Classic Science Paper: Belief in Fortune Telling Amongst College Students

The following post is for Classic Science Papers: The 2008 “Challenge”.

I’m certain that when most people think of a ‘classic’ paper on a topic like superstition or belief in the paranormal, they may think of B.F Skinner’s Superstition in the Pigeon. But as you can see, it was published after World War II, whilst the requirement of the challenge is to write about a paper prior to this time period.

So considering my own academic interests, I went for something ‘classic’ although maybe not really something that was quite as significant as ‘Superstition in the Pigeon’. Maybe another time. Yet it still says something about ‘the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available‘ and ‘the problems and concerns of scientists of that era‘. To me, it indicates a great many things that should be considered when investigating belief in fortune telling by college students, particularly when it comes to improving such studies.

I chose C.M Diserens and T.W Wood’s 1936 paper on ‘The prevalence of belief in fortune telling among college students‘ – which is quite short. We’re talking five pages. In comparison, the length of ‘Malinowski goes to college: Factors influencing students’ use of ritual and superstition’ (Rudski & Edwards, 2007) is fifteen pages.

I chose a paper that reflects the people around me as I type. Because I’m sitting in the research office of a university, whilst dozens of undergraduates thunder past, whooping about it being a long weekend.

How does research on belief of college students in fortune-telling from 1936, compare to research today? Are the students that much different or does research now recognise a wider spectrum of influences that could have been included in the initial study? What were some of the socio-cultural influences that could have made a group of 101 students from the University of Cincinnati respond the way they did – and could a paper of that time recognised those elements?

George Bernard Shaw (1903) described English society in the decades prior to the First World War as:

…superstitious, and addicted to table-rapping, materialisation seances, clairvoyance, palmistry, crystal-gazing and the like to such an extent that it may be doubted whether ever before in the history of the world did soothsayers, astrologers and unregistered therapeutic specialists of all sorts flourish as they did during this half century of the drift to the abyss. (Man and Superman, Act IV).

Today, I watch Richard Dawkins (2007) introducing the documentary ‘Enemies of Reason’:

Science has sent orbiters to Neptune, eradicated smallpox, and created a supercomputer that can do sixty-trillion calculations per second. Science frees us from superstition, and dogma and enables us to base our knowledge on evidence… well, most of us… Yet today, reason has a battle on its hands. I want to confront the epidemic of irrational, superstitious thinking. It’s a multi-million pound industry that impoverishes our culture and throws up new-age gurus that exhort us to run away from reality. As a scientist, I don’t think our indulgence of irrational superstition is harmless. I think it profoundly undermines civilization… We live in dangerous times, when superstition is gaining ground and rational science is under attack.

Two Englishmen, over a hundred years apart – and yet pretty much the same message. No wonder it continues to be a subject of interest today.

What was it like for US College students during the mid-1930s? The paper comes after the US ‘Scopes Monkey Trial’ of 1925, over the issue of teaching evolution in schools rather than the biblical story of Creation in the Book of Genesis. But even now it’s an ongoing issue, much like what Dawkins reflects in ‘Enemies of Reason’.

In my mind, I think of the most accessible portrayal of a group of college students in the USA during 1936 – the beginning of the film Raiders of the Lost Ark, as Dr Henry ‘Indiana’ Jones teaches archaeology to a group of mostly-swooning female students.

Perhaps a movie or popular film encouraged belief in fortune tellers, leading these students to check if it’s just like psychic readings in the flicks? During 1936, the students would have viewed stereotypical ‘mad scientist‘ fare (how dare he research the origins of the mind and soul!) and Charlie Chaplain’s Modern Times was out. There were Frank Capra films, science fiction like the great Flash Gordon, and what has become a classic for entirely the opposite reasons intended by its film-makers: Reefer Madness. Popular novels included the just-released Gone with the Wind and pulp fiction fare. Mysteries, horror stories and even 1930s zombie flicks could have influenced views of the paranormal for the respondents to the survey, although this is not considered in Diserens and Wood’s research.

For example, if we compare to modern college kids and what could influence their views on the matter, did you know that Steven Spielberg’s got a planned ghost and UFO based social network? Going to be called ‘The Rising’. Apparently it’s going to be capitalising on the sort of footage and stories that are going around on forum boards and everyone’s favourite ‘guess what went past my window’ YouTube shots. Yeesh.

