Higher Education Fuels Stronger Belief in Ghosts (!!!)

[Giz]

The most dispiriting news I've read in a while:

"Believe it or not, higher education is linked to a greater tendency to believe in ghosts and other paranormal phenomena, according to a new study."

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060121_paranormal_poll.html



"While 23 percent of college freshmen expressed a general belief in paranormal concepts—from astrology to communicating with the dead—31 percent of seniors did so and the figure jumped to 34 percent among graduate students."

- Wonder what classes they'd been taking?

[ond_magiker]

According to this table, belief in the paranormal has been reduced in the last 5 years. The various concepts have either about the same amount of believers, or less.

http://www.livescience.com/othernews/060121_paranormal_poll.html#table

For instance, belief in ESP and ET visits have gone from 50% to 28% and 33% to 17%, respectively.

If there's been such a downward trend, it wouldn't be very surprising that the older students are slightly more into the paranormal. I'm not saying this explains the difference, but it can at least explain part of it.

[Miss Whiplash]

Belief in ghosts, hauntings and demon possession are certainly on the rise in America though.

[Fosca]

It's correlation, not causation, so we can't say that education causes belief in the paranormal. I can't figure this out from the article--did the researchers compare the people in college to the people not in college of the same age? It may simply be that there's a cohort of students who are more likely to believe in this sort of thing going through school at this moment.

[MichelQC]

Personnaly I am not surprised at all! Since when education ever prevented people from believing in all sorts of woo? Knowledge and reason are not necessarily compatible (sadly).

:rolleyes: