Impact of the seductive allure effect and trappings of science on perceptions of paranormal and pseudoscientific research

ABSTRACT

Despite concerns proponents of the paranormal misuse scientific concepts to justify their claims, few studies have assessed the influence of these misuses. Here we examined the role of the “seductive allure effect,” which often shows neuroscience-related content to exert greater influence than content from other scientific fields, by assessing whether it would impact how people respond to brief summaries of paranormal research. We also examined whether any trappings of science would elicit a similar effect. We found content depicting neuroscientific methods elicited greater perceptions of paranormal research as scientific and greater belief compared to content depicting traditional spiritualist practices. Summaries of psychological or pseudoscientific research procedures with the trappings of science, however, did not demonstrate any significant influence on paranormal belief or perceptions of paranormal research. These results show the seductive allure effect can impact how paranormal research is perceived and can influence belief.

KEYWORDS:

• Paranormal belief
• Seductive allure effect
• Seductive details
• Trappings of science

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Data used for analyses are available via the following link: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.24595038.v2.

Notes

¹ Upon implementing stricter quality control procedures and removing the 138 additional participants that failed the second attention check question regarding the specific type of researchers carrying out the work described in the article summary presented to them, we still found a significant effect demonstrating an increase in our Belief measure F(3, 1870.260) = 3.591, p = .014, η = 0.034, specifically when responses of those in the neuroscience condition and the traditional spiritualist condition were compared p = .024, d = .45. Notably though removing these participants did eliminate the increased perception of paranormal research as scientific F(3, 500.526) = 2.574, p = .054, η = 0.024.

Additional information

Funding

We have no funding sources to disclose.