Are Sceptics More Rational Than Believers? Not So Fast...

What a New Psychology Paper Does - and Doesn’t - Say About Sceptics and Believers

An interesting paper was published last month in Frontiers in Psychology looking at a question that sits right at the crossroads of scepticism, belief, and the way people make sense of the world. Titled Mind over matter? The cognitive styles of scientific scepticism and paranormal belief, it explored whether people who lean more strongly toward scientific scepticism and people who endorse more paranormal belief tend to differ in their preferred cognitive styles. In a sample of 300 adults, the researchers found that they often did.

That is interesting, though perhaps not especially shocking. People do not all arrive at their beliefs in the same way. Some lean more heavily on analysis, structure, and external evidence. Others place more weight on intuition, lived experience, internal coherence, and felt meaning. Most of us, of course, are not tidy examples of either. We are mixtures. What this paper tries to do is map some of those differences more formally, and to ask whether scientific scepticism and paranormal belief tend to cluster around different ways of thinking.

To do that, the researchers used questionnaire measures of paranormal belief, belief in science, and several traits linked to cognitive style. They then used latent profile analysis, a statistical method designed to look for patterns within the sample, to see whether certain combinations of beliefs tended to hang together. Their best-fitting model identified two broad profiles. One, labelled Higher Evidence-based Thinking, made up 55 per cent of the sample and showed higher belief in science alongside lower traditional paranormal belief and New Age belief. The other, labelled Lower Evidence-based Thinking, made up 45 per cent of the sample and showed the reverse pattern.

The two groups also differed on several self-report measures linked to thinking style. Compared with the higher evidence-based group, the lower evidence-based group scored higher on experiential thinking, empathising, and reality-testing deficits, and lower on rational thinking and systematising. Need for closure and dogmatism, interestingly, did not significantly distinguish the groups in the way many people might expect. The authors argue that the profiles are better understood as competing worldviews than as a simple split between informed and uninformed people.

That is where I think this paper becomes genuinely useful. Not because it gives us an excuse to sort people into the clever camp and the gullible camp, but because it points toward something more subtle: that disagreements around science, scepticism, and the paranormal may sometimes reflect differences in cognitive orientation, not just differences in raw intelligence or sincerity. In other words, some of the friction here may come from people weighting evidence, intuition, personal experience, and explanatory coherence differently from the outset.

That said, I think it is important to be careful with what follows from that.

This does not mean that everybody is equally rational, only in their own special way. Some claims are better evidenced than others. Some people really are more careful, more reflective, and more methodologically disciplined than others. We are all vulnerable to mental shortcuts, motivated reasoning, and the quiet pull of our prior beliefs, but not always to the same degree, and not always with the same willingness to correct for them. The burden of proof still matters. Evidence still matters. Knowing the language of critical thinking does not make you immune from bias, but neither does that mean standards of reasoning suddenly disappear. This paper complicates the idea that “sceptic” and “believer” are simple stand-ins for intellectual worth. It does not flatten all differences in reasoning quality into meaninglessness. The paper itself also notes that dogmatism did not neatly separate the two groups, which is a useful reminder that rigidity is not the private property of one side.

That distinction matters to me, because it is something I have always tried to reiterate when speaking to mixed audiences of believers, sceptics, and the merely curious. Having a more rational thinking style does not make you automatically right. It does not make you wiser, more objective, or inherently cleverer than somebody who believes in ghosts. But neither does it follow that all routes to belief are equally reliable. We still have to ask what evidence exists for a claim, how strong it is, what alternative explanations might fit, and whether the conclusion actually follows. The point is not that reason does not matter. It is that reason is not a halo automatically granted to one tribe and withheld from another.

There is another reason to read this paper with some caution, especially if your own interests are hauntings, apparitions, folklore, and other anomalous experiences. The measure of paranormal belief used here was the Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, and the authors themselves note that, while it captures a breadth of supernatural ideas, it leaves out important areas such as ghosts and hauntings, poltergeists, folklore entities, and other culturally relevant phenomena. I had similar issues when using the same scale for my final research project as a Psychology undergrad. So this is not a final word on ghost belief but instead a study of a particular, questionnaire-defined version of paranormal belief, and that is not quite the same thing.

That caveat is more important than it might first appear. “Paranormal belief” is often treated as though it were one neat psychological category, but anyone who has spent time around this subject knows it is far messier. A person may reject astrology, psychic healing, and most supernatural claims while still feeling deeply affected by an experience in a particular house after a bereavement. Another may love ghost stories and folklore without making sweeping claims about what is objectively out there. Another may identify as a sceptic and still feel thoroughly shaken by something they cannot explain. A scale can be useful but it is not the whole terrain.

The study also comes with the usual limitations that deserve to be taken seriously. The data were collected through self-report questionnaires, which means the researchers measured how people described their own thinking, not how they performed on live reasoning tasks. The authors explicitly acknowledge that self-report can be distorted by response bias, social desirability, and limited self-awareness, and that reported thinking style may not match actual reasoning performance. They suggest future work should combine self-report with more objective measures.

The sample was recruited through social media, was self-selecting, and was not especially diverse, with the paper noting that about 87.6 per cent of participants identified as White British/Irish or White other. The authors also note that this limits how confidently the findings can be generalised to broader or more culturally diverse populations. The study was cross-sectional too, meaning it captured people at one moment in time rather than following them over time, so it cannot establish causation. It cannot tell us whether a given thinking style leads to a belief pattern, whether a belief pattern shapes thinking style, or whether both are influenced by other factors.

So what does this paper mean?

I think it suggests that scientific scepticism and paranormal belief may often sit within broader patterns of worldview and self-concept. It supports the idea that how people prefer to process information may help shape what kinds of claims they find persuasive, meaningful, or credible. That is valuable, because it helps explain why debates in this area can feel so frustratingly circular. Sometimes people are not just disagreeing over one fact. They are approaching the same territory with different assumptions about what counts as convincing in the first place.

What it does not mean is that one side has now been scientifically crowned the rational side or that sceptics are immune from bias, tribalism, or wishful thinking. It does not mean believers are incapable of careful reasoning or that paranormal belief can simply be reduced to poor thinking. Or that openness to anomalous experience tells you everything you need to know about a person’s relationship with evidence. And it certainly does not mean that knowing a few cognitive-bias terms grants anyone exemption from being gloriously, stubbornly human.

If anything, that may be the most useful takeaway. We all like to imagine that our own route to belief is the sensible one. We all like to think that other people are the ones being led astray by emotion, culture, identity, or prior assumptions. But human beings are rarely that clean. We are shaped by temperament, experience, community, story, education, fear, hope, and the meanings we make from strange things. Some of us use more visible scaffolding than others. None of us builds a worldview in a vacuum.

That is why papers like this are worth reading carefully. Not because they hand us a winner, but because they add another piece to the puzzle. They tell us something useful about patterns in belief and cognition. They may help explain why believers and sceptics sometimes seem to be speaking slightly different psychological languages. But they do not settle who is right about ghosts, or about reality more broadly. They cannot carry that weight on their own. What they can do is remind us that paying attention to cognitive style should sharpen our awareness of evidence, not replace it - and that mistaking our preferred way of thinking for a guarantee of being correct is one of the oldest human habits going.