Are people with certain personality types more likely to believe in the paranormal?
There've been lots of interesting research, looking at the kind of people who are likely to believe in the paranormal, and also the kind of people who are likely to themselves report paranormal experiences. The kinds of factors that seem to be important are things like, if you are more hypnotically susceptible, you're more likely to believe in the paranormal. If you have a greater tendency to engage in fantasy, if you've got a vivid imagination, if you have a tendency to go into altered states of consciousness, to be, in common parlance, "a little bit spacey", then those are the kinds of people who are more likely to believe in the paranormal. And this might help to explain why people have what appear to be paranormal experiences, because certainly those kinds of people would be more likely to actually confuse what's happening just in their own minds and their own imaginations with what's happening out there in the real world. And there's good experimental evidence to support that kind of an idea. Those kind of people might end up sincerely believing they had a paranormal experience when in fact it was based on a fantasy, a daydream, maybe even an actual dream that now, when they think about it, they think it was something that really did happen to them. So, yes, there are particular kinds of people who are more likely to believe in the paranormal and that might help to explain where some of those paranormal experiences, or apparent paranormal experiences, are actually coming from.
