ANT210H5 Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Apophenia, Pseudoscience, Michael Shermer
Document Summary
As soon as you are told what you should hear you are primed to hear whats not really there. Finding patterns in random or meaningless data. Ex. crazy man in video who keeps seeing phallic images. Face in hills near medicine hat alberta looks like first nations face. Because of the human brains necessity to recognize faces, we see faces in places where they are not. Targeted (more women believe in esp, mostly men attracted to. Ufos, holocaust revisionism for example) no correlation with belief process. Content dependent (correlated with mind over body and negatively correlates with astrology and haunted houses) a 2003 study documented that science students are no more or less likely to believe in the paranormal. English professors more likely to believe in ghosts etc. Internal versus external locus of control (do circumstances control us, or do we make things happen?)
