Why People Believe Weird Things

"This is a more recent book. He takes a wider perspective on the paranormal, looking at UFOs and conspiracies. His argument is that we’re very good at finding patterns – that’s one of the reasons why science has been so successful – but sometimes that mechanism goes into overdrive. If you take something like finding a face in the environment, the brain would rather see a few faces that aren’t there than not see one that is. So you can look into the darkness of the bushes and see a face that isn’t there, and convince yourself that it’s a spirit or ghost. Exactly. Michael takes a more broad-brush perspective and argues that these things are hard-wired into our brain – it’s one of the consequences of having such a successful brain, if you like. His main thrust is that people believe weird things because they have evolved to find patterns. And that gives rise to a lot of paranormal experiences. So they’ll have a dream, they’ll witness some events and they’ll see parallels between the two, even if one is not causing or predicting the other. He mostly sticks to the topics we’ve spoken about – ESP, psychics and mediums – but he goes beyond the other books when he talks about conspiracy theories – where people link up ideas which aren’t necessarily connected to one another. We like to think, when it comes to conspiracy theories, that there are big causes. With Princess Diana’s death, a big worldwide event, it’s hard to think that the cause of it was something relatively trivial, like a car accident. People think there must have been more going on, that there must have been a whole conspiracy behind it. I think to some extent you can. But with religious belief it’s slightly different because there’s a need to believe. It’s rather nice to think there’s a God who is benevolent and looking after you. Also there are very large cultural forces. Up until reasonably recently it’s been the norm to believe – you’re told from a very young age that you should believe. With a conspiracy theory, there are obviously not many people who believe in them. So in that sense they are more psychologically interesting. When from a very young age people are told that something is true, it’s not quite so surprising that most end up believing it. Creationism is somewhat different because there you have evidence [for evolution]. So in that instance you have to explain away a huge amount of evidence against your position. One of the reasons it’s such a terrifying belief is that if you can do that – if you’ve got the mental gymnastics to explain away the evidence – you can probably convince yourself of absolutely anything. Then it just comes down to what you want to believe. And some of those beliefs are extremely bad for society. So it’s similar to ghosts and the paranormal. The evidence is not on your side, so how do you explain it away? We don’t like dis-confirming evidence so we either ignore it, not read about it, or just say people are lying or there’s a conspiracy. It comes down to that fundamental ability to believe something that’s not true."