Chris French at Sheff SitP

The Psychology of Anomalous Experiences

Monday June 14th 2010 | 7.30pm | at the Lescar, Sharrow Vale Road, S11 8ZF

The fantastic Chris French will be speaking for us at Sheff SitP on Monday the 14th June and we hope to see you all there!

Ever since records began, in every known society, a substantial proportion of the population has reported unusual experiences many of which we would today label as "paranormal". Opinion polls show that the majority of the general public accepts that paranormal phenomena do occur. Such widespread experience of and belief in the paranormal can only mean one of two things. Either the paranormal is real, in which case this should be accepted by the wider scientific community which currently rejects such claims. Or else belief in and experience of ostensibly paranormal phenomena can be fully explained in terms of psychological factors.


This presentation will provide an introduction to the sub-discipline of anomalistic psychology, which may be defined as the study of extraordinary phenomena of behaviour and experience, in an attempt to provide non-paranormal explanations in terms of known psychological and physical factors. This approach will be illustrated with examples relating to a range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.


Chris French is a Professor of Psychology and Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths. He has published over 100 articles and chapters covering a wide range of topics within psychology. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears on radio and television casting a sceptical eye over paranormal claims. He is the editor of The Skeptic.

Sowing Seeds

When a died in the wool skeptic is confronted with an obvious piece of woo there is always the temptation to stomp in with all guns blazing and reduce the offender to quivering shreds of illogicality. In the words of the XKCD cartoon, someone is wrong on the internet, and it is very tempting to spend your time and energy putting them right. I am guilty as charged in this respect, as anyone who has ever experienced one of my rants over on my blog will know.

The question is, does it actually do any good?

I had an experience not so long ago, where I got into an argument about the nature of magical thinking particularly as it related to homeopathy. I posted one jibe too many and I ended up being defriended by somebody that I had known for a while. I was actually quite keen to know his views on the matter but obviously it was a very touchy subject for him.

There is also the issue of confirmation bias.

When somebody is confronted with an opposing view to their own they will often ignore all arguments to the contrary and just look for evidence that supports their preconceptions. It is all too easy for anybody to publish something on the internet without any evidence to back it up, and somebody searching for something to confirm what they want to hear will pay more attention to it than a contradictory source.

My view is that our job as skeptics is not to act as evangelical guardians of the truth (whatever that might be) but to encourage others to ask questions, look for evidence and develop a skeptical worldview of their own.

I recently got talking to a pair of young Jehovah's Witnesses that came to the door one Saturday morning. As part of the conversation one of them said that an increase in devastating earthquakes in recent years was a sure sign that the end times were approaching. Rather than going for a slam dunk, I suggested that he looked at the US Geological survey for earthquake data from the year 1900 to the present and plot it on a graph for himself to see what the truth of the matter is.

I hope that in this case a bit of patient encouragement will have sowed a seed of skepticism that will be more productive in the long run than a blazing argument (however satisfying that might be at the time!).



(Chart data from Miguel Vera)

Tools for a Skeptical Life

What are we doing differently when being a skeptic than at other times in our lives? Are we inherently closed minded to new ideas or are we skeptics simply more cautious than other people?

What I wish to argue with this piece is that rather than acting as a belief system or philosophy skepticism is simply a process. As such the skills involved in the process can be learned and acquired by anybody who is minded to learn them. Whether we choose to apply those skills to all or only some areas of our life is a decision we have to make on a case by case basis.

Religion is a case in point. It may be argued that faith by its nature is a sub rational voluntary surrender to the unknowable. A scientist who is exactingly rational in their professional life may be be supported and sustained by their faith personally and may feel that using the tools of critical thinking in this area is entirely missing the point of the endeavor. Falling in love or selecting which football team to support may also be acts resistant to close analysis.

Rather than closing our minds to new ideas the gaining of critical thinking skills can be a wonderful journey towards new, interesting and original perspectives on our lives. Although we are all capable of making an assessment of information placed before us I would suggest that the quality of our assessment can be enhanced through the acquisition of new tools of analysis. The result of this may be that we are taken in less often by dubious claims, and less inclined to collude in fooling ourselves which as you will see we do all too often.

There are three main skill sets we need to examine

• Logical Fallacy
• Cognitive Bias
• The Scientific Method

Rather than attempting my own inexpert summaries of these I intend to point the reader to some excellent resources that have helped, and are still helping me to become a better critical thinker.

