ridiculing someone’s beliefs, however, has increasingly been shown to achieve the very opposite of what it hopes to do — ultimately reinforcing rather than weakening the initial belief.

This is especially the case with personal experiences: It’s difficult to challenge someone’s memory of a paranormal event (even though memories are notoriously unreliable) without implying that they are either an idiot (for believing something that isn’t true) or lying (by distorted a perfectly natural event).

The more someone feels personally attacked by an argument, the more reason they have to reject the challenge — regardless of its validity.

None of this is to suggest that we should not tackle beliefs we believe to be wrong. But I think we have to accept that our ability to change people’s minds is extremely limited. Perhaps the best we can often hope for is simply to plant a seed of doubt and hope that it leads the individual to re-examine their views at some later point.

Debunking also tends to overlook the value of ghost stories in providing insight into the psychology of human beliefs. Perhaps a better approach is that of an anthropologist looking to document and clarify beliefs in the hope of shedding new light on human behaviour?

The universe, as the saying goes, is not just queerer than we imagine, but queerer than we can imagine. Even if we adopt a purely naturalistic view of things we have to admit that there may well always be things that cannot be properly understood. And as long as this is the case people will probably continue to populate the world with all manner of weird and crazy things — no matter how weak the arguments for them appear to the rest of us.

We may not like this — but I think we need to accept it, and find better ways to deal with it.