Speaking of Psychology - Ghosts, Ouija boards and ESP: psychology and the paranormal, with Chris French, PhD

Episode Date: October 27, 2021

Just in time for Halloween, we talk about the psychology of strange stuff – including ghostly visitations, alien abductions, ESP, and more – with Chris French, PhD, head of the anomalistic psychology unit at Goldsmiths, University of London. Dr. French discusses how psychological explanations such as sleep paralysis and inattentional blindness could underlie many people’s paranormal experiences, and the role of skepticism and science in testing and evaluating paranormal claims.   Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

It's almost Halloween. Time for kids of all ages to dress up as ghosts and monsters, watch scary movies and indulge in all things spooky and supernatural. The costumes and treats are just for fun, but surveys suggest that many people take ghosts quite seriously. One 2019 poll found that 20% of Americans believe that ghosts definitely exist, and another 25% say they probably exist. Many others believe in extrasensory perception, demons, space alien abysmal. reduction, near-death experiences, and all sorts of unearthly things. Where do these beliefs come from? What is behind their enduring appeal?

And what explanations, psychological rather than supernatural, might underlie paranormal experiences? What does the science tell us? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. Chris French, an emeritus professor of psychology and head of the anomalistic psychology research unit at Goldsmith's University of London. He studies the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences, looking for psychological

explanations for phenomena, including near-death experiences, ESP, and ghostly visitations, for example. He's written more than 150 journal articles and book chapters and several scholarly books. He also brings his research to the public by writing regular columns for the UK publications Skeptic and The Guardian, and he makes frequent appearances on TV, radio, and podcasts to offer a skeptic's perspective on paranormal experiences. Thank you for joining us, Dr. French. It's my pleasure. So I just mentioned that you're the head of the anomalistic psychology research unit at the University of London. What is anomalistic psychology? Yeah, I thought that might be the first question.

Anomalistic psychology is primarily focused upon trying to come up with and where possible put to the test, non-paranormal explanations, usually psychological explanations, for ostensibly paranormal experiences. So all the kinds of things you just mentioned there, people who think they've been abducted by aliens, people who think they've seen ghosts or that they have psychic powers and so on. our kind of working hypothesis, and I have to emphasize this is, this is all it is, but it's a working hypothesis, let's assume paranormal forces don't exist. Can we explain those claims in other terms? I would self-identify as a skeptic, certainly, but for me, an important part of skepticism is to always be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. New evidence might come along that makes you revise your opinion. For the time being, I would have to say, I don't, I don't believe that paranormal forces exist.

So what are some of the psychological or cognitive factors that drive belief in the supernatural? People are very wedded to these beliefs. I think there's a whole host of different kinds of cognitive biases and weird experiences that people genuinely do have. I mean, I retired about a year ago, but before that, I used to teach a kind of 20-hour course on this stuff. So we'll try and boil it down into around 40 minutes or so. But basically, people do have genuinely weird experiences. Just to give one example, one of the ones that we're

most interested in is a phenomenon called sleep paralysis, which is fairly common in its most basic form. But for a few people, they get very, very vivid hallucinations while they're having this experience as they lie there in their bed. And if you already, believe in ghosts or demons and so on, it's not surprising that they will sometimes opt for that as an explanation. So that's just one example. There's a whole range of cognitive biases that are also relevant to this topic. Again, just to give you a couple of examples, the very first systematic investigation of the unreliability of eyewitness testimony was actually carried out in the context of a fake seance back in the Victorian era. And so, you know, again, a lot of paranormal

claims are based on anecdotal evidence, and we've always got that problem of, well, how reliable is the account? Even if the person's being honest, they may be mistaken. And then when it comes to paranormal belief, again, there are a whole host of cognitive biases, problems that we have with probabilistic reasoning, for example. The list goes on and on, and I'm sure we can touch on some of them during our talk. I thought it was particularly interesting that you studied sleep paralysis. I mean, that's something that I experienced a great deal

when I was a college student, and I think you've found that that's true among college students. Just to help people better understand, I mean, it's almost like you're conscious, but you're asleep. Can you explain a little more about what's happening? It is this kind of weird hybrid state

between normal waking consciousness and dream consciousness. And as you say, students are particularly prone to it, interestingly. In terms of what I would call kind of basic sleep paralysis, which is really when you're half awake, half asleep, and you realise you can't move, it's a period of temporary paralysis.

