By MAGGIE KOERTH-BAKER via NYTimes.com
In the days following the bombings at the Boston Marathon, speculation online regarding the identity and motive of the unknown perpetrator or perpetrators was rampant. And once the Tsarnaev brothers were identified and the manhunt came to a close, the speculation didn’t cease. It took a new form. A sampling: Maybe the brothers Tsarnaev were just patsies, fall guys set up to take the heat for a mysterious Saudi with high-level connections; or maybe they were innocent, but instead of the Saudis, the actual bomber had acted on behalf of a rogue branch of our own government; or what if the Tsarnaevs were behind the attacks, but were secretly working for a larger organization?
Crazy as these theories are, those propagating them are not — they’re quite normal, in fact. But recent scientific research tells us this much: if you think one of the theories above is plausible, you probably feel the same way about the others, even though they contradict one another. And it’s very likely that this isn’t the only news story that makes you feel as if shadowy forces are behind major world events.
“The best predictor of belief in a conspiracy theory is belief in other conspiracy theories,” says Viren Swami, a psychology professor who studies conspiracy belief at the University of Westminster in England. Psychologists say that’s because a conspiracy theory isn’t so much a response to a single event as it is an expression of an overarching worldview.
As Richard Hofstadter wrote in his seminal 1965 book, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” conspiracy theories, especially those involving meddlesome foreigners, are a favorite pastime in this nation. 
Americans have always had the sneaking suspicion that somebody was out to get us — be it Freemasons, Catholics or communists. But in recent years, it seems as if every tragedy comes with a round of yarn-spinning, as the Web fills with stories about “false flag” attacks and “crisis actors” — not mere theorizing but arguments for the existence of a completely alternate version of reality.
Since Hofstadter’s book was published, our access to information has vastly improved, which you would think would have helped minimize such wild speculation. But according to recent scientific research on the matter, it most likely only serves to make theories more convincing to the public. What’s even more surprising is that this sort of theorizing isn’t limited to those on the margins. Perfectly sane minds possess an incredible capacity for developing narratives, and even some of the wildest conspiracy theories can be grounded in rational thinking, which makes them that much more pernicious. Consider this: 63 percent of registered American voters believe in at least one political conspiracy theory, according to a recent poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University.
While psychologists can’t know exactly what goes on inside our heads, they have, through surveys and laboratory studies, come up with a set of traits that correlate well with conspiracy belief.
Related articles
- Conspiracy theories only create more conspiracy theories (illuminutti.com)
- The Conspiracy Theory Flowchart “THEY” Don’t Want You To See (illuminutti.com)
- NYT Article: Why RATIONAL PEOPLE BUY INTO CONSPIRACY THEORIES (secretsofthefed.com)
Cryptomnesia is, literally, hidden memory. The term was coined by psychology professor 
By 
One of two justifications are commonly given for how the moon might influence human behavior. The moon basically has two physical effects on our environment – gravity and light. Astrological influences are not worth further discussion in this article, and I rarely hear that as a justification from the general public in any case.
This is one question that is very amenable to standard observational studies – is there a correlation between some kind of event and the lunar cycle? There have been hundreds of such studies over the last few decades, involving emergency room visits, births, accidents, crime, crisis center calls – just about any marker of human behavior you can think of. Systematic reviews of this research consistently demonstrate that there is simply no evidence for any such effect.
Further, the group exposed to the wifi documentary experience significantly more symptoms. This is a small study but it matches prior research showing that those who believe they have electromagnetic sensitivity will experience symptoms when exposed to sham EMF. The difference with the current study is that it used healthy volunteers and controlled for media exposure.
Imagine applying for a job, a position you really want and feel is a good match for your skills, and during the interview process you are seated in front of a psychic. The psychic is wearing full regalia, with a turban, crystals, and mystical garb. They proceed to give you a 
Handwriting analysis has been subjected to properly blinded experimental tests. Graphologists are given samples of text that are neutral, meaning that the content of the text does not reveal anything about the person writing it. They are also blinded to the target subject, and given the task of analyzing the handwriting. Their results are then compared to standard personality profiles of the subject, and to other graphologists examining the same samples.
Diane Schou came here with her husband in 2007 because radio-frequency exposure anywhere else she went gave her constant headaches. “Life isn’t perfect here. There’s no grocery store, no restaurants, no hospital nearby,” she told me when I visited her house last month. “But here, at least, I’m healthy. I can do things. I’m not in bed with a headache all the time.”
