How a Thinking Error Leads Some People to See Spirits

Mistaking one type of thing for another can lead to erroneous—and sometimes paranormal—beliefs.

Reviewed by Devon Frye

Key points

• Some people are more prone to mistaking one category of "thing" or its properties for other types.
• This tendency has been linked to a greater likelihood for believing in the paranormal.
• The pattern could help explain why paranormal belief is so common despite a lack of hard evidence.

Belief in the paranormal continues to enjoy a central place in popular culture. Social scientists classify something as "paranormal" when it runs counter to both a scientific understanding of the world and mainstream religious doctrine (Bader et al., 2010). It can include a wide range of entities, events, or abilities like psychic abilities, fairies, or the alleged influence of the stars on human affairs.

Polls frequently find that belief in paranormal phenomena is not at all unusual. For example, one poll found that 36 percent of Americans reported that they believe in ghosts while over a fifth believed in witchcraft or magic spells (Ipsos, 2021).

This widespread belief is all the more interesting considering there is no hard evidence to support the existence of anything paranormal (see Markovsky, 2023 for a review). Instead, research finds that anomalous claims are usually based on very non-paranormal things like subjective feelings, quirky experiences, technical glitches in recording devices, or misperceptions (Radford, 2010). So why do some people interpret this sort of phenomenon as paranormal while others do not?

Perception and Categorization

Many researchers have been interested in precisely this question. One possible explanation has to do with how different people tend to perceive and categorize things.

From a very early age, children acquire "core knowledge" about the world around them (Wellman and Gelman, 1998). Through experience, they learn that there are different classes or categories of things that have different properties and how to distinguish between them.

For instance, there are physical things that are different from mental things and inanimate things that are different from animate. A thought or feeling does not have shape or size, but physical objects do. Similarly, inanimate things don’t move of their own volition and don’t make decisions, but animate ones do.

Since this is a fundamental aspect of developmental psychology, it has been proposed that there could be a link between one’s mastery of core knowledge and their tendency to believe in things—like the paranormal—that run counter to the understanding of the world that this formative knowledge should provide. In particular, the extent to which a given person is prone to "ontological confusion" could explain many such beliefs (Lindeman and Aarnio, 2007).

In other words, their tendency to mistake one category of thing or its properties for another type. This results in a lack of conceptual clarity where, for example, they might tend to mistakenly attribute living characteristics to inanimate objects or assign physical properties to mental things.

This misperception fits well with many of the experiences paranormal believers interpret as supernatural. For example, many accounts of encounters with seemingly otherworldly forces mistake internal feelings as something caused by an external force (Debies-Carl, 2023). A walk in a cemetery at night can be understandably scary, but to mistake that fear as something psychically caused by an entity lurking in that environment is something else entirely. Seeing some sort of agency in bad luck or perceiving consciousness in "cursed" objects conceivably also represent examples of ontological confusion.

Several studies over the years have attempted to examine this question. Generally, they find support for the connection between ontological confusion and paranormal beliefs (e.g. Betsch et al., 2020; Williams et al., 2024). However, the results also tend to vary from one study to the next.

Fortunately, a new paper published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences provides new insight into this topic (Gallyamova et al., 2024). Rather than simply collecting new data from a new sample of participants to examine the question, the authors conducted a meta-analysis of existing research on the subject. This is a formalized method of inquiry that statistically combines the results of previous research on a specific research question. In doing so, it can locate any deeper patterns that exist between all of this body of work despite the differences between them.

The synthesis included a total of 25 previous studies, published between 2010 and 2024, that examined the relationship between ontological confusion and belief in the paranormal. In total, these studies included data on 16,129 participants from 11 different countries. This provides a reasonable sample to work with, not only in terms of the total number of people involved, but also due to its cross-cultural representativeness.

The authors employed statistical methods to check for publication bias that could affect their results—an important concern with any meta-analysis—but they found no evidence of significant bias. This increases confidence in the findings.

What the Latest Study Found

The results indicated that there was considerable diversity in these studies. Specific results varied across them, which can make finding a clear pattern difficult. However, the overall outcome was a consistent pattern: People who express more ontological confusion are more likely to also express belief in the paranormal.

The fact that the study included a range of nations helps to determine whether any findings were caused by cultural differences or something more fundamental about the human psyche. In this case, despite differences across studies in different countries, the overall pattern persisted.

This report’s findings are interesting in and of themselves, but they also highlight potential directions for future research. The first has to do with the fact that there was variation in the strength of the relationship between ontological confusion and paranormal belief that could not be accounted for by looking at the variables the authors had access to. From this, it is clear that there are other important factors that play a role but that still need to be identified.

Second, the results also highlight the need for further cross-cultural research. This is especially true for work that can carefully ensure the validity of measures across different nations and languages.

While questions remain, the findings illustrate a fascinating link between cognition and the things we are willing to believe. They also seem to indicate that culture or some other social factors could modify this relationship, given the variance in the study. Consequently, further inquiry could lead to new insights into how to improve our critical thinking and, in the process, protect ourselves against beliefs formed on shaky foundations.