And you just last a few seconds and you snap out of it and you maybe think that was a bit weird, but it doesn't really go any further than that. Interestingly, estimates vary hugely from one study to another across different countries, from literally a fraction of a percentage point up to 65, 70%. So clearly there's something weird going on there. And it's really about obviously how you ask the question, how you define it,

so how you present it to people. But the best estimate we have taking all those surveys into account, this is from an American friend of mine, Brian Sharpless, about 8% of the population will experience sleep paralysis, at least once in their life. But that's the general population. There are two groups that stand out in terms of having rates of more like 30%, and that is students and psychiatric patients, which is kind of quite interesting. It does make sense because if you have the underlying susceptibility, then you're much more likely to have an episode if your sleep pattern is disrupted. And two groups who have notoriously irregular sleep patterns would be students and psychiatric patients. Now, as I say, in its most basic form, it's no big deal. But for a smaller percentage of people, you can get a host of associated symptoms. You can get a sense of presence, feeling that there's

something evil in the room with you. Even if you can't see it or hear it, you just know it's there. But sometimes people do actually hallucinate. So they might hear voices or footsteps or mechanical sounds. They might see lights moving around the room, or dark shadows, or even demons. and all witches, hags, all sorts of stuff. And also people often report a sense of pressure on the chest, difficulty breathing. Now, I can imagine if you get all this, it's not too surprising that people also report intense fear. But it's a kind of fear that's almost over and above the kind of fear that even people

who in real life have been in life-threatening situations feel. They say, this is just orders of magnitude greater. And it's possible that it's the overactivation of the amygdala that's maybe causing that. So it's an integral part of the whole experience. But it's absolutely fascinating. I get sent lots of first-hand accounts. And again, I'm a skeptic. Usually the person who's sending me the account is a skeptic because they've figured out for themselves it's sleep paralysis, this thing that we know about.

But the stories can still send a shiver down your spine. I don't think my episodes were ever that entertaining. Another area that you've studied is the idea motor effect, the fact that people can make movements that they're not consciously aware of. Oh, yes. And it's supposedly behind things like dousing for water or Ouija boards. And I found this especially interesting because when I was a kid, I was in junior high school. I had a friend. And she and I became obsessed with this Ouija board that I had and we would use it together.

And it would spell out all kinds of words and it would send us on expeditions around the neighborhood. And it had just a whole series of personalities and rituals that we were supposed to go through. Now, I was not pushing that little table. And I still know where this woman is, and she swears to this day that she wasn't pushing the little table. So how does your work explain what may have been going on? Were we not in touch with, they called it Ouija Control? I mean, the board would tell me that there was a place called Ouija Control. That's a new one on me.

I like that idea. No, I think we can be pretty sure that, in fact, between you, you were pushing the little Clive Shed, but you weren't consciously aware of it. And I totally know where you're coming from because as an undergraduate student, in my final year at Manchester University, I would go out on the Friday night and go to the pub and have a few drinks. I lived in a house with five other guys, and it was a regular thing that we'd do when we got back in. to entertain ourselves would play around with the Ouija board. And it does feel very much like, I'm not pushing this.

I'm not pushing this. It's interesting, again, one of the kind of nicest illustrations of the fact that this is what we call the idiotic motor effect where basically non-conscious muscular movements, that again, if we look back in the history of this, at the time of the heyday of seances back in the Victorian era, another craze that caught on, initially from America and then came over to Europe,

was what's called table turning or table tilting. And this was, again, supposed to be a way of contacting the spirits where you take a small wooden table, the sitters would put their hands on the table top and they'd ask questions. And the table, on a good session,

the table would be kind of shudder in response to the questions. On a very good session, It could even end up, it appeared that people were trying to chase the table around the room, trying to keep their hands in contact with it. All very, very exciting stuff. And this caught the attention of Sir Michael Faraday. And what I really like about this is that rather than just dismissing it, he thought, that's interesting, let's have a look at it.