Take a look at this short and simple animated gif showcasing the 
When filmmaker Carla MacKinnon started waking up several times a week unable to move, with the sense that a disturbing presence was in the room with her, she didn’t call up her local ghost hunter. She got researching.
One man told her about his frequent sleep paralysis episodes, during which he’d experience extremely realistic hallucinations of a young child, skipping around the bed and singing nursery rhymes. Sometimes, the child would sit on his pillow and talk to him. One night, the tot asked the man a personal question. When he refused to answer, the child transformed into a “horrendous 
Finding this incredibly cool, she visited websites where ghost hunters from all over uploaded creepy recordings of spirit voices. She bought a recorder like the ones she saw on TV and did her own EVP (Electronic Voice Phenomenon) experiments. She lived in a house where a previous owner died on the dining room floor. Lights went on and off by themselves, faint disembodied voices and footsteps were heard and unexplained shadows were glimpsed out of the corner of the eye. So obviously, it had to be haunted. She wanted to prove to others that the ghosts were actually there, and she also wanted to hear what they had to say. Why were they there? Were they “stuck” from unfinished business? Were they attached to the house or something in it? So, just like the investigators on TV, she held her inexpensive recorder and asked questions. On playback, she was excited to hear responses. It was hard to make out the words, but as some ghost hunting experts will explain, sometimes the spirits just don’t have enough “energy” to speak clearly. One night, she got a reply which sounded more like a snarl. It scared her, and after stinking up the house with burning sage, she stopped doing sessions in her own home.
Yep, that was me several years ago. Back before I took the time to learn about recorders, recording techniques, what environmental factors can affect recorders, and what physiological and psychological factors affect how a person can misinterpret sounds. Luckily, I can laugh at myself now. But what isn’t funny is the fact that there are paranormal investigators going into people’s homes or businesses and, because they are making the same mistakes I once made, presenting frightened clients with false positives and calling them ghost voices. As I mentioned in my article “The Evocative EVP” (
Astrology is a kind of fortune telling based on the positions of stars, planets, and other objects in the deep sky (called celestial objects). Astrologers believe that the position of celestial objects affect what kind of personality you have and also cause such things as forest fires, floods, volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, and tornadoes.
Maybe walking along the sidewalk. Maybe sitting on a bus. And sure enough, when you turned your head to look, the suspect’s eyes met yours.
One of the most common anomalous experiences is the sense of being stared at. When you see someone gazing directly at you, emotions become activated—it can be exciting or comforting or creepy—and this visceral charge can give the impression that gazes transfer energy. Further, if you feel uncomfortable and check to see whether someone is looking at you, your movement may draw attention—confirming your suspicions.
Alex and Donna Voutsinas were leafing through family photo albums a week before their wedding in 2002 when one picture caught Alex’s eye. In the foreground was Donna, five years old, posing at Disney World with one of the 
What kind of person would have so little trust in his fellow man to believe that the U.S. president and the CIA conspired to fake the 
Our ancestors had to worry about plots by members of their own group as well as plots by members of other groups (who had even less to lose and more to gain from doing them harm). Evolutionary psychologists such as Pascal Boyer and Ara Norenzayan have noted that the human brain has powerful mechanisms for searching out complex and hidden causes. The popularity of Sherlock Holmes, James Bond, and Harry Potter owed much to their authors’ talents for exercising those causal mechanisms in readers.
How is it possible to get relief from swelling, pain, nausea, headaches, anxiety, and an assortment of other ailments without the use of medicine or surgery? It happens all the time and has been going on for centuries. It’s called by many names but these days it’s mostly called “
They just wave their hands over the patient and “feel” the energy moving. The patient feels it, too. Great stuff but what’s really going on? How did so many different people independently discover energy healing? It must be because there really is energy that can be manipulated to bring about healing, right? Not necessarily.
Today we’re going to enter a quiet, darkened room, sit comfortably, and prepare to receive psychic imagery, in what’s often claimed to be the most convincing evidence for the reality of psi — psychic abilities. The idea of being able to transmit thoughts from one person to another is so compelling that there’s never been a shortage of researchers hoping to find a way to develop it. We all wish we could have such a superpower, so we all want this to be true. Today’s subject is ganzfeld experiments. Ganzfeld is German for “whole field”, referring to its method of replacing the whole of your field of perception. Let’s take a close look and see what it is, how it works, and — most importantly — whether it does indeed promise to be proof of psi.
