Studying Anomalous Beliefs in Psychology:

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Studying Anomalous Beliefs in Psychology
Lessons from The Book of the Damned
Vaughan Bell vaughan_at_backspace.org
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Outline

• Charles Fort and The Book of the Damned
• Thomas Kuhn and The Structure of Scientific
  Revolutions.
• Successful Fortean approaches to anomalous
  beliefs
• Koro and penis theft beliefs.
• Alien abduction beliefs.

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Who was Charles Fort ?

• Born in Albany, NY.
• Lived, largely in poverty, in New York and
  London.
• Survived by taking odd jobs between infrequently
  selling short stories to local newspapers.
• Inherited a modest income from his deceased uncle
  at the age of 42.
• Wrote The Book of the Damned, New Lands, Lo! and
  Wild Talents

1874 - 1932
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Influence of Charles Fort

• Fort meticulously amassed data from anomalous
  happenings, reported in the scientific
  literature.
• Falls of fish from the sky, ghosts, UFOs, psychic
  abilities and so on.
• Fort argued that scientists argued according to
  their beliefs rather than the rule of evidence,
  and inconvenient evidence was ignored,
  discredited or explained away.
• A procession of the damned. By the damned I mean
  excluded. We shall have a procession of data that
  science has excluded. Battalions of the accursed,
  captained by pallid data that I have exhumed,
  will march.

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Influence of Charles Fort

• Fort was not actually arguing that these
  phenomena were as described.
• One measures a circle beginning anywhere
• He was arguing that we cannot view the world
  entirely from the theories we use to understand
  it.
• And his cataloguing of anomalous phenomena was an
  attempt to show the folly of doing so.
• He also stressed the importance of accepting the
  phenomena as it presented.

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Thomas Kuhn

• Born in Cincinnati, Ohio.
• Received PhD in Physics from Harvard in 1949.
• Known for his work in the Philosophy of Science.
• Wrote The Structure of Scientific Revolutions
  which argued that much of science is based on
  subjective criteria, rather than entirely on
  falsification.

1922 - 1996
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Subjective Influences

• Before scientific enquiry can begin, the
  scientific community must agree on fundamental
  points, for example
• What kinds of things exists in the universe.
• How they interact with each other.
• What kinds of questions may be legitimately asked
  about these things.
• What techniques are appropriate for answering
  questions.
• What counts as evidence, explanation or solution.

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Attributes of Belief

• Some beliefs are un-falsifiable
• e.g. I believe in the existence of God.
• Some beliefs are improbable
• e.g. I believe that my penis is shrinking into
  my body at which point I will die
• Some beliefs may be both
• e.g. I believe I have been abducted by aliens
• This makes them ideal candidates for the
  Procession of the Damned. As Kuhn argued, these
  are rarely seen as valid topics to study.

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Fortean Approach

• Investigating the belief may not be possible
  scientifically.
• Denying the phenomena, slows the progress of
  science.
• However, the phenomenon is not only the belief,
  but the believer.
• Therefore, we can use science to examine the
  believer without damning the evidence, and still
  continue to make scientific progress.

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Koro

• The belief that genitals have been stolen (most
  commonly in East Africa)
• or that they are fatally shrinking into your
  body (most commonly in Asia)
• Outbreaks have been well documented in medical
  journals as well as news sources.
• PubMed returns 114 references for koro

Guangdong, China, 1985
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Psychiatry and Koro

• Western models of psychiatry have been applied to
  Koro and it has been variously described as
• Pathological castration fear (Kobler, 1948)
• Psychosexual disorder (Rack, 1982)
• Unitary psychiatric disorder modulated by culture
  (Berrios and Morley, 1984)
• Culture bound syndrome (Chowdhury, 1992)
• These are all attempts to view the phenomena from
  a certain theoretical position (false, fixed
  beliefs are signs of mental illness)

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Koro Bartholomew

• Robert Bartholomew (2000, 2001) has argued that
  Koro cannot be understood in terms of current
  psychiatric thinking.
• By starting from the phenomena, he has shown that
  Koro outbreaks share exactly the same structure
  as many other phenomena.
• Such as several Martian Invasion Panics (USA,
  1938 Chile, 1944 Ecuador, 1949)
• Phantom Air Raids (Canada, 1914).
• Phantom Snipers (UK, 1953)
• None of which have been indicative of mental
  illness.

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Alien Abduction Beliefs

• Up to 4 million Americans claim to have been
  abducted by aliens (Hopkins et al, 1992)
• Traditional refutations usually dispute the
  abduction experience, or attribute it to mental
  illness.
• Spanos et al (1993) abductees no more likely to
  be psychopathological, fantasy prone, suggestible
  or less intelligent than general population.
• Holden and French (2002) review, cited several
  neuropsychological mechanisms by which such
  beliefs may occur.

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Holden and French (2002)

• ASP victims often report high levels of
  hallucination (hypno-gogic/pompic), sensed
  presences, bodily pressure (Cheyne et al, 1999)
• Many of which are described as threatening or
  evil (Cheyne, 2001)
• Temporal lobe disturbance has been demonstrated
  to produce similar effects both from seizure
  (Persinger, 1990) and magnetic stimulation
  (Persinger and Healey, 2002).

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Clancy et al (2002)

• Memory distortion is abductees, tested by DRM
  paradigm.
• Abductees able to remember words from the
  original list as well as non-abductees
• but tended to show a higher rate of recall and
  recognition for words that were never actually
  read out.
• Hypnotic suggestibility, depressive and
  schizotypal features predictors, despite no overt
  mental illness.
• Supports continuum model of psychosis.

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Conclusion

• We must be careful of personal invalidation or
  damning evidence when examining psychological
  phenomena.
• Scientific study of anomalous beliefs and
  anomalous believers can enhance our understanding
  of the psychology of normal and pathological
  beliefs.