So there are two possibilities here. One is that some external force, possibly a spirit, is moving the table, or in the case of the Ouija board, the planchette or the wine glass. or people are pushing the table without realizing it. And Faraday devised a number of ingenious experiments. I'll just mention one of them. Instead of having people put their hands directly on the tabletop, he had layers of waxed paper on the tabletop,

and they put their hands on top of the layers of wax paper. Now, if you think about it, if the table moves to the right, if the table's moved on its own, the waxed papers, the hands will tend to drag behind a little bit, and the waxed papers would spread out to the left. If the hands are pushing the table, then the table will drag behind the hands a little bit, and the wax papers, the wax sheets would be pushed to the right. Well, you can guess what he actually found.

So even those people, these people were convinced they were not pushing the table around. Actually, they were. And again, yeah, we know from a number of different studies that that is almost certainly what's going on in these situations. What role does inattentional blindness play in having us kind of feel that there are supernatural things occurring around us? I think it's just one example of a situation where because we're not aware of the limitations of our cognitive system, we make various assumptions about how much information we take in, how accurate our memory is, etc., etc. So inattentional blindness refers to a situation where there might be a stimulus that you're actually looking directly at, but you don't see it, you don't perceive it. And the classic example of this is the famous invisible gorilla study, of course.

Right. Me and my wife, who's also a psychologist, we kind of looked at this because she was doing lots of research into the topic of inattentional blindness. She contacted me one day to say, do you have a copy? of a scale that we could use to measure absorption. Absorption is the tendency that people have to become completely engrossed in what they're doing and to completely cut off the kind of outside world. So you know the kind of people who, when they read a book or watch a film, just get completely engrossed in it, and hence absorption. I did have such a scale. And my wife was basically interested in the issue of, well, you'd expect people who scored

highly on this measure to be maybe more susceptible to unintentional blindness. They might might not note, if they were in the gorilla study, for example, they might be the ones that because they were concentrating on the primary task to count the number of times the ball was thrown, they wouldn't see the gorilla. Which sounded sensible. Now, I knew that absorption correlates with paranormal belief and experience. So I thought, well, let's be interesting to look at all of this in one study. So that's what we did. We didn't use the guerrilla task. We used something that was conceptually similar. My wife programmed the computers

so that you saw a display of white letters and black letters moving around the screen. The letters were kind of bounced off the edge of the screen as they moved around, and halfway through a big red cross moved slowly across the background. That was our gorilla. And the task was set up,

so about half the people at the end of the task, if you said, did you notice anything unusual? or even more directly, did you see a red cross, about half the people who'd report they had seen it and half hadn't. What we found, as we predicted, was that the people who scored, the ones who didn't see the red cross, the inattentionally blind participants,

scored higher overall on the absorption scale, also scored higher on paranormal belief and experience. And, you know, we replicated this effect in a second study, so it does seem to be a real effect. Now, bringing that back to kind of more real-life situations where people might think they've encountered a ghost. And again, it's maybe worth pointing out here that when people talk about ghostly encounters, I think that summons up an image of a translucent figure floating and coming through the wall and so on. But typically it's not that.

It's more likely to be that people report that objects have been moved and they didn't know how they were moved. Or maybe, like we were talking about before, a sense of presence. or it's much more kind of subtle effects rather than a full apparitional experience. So someone who, for example, insists that they've had a paranormal experience because this is just a hypothetical example, you know, they were in a room and an object moved from one place to another and there was nobody else in the room, then, well, yeah, maybe you know, somebody else was in the room and they moved the object. You just didn't see them.

Oh, but I'm sure I would have done. I would have done. You know, well, would you? People don't see a gorilla. And there have been so many variations on that basic study that we know that people don't often see things that they are sure they would see. So, again, just providing a mundane explanation for an ostensibly mysterious event. And for those few listeners who don't know the Invisible Gorilla study, can you just summarize that? Yes, certainly, yeah. This was a classic study in 1999 by Simons and Shabris.

What they did was to show people a short video clip of two groups of people standing there, some in white shirts, some in black shirts, and each group were throwing a ball back in two to each other. And the task was to count the number of times that the people in the white shirts through the ball to each other ignore the people in the black shirts. And halfway through the video, somebody walks into the middle of the group in a gorilla suit, stands there beating their chest and then walks off. Now you think intuitively this is something that would be bound to capture your attention, even though it's not what you'd been asked to do, that you would notice it. About half the people who do that test don't see the gorilla. And it's a lovely example.

I mean, again, they were shocked by the results themselves. They didn't expect that to get such a strong effect, but it's something that has been replicated to the nth degree. It's definitely real. He's got real implications, obviously, in real life. There's a lot of fatal accidents, of course, by people not seeing something that was right there. They were pointing their eyes at it. They just didn't register it. So it's generated a lot of further research.

We cover a broad range of psychology topics in this podcast, and I'm struck by the common themes that have come up in recent episodes. We've done episodes on conspiracy theories, superstitions, science denial, memory errors, and many similar issues that seem to emerge in terms of how our biases and other cognitive glitches can lead us astray. So do you see a connection between anomalistic psychology and research on these other topics like science denial and conspiracies? Oh, very much so, yeah. I mean, conspiracy theories, I've say in recent years, our research in terms of the areas that we've been actively researching, have been three main ones. One has been sleeper.

analysis. One has been false memories and the third has been belief in conspiracies. And there's a kind of, you know, they all kind of are linked to each other quite strongly. It's really, I mean, I'm fascinated by the whole topic of weird beliefs and where do they come from. There are many conspiracy theories that do have an explicitly paranormal angle to them. Obviously, they don't all have. But so many kind of links. between the kind of factors which influence whether or not people believe in conspiracies, whether or not people believe in the paranormal, the supernatural, alternative medicine. The list goes on.

I'm an atheist, so I would even put religious beliefs into that category. These are all what I would classify as examples of magical thinking. And interestingly, they all tend to increase, our tendencies towards magical thinking, tend to increase at times of stress and uncertainty, and that seems to go across the board for all of them. But there are a lot of other parallels as well, which is fascinating. Now, you've done research to directly test whether paranormal claims might be for real. Can you talk about some of these studies?

So how do you test, for example, whether ESP exists? With respect to testing ESP, there are a number of established ways of doing it, One technique which I've never actually used personally, but one which is still something of a challenge for skeptics to explain away. I'm not convinced overall, otherwise I wouldn't be a skeptic. But the so-called Gansfeldt technique, this is based on the idea that if there is such a thing as ESP, then it's maybe a very weak signal, which is usually kind of drowned out by all the other processing that's going on in our brains at the time. Now, if there's anything in that idea, the things to do would be to try and dampen down the background activity so that the ESP signal, the telepathy signal, can come through. So what people do is you get a sender and a receiver, two people taking part in the study.

The sender relaxes on a comfortable couch, wears headphones over which you play white noise. they have half ping pong balls over their eyes with cotton wool around them and maybe a red light bulb. So if they open their eyes, all they see is red. Basically, you're trying to kind of, it's like perceptual deprivation. And it's a very comfortable position to be in. And people typically report that when they're in that situation, they enter a very relaxed state. And their mind fills with imagery, you know, which is quite a common thing. You mean you're just lying there on your own couch.

And the hope is that this is a kind of state that would be conducive to being able to receive these weak ESP signals. So at prearranged times, you have somebody in a distant location who randomly selects, it used to be kind of pictures that people would look at, often kind of art, postcards, that kind of thing. These days it tends to be video clips. You randomly select a set of typically four, let's say, video clips. and then randomly select one clip from within those, and that person, the sender, watches the video, and tries to telepathically transmit the information back to the receiver.