The room is bathed in red light and the receiver wears translucent cups over the eyes, so all they see is a uniform, featureless red. They are relaxed and cozy. That’s the physical setting of the experiment. Two other people are involved: an experimenter and a “sender”. The sender, in an isolated room where they cannot be seen or heard by the receiver, concentrates for 30 minutes on a “target”, which is some object or video clip or something. Throughout the 30 minutes, the receiver is supposed to verbally recite what they see or imagine. The experimenter, who is also supposed to be isolated from both the sender and the receiver, records what the receiver says, and usually keeps notes about what they describe.
By Teller via 
Literally, “distance feeling.” The term is a shortened version of 
A similarly clever horse had been studied by 
A superstition is a false belief based on ignorance (e.g., if we don’t beat the drums during an eclipse, the evil demon won’t return the sun to the sky), 
The indiscriminate power of nature is obvious. For as long as humans have been making sounds and instruments, magical methods have been created in the attempt to control the forces of nature and the life and death matters of daily existence. Good and evil befall us without rhyme or reason. We imagine spirits or intelligible forces causing our good and bad fortune. We invent ways to placate them or direct them. Many of the superstitions we developed seemed to work because we didn’t know how to properly evaluate them. There are many instances of 
Human behavior can be understood as issuing from “internal” factors or personal characteristics–such as motives, intentions, or personality traits–and from “external” factors–such as the physical or social environment and other factors deemed out of one’s personal control. Self-serving creatures that we are, we tend to attribute our own successes to our intelligence, knowledge, skill, perseverance, and other positive personal traits. Our failures are blamed on bad luck, sabotage by others, a lost lucky charm, and other such things. These attribution biases are referred to as the 
In Gestalt 
The idea that one is projecting much of what he or she perceives maybe difficult to accept. People rely on their thinking beyond reproach. This is understandable; one has more access to his or her thoughts than any other material. One’s thinking has likely served him well. The thought of not relying on thinking could be terrifying. However, the alternative is to walk through a dream world never interpreted.
When you look up at the evening sky as the moon begins to rise above the horizon, it seems to swell and then retract as it goes higher in the sky. This effect, where the moon looks bigger along the horizon, is known as the “
Part of the reason your brain has such a hard time interpreting the size of the moon in the sky is because the moon’s size does not change as it goes across the sky. Other objects in the world around you (that are not in the sky) appear to be smaller as they move closer to you and gain size as they move farther away. This expectation is physiologically imprinted in your brain. Optical illusions that you may have seen where you compare the size of two lines or circles, such as the Ponzo Illusion, illustrate your brain’s ability to trick itself based on the sizes of objects. Note that in the 
The 
Humans have debated the issue of 
In just about every disaster or event in which there are many deaths, such as a plane crash, there is likely to be, by random chance alone, individuals who survived due to an unlikely sequence of events. Passengers missing their flight by a few minutes can look back at all the small delays that added up to them seeing the doors close as they a jog up to their gate. If that plane were then to crash, killing everyone on board, those small delays might seem like destiny. The passenger who canceled their flight because of flying anxiety might feel as if they had a premonition.
This afternoon I had a (very rare) nap. During that nap I had a 
Part way through (54 lines in fact) he was interrupted by a “
In a recent sleep study, students who were awakened at the beginning of each dream, but still allowed their 8 hours of sleep, all experienced difficulty in concentration, irritability, hallucinations, and signs of psychosis after only 3 days. When finally allowed their REM sleep the student’s brains made up for lost time by greatly increasing the percentage of sleep spent in the 
Skeptics should add another term to their lexicon of self-deception and cognitive biases – temporal binding.
“Subjective validation” occurs when two unrelated or random events are perceived to be related because a belief, expectancy, or hypothesis demands a relationship. Thus, people find a connection between the perception of their personality and the contents of their horoscope.
The trick? In reality, each student received the exact same analysis: On average, the rating was 4.26/5(that is, the students found their “personal” analysis to be 85% accurate). It was only after the ratings were turned in was it revealed that each student had received identical copies assembled by Forer from various horoscopes.
To some observers, it looked like an ordinary grilled cheese sandwich. But to the Miami woman who put it up for sale on eBay, and to some people who viewed it, there was an image of the Virgin Mary seared on this seemingly run-of-the-mill snack.
This is literally a childish attitude. Children often behave as if asking hard enough of the universe for something might produce the thing wished-for. Most adults have learned that the universe does not work this way – or perhaps they have just learned to hide this childish desire that they still harbor. They use their better developed frontal lobes to rationalize what they wish to be true (manifesting as a positive cognitive bias). Reframing this 
