Marieta Pehlivanova & Bruce Greyson

Division of Perceptual Studies, Department of Psychiatry and Neurobehavioral Sciences, University of Virginia School of Medicine, Charlottesville, VA, USA

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Introduction: Individual differences in psi belief are associated with factors related to demographics, personality, cognition, and culture. According to leading hypotheses, high belief in psi can be explained by deficits in cognition, including critical and scientific thinking, reasoning, and overall cognitive ability. This hypothesis has received support, although findings have been mixed depending on the domain, methodology, and population studied. According to a recent review, high psi belief is consistently associated with increased intuitive thinking (quick and emotion-based) and bias towards confirmatory evidence. Differences in self-reported cognitive styles—how people perceive and process information— have also been associated with different levels of psi belief . In particular, greater belief in psi correlates with lower “actively open-minded thinking” (AOT)—a rational disposition marked by extensive exploration of alternatives and evidence to find the optimal answer, even if it contradicts one’s beliefs. Collectively, these findings suggest that individuals endorse psi beliefs at least partially on the basis of emotion and insufficient consideration of conventional explanations for seemingly anomalous occurrences. One area of inquiry that remains unexplored is whether these associations between cognition and psi belief extend to academics engaged in psi research. The majority of studies investigating these links used undergraduate and/or general population samples. Yet, many psi researchers are trained scientists and scholars . Even though they may endorse the reality of psi, they likely differ cognitively from lay believers. Among academics, high endorsement of psi phenomena as assessed on standardized measures of psi belief, may be strongly influenced by researchers’ assessments of the experimental evidence on psi. Cognitive styles related to how one evaluates evidence and reaches conclusions are particularly relevant to the controversial nature of psi, as they may contribute to how researchers (whether proponents or skeptics) and lay individuals form beliefs about, or engage with, psi research. As it relates to evidence of psi, psi researchers have been accused of being poor thinkers, while skeptics have been viewed as uninformed dogmatists. We investigated differences in cognitive styles among academic psi researchers, lay psi believers, academic skeptics, and lay skeptics. Specifically, we assessed AOT, “need for cognitive closure”— a disposition towards quick and definitive knowledge on an issue, avoiding ambiguitybeliefs,, psi beliefs and experiences and examined differences among groups. This research sought to shed light on two questions: 1) Are psi researchers different from lay believers in how they approach knowledge, evidence, and ambiguity? 2) Are psi researchers—who are engaged in a field of study that often yields observations incompatible with mainstream scientific consensus—equally open to considering inconsistent evidence and equally motivated to search for the “correct” answer compared to skeptics?

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Marieta Pehlivanova is a research faculty member at the Division of Perceptual Studies at the University of Virginia School of Medicine. Her research focuses primarily on near-death experiences and children reporting past-life memories, with a deep interest in changing the clinical culture surrounding the reporting of these and similar experiences. Marieta holds a PhD in Experimental Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania and a Bachelor’s degree in Statistics from American University. Before academia, she pursued a career as a statistician in medical research.

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The Parapsychological Association is an international professional organization of scientists and scholars engaged in the study of psi (or ‘psychic’) experiences, such as telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, psychic healing, and precognition. The primary objective of the PA is to achieve a scientific understanding of these experiences.

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Published on April 14, 2026