There are variations on a theme, but essentially what would often happen is that the experimenter who is with the receiver would note down, they'd record everything that said, the experimenter who must not know what the target is themselves in case they give away any unconscious cues. Maybe at the end of the session, they'd go over it and say, you know, you said something about triangular shapes,

could you just describe that a little bit more clearly, just to get all clarified and all recorded. But the clincher is when either the receiver or independent judges say what is the best match from the four available video clips to the imagery that the person was describing. Now, you would expect by chance people to get a hit rate of 25%, but it was claimed that people were getting hit rates of more like 33%. So not a massive effect, but statistically significant. That's one example.

Now, there are issues, which again, we would probably need another three podcasts to talk about, which mean that, yeah, although I think the evidence there is quite interesting and worth taking seriously, which a lot of skeptics don't, and I think they should. I think they're kind of missing a trick there. There are studies like that. There are techniques like that where you can statistically analyze the results, where you can try your best to be as methodologically sound as you can, and not all of those results can be just dismissed by the skeptics.

That leads me to the idea of how your thinking has evolved over time, right? I mean, you were a believer in parapsychology when you were quite young, and then you changed your thinking. At one point, you thought parapsychology was a pseudoscience, but now you don't think that. What went through your, I mean, how did you reach this point? For me, kind of discovering the joys of skepticism, it was a very exciting time in my life, I have to say.

I'd always had an interest in these kind of things, not an overwhelming passion, but I'd always had an interest in kind of ghost stories and UFOs and just weird stuff generally. I like a lot of teenagers. And pretty much everything I'd read was very uncritical. It was very kind of pro-paranormal. And so why should I question it?

It was only when I was doing my PhD at Leicester University in a completely different area, nothing to do with anomalistic psychology. Someone recommended a book to me. It was by James Alcock. It was called Parasicology, Science or Magic. And that book kind of basically changed my life. life. You know, it opened up the doors. It was written by a social psychologist who was very informed on parapsychology, but was a skeptic. And he was presenting basically non-paranormal

accounts for a range of ostensibly paranormal experiences. And I found it all very, very kind of convincing and really interesting. And that's when I first kind of became a skeptic, so to speak. And I obviously then kind of realized that there were skeptical books out there. There were people like James Randi and Reheimen and all these other great people doing really interesting stuff. I shouldn't blame them for one aspect of this was that I initially had the impression that parapsychology was a pseudoscience, kind of no better than astrology in that respect, and various other kind of attitudes that all parapsychologists, were kind of incompetent. They didn't know how to design experiments or analyze data or any of these

things. And, you know, various other kind of attitudes which I would now kind of say were, you know, too negative, too extreme. And it was only kind of over the years as I then gradually got to actually meet a number of real-life parapsychologists. I realized that, you know, this wasn't actually true. Again, one person that I would kind of particularly know here would be the late Professor Robert Morris, Bob Morris, up at Edinburgh, the Kursler Chair in Parasikosite. psychology, and his protege who is now the current Kirstler chair, Caroline Watt, who's a very good friend of mine, two people who were probably, certainly Bob, and maybe less so, Caroline, but Bob was definitely more of a believer than a skeptic, but he was very open to listen to what

skeptics had to say. I really like that kind of open-mindedness. And also, he had kind of, there were two strands to the work that was looking to see whether maybe you, be things like telepathy, precognition, etc., etc., really did exist. That was one strand, and that's probably what the major emphasis of that unit was about. But also a second strand, looking at why people might sometimes think they've had a paranormal experience when, in fact, they hadn't. I mean, his first PhD student was my good friend, Richard Wiseman, who, you know, is one of the kind of leading skeptics in terms of all this stuff as well.