We do have plenty of evidence for such popular social reinforcement and networking contributing to belief in superstition: rituals of test-taking, athletic lucky-touchstones and theatre and dance performances:

In Vyse’s 1997 chapter ‘The Superstitious Person’, he reviewed several articles examining superstition and provided compelling student-related anecdotes. For example, he wrote about a student who could not commence an exam until he found a piece of loose change, occasionally resulting in his tardiness for a test. (Rudski & Edwards, 2007).

The Diserens and Wood paper chose items such as ‘did you visit a fortune teller who used…’ the following techniques or ‘tools of the trade’: spiritualists, palmists, phrenologists, tea and coffee grounds, cards and ‘any other kind’. Did the students ever have their horoscope read? Was it mere curiosity that led them?

In addition, was there anything ‘demonstrated to be true’ – did it guide them, and in what phase of their life? Did they believe in fortune telling (’are you absolutely prejudiced or do you think there might be something to it’)?. Yes, they could have used some Likert scales to help out at this point, admittedly.

The results demonstrated that within a group of 53 women and 48 men (N=101):

- of women, ten out of sixteen who had ‘not visited fortune tellers’ thought ‘there might be something in it’. Thirty-seven who had visited, thought the same, with twenty-five confirming that ’something came true’ for them.

- for men, twenty-eight had not visited, but thirteen thought ‘there might be something in it’; twenty had gone, with twelve thinking ‘there might be something in it’ and fifteen reporting that ’something came true’ from the visit.

Most popular for women were card readings, palmists and tea and coffee-ground readings; for men, it was palmists, card readings and spiritualists.

Also of interest – ‘do your church principles determine your views on fortune telling’? Yes or no?’

Of non-visitors to fortune tellers (16), one said that there was ‘prejudice against it due to their church’. Yet with those who visited (37), a total of nine reported condemnation. Yet:

It would not be an idle conjecture to state that we would expect the number of repetitive visits to fortune tellers to be closely allied with a belief in such, the individual being in a more suggestible state each visit. On this assumed basis, the men run true to forum, but peculiarly enough the women almost reverse the expected outcome. However, it might be pointed out that women are more readily influenced by social compulsions and hence checked their beliefs on the questionnaire with an unconscious factor playing an important role.

Support for this statement might be gathered from the fact that among the men in both groups, but 8.33% of them were influenced against fortune telling by religious principles while 18.86% of the women in both groups were so influenced.

This runs rather akin to comments on this blog which said that ‘women were more susceptible to social thinking’. It is true that research indicates that women women hold more paranormal beliefs than men, with a few exceptions such as belief in extraterrestrial life forms (Rice, 2003; Tobacyk & Pirttilä-Backman, 1992; Vyse, 1997). One reasoning is that it is due to men being more likely to think analytically and less intuitively than women (Lieberman, 2000; Pacini & Epstein, 1999).

One element that fascinated me was the second line of the paper about ‘Indeed among the colored race, superstitions of varying degree play an important part of motivating their behaviour‘. There is a lengthy account of the treatment of Black people at the University of Cincinnati on the webpage Eleven Cincinnati Legends, including stories of segregation, bias and efforts to challenge the status quo during that time:

Donald Spencer, an African American student who attended the University of Cincinnati in the early 1930s, formed an organization in 1934 along with four other students at the University called “Quadres”. Its goals were four in number: to promote high ideals and scholarship; to foster cultural enterprise; to establish contacts to aid social life; and to encourage interracial harmony and participation on campus. It was part of a singular effort by the group to fight segregation on the U.C. campus and lasted until approximately 1948…

Despite their many difficulties on campus, African Americans for the most part successfully completed their degrees at the University of Cincinnati and went on to make great contributions to the Greater Cincinnati community in the areas of education, athletics, law, city politics, and civil rights.

So whilst Diserens and Wood mention in passing the racial stereotyping of the time, it doesn’t go any further on what other elements could have made one particular group of men and women more likely to believe in an aspect of fortune telling than others. Why these weird beliefs, in particular?