Logical Fallacy

This wonderful father and son team walk us through a myriad of different fallacies both in their podcast and free Skeptics Field Guide pdf
 
http://www.skepticsfieldguide.net/


Cognitive Bias

This is an excellent visual and written guide to pretty much the full range of cognitive biases our human nature makes us vulnerable to

http://www.scribd.com/documents/30548590/Cognitive-Biases-A-Visual-Study-Guide-by-the-Royal-Society-of-Account-Planning

A great hummable cognitive bias song that I use at the end of my talk on CAM Treatments for Tinnitus with the artists kind permission

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3RsbmjNLQkc&feature=player_embedded

The Scientific Method

Very clear description with good examples. Lots of Skeptical FAQ's to enjoy too! Looks very web 0.1 though...

http://skepticx.myweb.uga.edu/skepticism.html

The Skeptics Dictionary is an invaluable tool for any aspiring rationalist as this entry on the scientific method clearly demonstrates.

http://www.skepdic.com/science.html


Hopefully if you have followed some of these links you will see that the skeptical process is closer to an opening rather than a closing of our minds. This is not to the exclusion of excitement and wonder in our existence, quite the reverse. Our universe is sufficiently complex to allow us to be continually amazed whether we choose to engage our critical thinking skills or not. As an example of how even the most rational among us can be selective in our engagement with critical thinking I offer you the illustrious Crispian Jago Esquire...

http://crispian-jago.blogspot.com/2010/05/science-reason-critical-thinking-and.html

Go veggie, you know it makes sense...

Skeptics in The Pub

Just a quick post to let you all know that Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub on Monday May 10th will now be held at the University Arms, 197 Brook Hill. This is a change in venue from the one previously advertised.

We've got a great speaker, the fantastic Simon Perry who has been a great force in skeptical activism, and will be entertaining us with stories of his adventures.

He was also a great help when we were setting up Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub and continues to help SitPs get started.

We hope to see you there.

Not So Happy Meal

The Metro has this brief news story about a young mother who found an unsmoked cigarette in the box of a happy meal she bought for her one year old son.

According to the woman, Nicky Holloway, the girl who served her "just laughed" and she said she felt she wasn't being taken seriously. She was offered a refund or a new meal but declined.

A spokesman for McDonald's (we're not told who but presumably someone from the PR department) apologised and offered a gift and some free meals for the family. Miss Holloway declined this offer also.

Trading Standards offered to investigate but she declined this offer also.

A question I have, bearing in mind Miss Holloway's refusal to accept the offers above, is what exactly does she want?

The Metro writes

But the deal was rejected by Ms Holloway, who also turned down an offer by trading standards officers to investigate the incident. She wants ‘more to be done about it’ and plans to sue McDonald’s.

Ah. Is it perhaps that she wants a big lump of money? Maybe not, but why else is she suing? What does 'more to be done about it' mean? Firing the person responsible? Banning anyone who smokes from ever working at McDonald's? I don't know but a bigger question to me is, is her outrage appropriate?

Of course the workers at McDonald's should not have had cigarettes on them whilst working and handling food and of course the (according to Miss Holloway) attitude of the girl was unacceptable and of course she should have complained.

But that is about as far as it should have gone.

She was offered a refund or a new meal - that should have been enough, but I can understand that she refused this first offer. She should have accepted the second offer or let Trading Standards investigate. Or both.

Let's face it, the staff at any particular McDonald's probably have an average age of 16 so the attitude of the staff can be expected to be that of a teenager. Not acceptable, but not unexpected either.

And as for the cigarette, well, again it is unacceptable for it to be in the Happy Meal box but hardly warrants court action. I'm no lawyer but I was under the impression that some kind of loss or damage has to be suffered to successfully sue someone. Miss Holloway has suffered no such loss. McDonald's offers were reasonable given the scope of the incident.

She saw the cigarette before any harm was done. She was watching what her son was eating. In fact, she should be watching what her one year old son is eating. He's one. The cigarette was not in the food it was in the box. So what's the deal with the suing?

The questions I would like to put to you is, Do we expect too much when we suffer an injustice? And do we offer too little ourselves when we perform an injustice on other people?

Big TED

This has been linked to from a number of places, but for those of you who may not have seen it yet here's James Randi's TED talk from 2007.

Some TED talk subjects are cutting edge, some possibly flights of fancy, but all are interesting. They cover a huge range of topics so if you haven't yet seen any TED talks then do so. Some notable talks include Michael Specter, Michael Shermer, Jamie Oliver, Bill Gates, Jane McGonigal, personal favourites John Lloyd, Benjamin Zander and the bizarrely funny Charles Fleischer.

We are now live, people

So here it is. We're now "live" with the South Yorkshire Skeptical Society site.

We also run Sheffield Skeptics in the Pub (SSitP). You can see our list of speakers here or visit the Skeptics in the Pub site where you can sign up to our events email. While you're at it you can also join our Facebook group for SSitP and also follow us on Twitter.

We hope you'll check in here now and then as we blog on various subjects. And if you see anything of interest, particularly in the South Yorkshire area, please let us know. You can contact us here.