And so, as I say, for many years, in my lectures, I would talk about pseudoscience generally, but when I talked about parapsychology, it was as pseudoscience, as I then saw it. And then I came across a paper where somebody had put this to the test empirically by looking at the typical kind of criticisms in terms of the criteria for pseudoscience that skeptics direct to parapsychology. and it's basically said, well, you know, are they true? By looking at three journals from kind of mainstream science, including the British Journal of Psychology, three journals from fringe sciences, including the Journal of Parasicology, and really on that basis, it didn't look like these were fair criticisms, the vast majority of them.

And so on that basis, and ultimately, science is a method rather than a body of established facts. And you can look at any issue either scientifically or non-scientifically, but if you're looking at an issue scientifically, using methodological controls and statistical analysis and so on and so forth, why would you not say that's a science? And so, again, one final argument, people like myself, Richard Wiseman, James Randy, a whole host of other skeptics have sometimes directly tested paranormal claims, in which case we're doing parapsychology, and I would hope We're doing it scientifically. So parapsychology, at its best, I think, has to be described as a science.

This is not a popular view among skeptics, I hasten to it. Our skeptics would disagree, but that's my position now. But essentially, I mean, if you design a study scientifically, you know, you could potentially potentially study anything, I mean, as long as you're following the prescribed method. But, you know, that raises another question in my mind. mind, which is that there have been studies that have been published in esteemed journals, peer-reviewed journals about parapsychology, and some of them have indicated an existence, and then some of them have been retracted. So, you know, why is that happening? Is that,

is that because we're not skeptical enough? I think it's, I mean, it is one of those, obviously, hugely controversial areas, and people, you know, emotions are high on both sides. I mean, one of the most recent episodes would be kind of Darrell Bem's controversial paper on precognition. And that was published in, I think it was 2011. Again, without going into all the details, Bem, who has obviously been around for many, many decades, very respected figure within psychology, but also unusually for a psychologist,

known to be very sympathetic towards parapsychology and paranormal claims. And he had already done this before in, With respect to the Gansfeld studies, rather than publishing in Parasicology journals, where the kind of mainstream science media wouldn't even bother to read the stuff, he'd made a point of trying to publish in really the top journals in psychology and succeeded on at least two occasions. And it's kind of interesting when somebody does that, because it raises all kinds of issues.

just to kind of summarize, he published in the more recent study, the studies of precognition. There were nine experiments, over 1,000 participants in total. And basically, he was arguing that he had found pretty compelling evidence for the reality of people being able to sense future events before they happen pre-cognition. One of the very good things that he did, this paper I hasten to add, had been through, I think it was half a dozen different referees. It had done to the standard refereeing process. And at the end of the day,

the editor had felt they had no choice other than to publish, even though he probably knew that he was going to be a very controversial paper. One of the good things about what Ben did was to say he wanted other people to try and replicate the effects, and he would make his software available. We decided to chase up on that. we being in this case Richard Wiseman and Stuart Ritchie. I must admit we had a slightly ulterior motive here.

We didn't really expect to replicate the effects, but we did think this might be a relatively easy way to get a paper in a top journal. That was our hope. But anyway, it still took a lot of work. We each did an independent replication of Bem's experiment number nine. I can go with the details of what the experiment involved do you like, but just for the time being, I'll talk about the fact we didn't get the same

results as Bem. We weren't surprised. We wrote it up. We sent it into the journal of personality and social psychology, and it was rejected without being sent out for peer review. And that's what really annoyed us, because this paper, Ben's paper had had huge coverage right around the world. So it's important whether these effects are real or not, and we had failed to replicate. But the attitude was, no, no, no, we don't publish replications. We were a bit cross about that, but we tried two other high-impact journals and got the same treatment. And again, we weren't saying, you know, you must publish this. We were saying, send it out for peer review. The British Journal of Psychology did send it out for peer review.