These days more of an effort is made to encapsulate cultural and regional factor influences on paranormal beliefs. Although Diserens and Wood clearly had a prejudicial opinion about the supposed ‘motivating’ influence superstitions had on Black people, they could have additionally benefited from an approach shown by Alvarez-Gonzalez and Diaz-Vilela (2004), with their study on ‘Differences in paranormal beliefs across fields of study from a Spanish adaptation of Tobacyk’s RPBS’:

The study included 355 students from six university departments, both scientific and nonscientific…we believe some items could be skewed because they belong to a very different cultural background. For instance, our population knows too little about monsters like Yeti or Bigfoot in order to have a clear opinion about their existence. Nevertheless, these items showed a clear, distinct behavior in the factor analyses, which gives us an idea of the cross-cultural conceptual strength of the dimensions within the scale. This finding clearly expands the possibilities of the questionnaire in order to carry out cross-cultural research that can shed some light on the similarities and differences in paranormal beliefs across different human groups and their correlates.

One particularly enjoyable 2008 study – which looked at 595 Chinese fortune cookie sayings as ‘cultural texts’:

The study indicates that fortune cookie sayings fulfill four primary functions: prophecy, compliment, advice, and wisdom. This textual analysis further uncovers that fortune cookie sayings (a) delimit “fortune” in terms of money, prosperity, and romance; (b) make compliments about sociability and talents; (c) provide advice on life and relationships with others; and (d) offer wisdom regarding integrity, spirituality, and the past.

Despite their apparent triviality and ordinariness,fortune cookie sayings represent a form of hybridized cultural discourse… However, the analysis reveals that fortune cookie sayings subscribe to dominant ideologies in both U.S. American and Chinese cultures. As detailed in the present study, they are a fusion of the American Dream and the Chinese upward mobility. (Yin & Miike, 2008)

Could these 1936 Cinncinatti students, living the ‘American Dream’, included some young men and women who drew upon European, Asian, South American or even Native American backgrounds or influences when they chose whether to visit a psychic or not?

Another aspect that wasn’t really touched upon was the social source of such beliefs. Were the college students acting on just peer pressure, a trend going around campus? Did they go in groups, or visit alone? Were there traditional, family-based incentives for checking out their fortunes? Was the friendly palm-reader actually Grandmother? Or even their room-mate? Or girlfriend?

Whilst more recent studies demonstrate that seeing unlikely events as planned rather than due to probability, will tend towards having a belief in the paranormal (Musch and Ehrenberg, 2002), there is still an ongoing debate as to whether intelligence levels contribute, tending towards it being less of a factor. In addition, ‘reasoning ability…[has] a significant effect on paranormal belief scores, but not on paranormal experiences… results suggest that those who have better reasoning abilities scrutinise to a greater extent whether their experiences are sufficient justification for belief in the reality of these phenomena’ (Hergovich and Arendasay, 2004).

So, information in Diserens and Wood’s study is missing in regards to cultural background and level of education (since ‘psychology classes at the University of Cincinnati’ could include postgrads). Whilst ‘strenuous efforts were made by diverse means to see that the individuals lost his identity in this investigation‘, such elements do influence the final results and could have allowed for a more in-depth study as to cultural influences and level of education upon beliefs.

Finally one recent publication that directly addresses the issue of paranormal beliefs in college students studying Psychology – (’Students’ beliefs about paranormal claims: Implications for teaching introductory psychology by Benassi and Goldstein, 2006; from ‘Best Practices for Teaching Introduction to Psychology’, ed. Dunn and Chew):

Many standard introductory psychology textbooks include at least some coverage of parapsychology topics… most of the coverage was brief and negative… be that as it may, our assessment of current introductory psychology texts is that the material contained in them will have little impact on students’ beliefs about paranormal topics or, more important, on the way they think about these topics. Instead, the pedagogy used by course instructors will play the key role in determining whether these dimensions (belief and critical thinking) are impacted.

This is why I think that if future research in this vein wishes to challenge potentially dangerous beliefs, as demonstrated by the Australian Government’s publication ‘Little Black Book of Scams‘, the quality of education in regards to not only materials and resources, but distinctly human resources – teachers, professors, lecturers, tutors, friends, family and peers – need to be considered.

After all, upon reflection of this rather flawed study from 1936, we can see how belief in fortune tellers hasn’t disappeared over time…

Selected References:

Diserens, C.M., & Wood, T.W. (1936) The prevalence of belief in fortune telling among college students. Journal of Applied Psychology, 20(4), 488-492.

Vitulli, W.F., & Luper, S.L. (1998). Sex differences in paranormal beliefs among undergraduate college students. Perceptual and Motor Skills, 87, 475-483.

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