One referee really loved the paper. The other one had concerns. It wasn't too keen. And we could recognized from what the concerns that Rexrest were, we thought, we think we know who this referee is. We think it's a certain Darrell Bem. We asked him and he confirmed it was him. So clearly it's a conflict of interest there. How is that even possible that the editor would use him as a referee? That's what happened. So again, we said, well, you know, sent out to a third reviewer. Nope. Long story short, we published it in plus one. which, as you'll know, is an open access journal, which turned out to be a good move

because at one point we were getting like a thousand views a day, which is amazing for a scientific paper. And it also fed into the ongoing discussions and debate about the replication crisis in psychology. Because this was a situation where I say the paper had gone through, the normal process of being reviewed and so on and so forth, and it had been published. Now, some people took the application,

of, well, it can't possibly, the results can't possibly be true, therefore, how could this happen? There's something wrong with the whole process, the whole kind of scientific publication. Others were kind of more open-minded about whether possibly the results might be true or not. I think what it did, it made me think long and hard about the ways in which spurious results may end up being published and the kind of pressures that are on. And now, you know, the debate has kind of advanced to the extent that we all recognize that what we might call questionable research practice is not out and out fraud, much more subtle than that, but just kind of giving yourself the benefit of the doubt, knowing that you've got to get an effect that's just below that 0.05 level

of significance, otherwise the editors won't look at it. Then it kind of really highlighted how those issues can basically distort what ends up being published. And maybe particularly in what we would think of as the top journals, because they have a bias towards not only saying, well, we don't publish replications because they're not interesting enough, we don't publish negative findings. And, you know, so all the negative findings and all the kind of just boring old replications just don't see, ever see the light of day. Or usually in this case, as I say, we actually managed to kind of get it published.

Although that may be changing. I mean, I think there's more of a tendency to... Oh, I think it definitely is, and I think it's a healthy thing. I think I'm kind of... People talk about the kind of crisis in psychology. I just see it as a kind of healthy period of self-criticism. I must admit, I feel slightly guilty about it, because I can look back now and see papers that I have published in the past

and think that probably wasn't a real effect. You know, things that I published and then tried to replicate myself and failed. And, you know, if you even try to send off a paper that's about these failed replications, even though it's your own work, you know, you're trying to say, no, I don't think that was real, after all, you can't get it published. Whereas now, I think, as you say, things do seem to be in the direction where that's going to be easier to do. So, yeah, so it's a bit, it's been a good outcome there, I think. So I know you do a lot of writing for the general public about the work that you do.

And what is one lesson that you'd want people to take away from your research? I mean, I think what I just heard was part of it that science is evolving and that people should understand that we all need to keep an open mind. But, I mean, what would you say to just our average listener about what they should be thinking, say, about the paranormal, whether they believe in ghosts or think they've been inducted by aliens? What would your best advice be? I suppose, if maybe allow me kind of two or three, a little nuggets here rather than just one. I mean, one thing would be that I think it's best to base your beliefs about the way the universe operates on kind of solid empirical evidence, preferably from well-controlled studies, rather than personal experience. Now, for most people, personal experience is the gold standard. Even still in the legal system, eyewitness testimony is given far more credence than it should be, given what we know about the way memory works.

So, you know, I think that would be one piece of advice that I think I'd like to pass on. And I think the other thing is kind of as you've hinted out there, that science is not. not a kind of an established body of facts. It's something that evolves. And scientists will sometimes change their minds on issues. And that's a good thing. You know, it's, it's, it's a pity we don't have kind of more politicians who are able to do that. But because of the way political systems work, it's political suicide to change your mind on an issue. I mean, that's how we've ended up with Brexit and maybe how you ended up with Trump. But let's not go.

But, you know, I mean, there's, I actually respect people greatly who kind of stand up and say, actually, I've realized I was wrong about that. I think it's a good thing to do. Whereas, you know, there is still this tendency for people to see that as being kind of wishy-washy and you can't make your mind up. I think that's a mistake. Well, this has been a fascinating exchange. I really appreciate you joining us today, Dr. French.

Thank you. I've enjoyed it. Thank you very much. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www. www.spereg.org or on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, or wherever you get your favorite podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingof psychology at APA.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lee Winerman.

Our sound editor is Chris Condiion. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.