Overview

Drinkwater’s research program addresses a fundamental question in parapsychology and anomalous belief research: what is the underlying structure of paranormal belief, and how do psychological differences in cognition, personality, and reasoning contribute to its formation and maintenance? Rather than treating paranormal belief as a monolithic construct, his work has systematically decomposed belief into its constituent dimensions and mapped these onto specific cognitive and personality variables.

Working primarily at Manchester Metropolitan University in collaboration with Neil Dagnall and Andrew Denovan, Drinkwater has contributed to a body of research that moves beyond simple correlational studies to examine the mechanisms through which individual differences shape anomalous belief. His approach combines psychometric validation, latent profile analysis, and experimental manipulation of contextual factors to build a nuanced understanding of belief structure.

Paranormal Belief Dimensions

One of Drinkwater’s central contributions has been clarifying the dimensionality of paranormal belief through rigorous psychometric analysis. The Revised Paranormal Belief Scale (RPBS) is the most widely used measure in parapsychological research, yet its factorial structure has remained contested. Drinkwater led a large-scale study aggregating data from 3,764 participants to test competing factorial models of the RPBS.¹

The analysis revealed that a seven-factor bifactor solution provided superior fit to the data. This model indicates that paranormal belief, as measured by the RPBS, functions simultaneously at two levels: a general factor representing overall belief in the paranormal, and seven distinct subfactors that capture specific belief domains. The seven subfactors are conceptually independent yet contribute to a unified construct, suggesting that paranormal belief is neither purely unidimensional nor entirely fragmented.¹

This bifactor structure has important implications for how researchers conceptualize and measure paranormal belief. It validates the use of the RPBS as a global measure while also supporting the examination of specific belief dimensions. Additionally, the analysis revealed gender differences, with women reporting significantly higher paranormal belief scores than men, though measurement invariance testing indicated these differences reflect genuine belief variation rather than differential scale interpretation.¹

Earlier work by Drinkwater and colleagues identified nine common paranormal belief dimensions across multiple existing scales: hauntings, other life, superstition, religious belief, alien visitation, extrasensory perception, psychokinesis, astrology, and witchcraft.⁵ This taxonomy has provided a framework for understanding the landscape of paranormal belief and identifying which belief clusters share underlying psychological mechanisms.

Cognitive and Personality Correlates

Drinkwater’s research has systematically examined how personality traits and cognitive-perceptual characteristics relate to paranormal belief. A key focus has been the relationship between schizotypy, a personality dimension characterized by unusual perceptual experiences, magical thinking, and cognitive disorganization, and paranormal belief.

Using latent profile analysis, Drinkwater and colleagues identified four distinct groups within a sample of 725 adults based on combinations of schizotypy and paranormal belief levels.² These groups ranged from low schizotypy and low paranormal belief (43.9% of the sample) to moderate schizotypy with high paranormal belief (8.9%). Importantly, the analysis revealed that schizotypy and paranormal belief are not perfectly correlated; individuals can be high on one dimension while low on the other, indicating that they reflect partially independent psychological constructs.

The relationship between reality testing (the capacity to distinguish between internal mental events and external reality) and paranormal belief has also emerged as significant in Drinkwater’s work. Reality testing deficits showed stronger associations with endorsement of urban legends, while cognitive-perceptual schizotypy more strongly predicted paranormal belief.⁴ This dissociation suggests that different anomalous beliefs may arise through distinct psychological pathways: some through perceptual and cognitive-perceptual disturbances, others through deficits in reality discrimination.

Probabilistic Reasoning and Bias

A substantial portion of Drinkwater’s research has examined the relationship between paranormal belief and performance on probabilistic reasoning tasks. Paranormal believers have been found to show characteristic patterns of statistical bias, including heightened perception of randomness (seeing patterns in random sequences) and susceptibility to the conjunction fallacy (judging the probability of a conjunction of events as higher than the probability of one constituent event).

In a study of 254 participants, Drinkwater and colleagues found that paranormal belief correlated negatively with performance on standard probabilistic reasoning problems, particularly those assessing perception of randomness.⁶ However, the relationship was not uniform across all reasoning tasks. Perception of randomness associated more strongly with paranormal belief than conjunction fallacy, suggesting that paranormal believers are particularly prone to detecting illusory patterns in random sequences.

Notably, Drinkwater’s research has demonstrated robust framing effects in probabilistic reasoning. When the same logical problems were presented in a paranormal context rather than a standard context, performance patterns shifted significantly.² For most groups, framing problems in paranormal terms facilitated performance, suggesting that contextual factors and the relevance of problems to participants’ belief systems substantially influence reasoning outcomes. This finding highlights the importance of examining not just individual differences but also how situational factors interact with personality and belief to shape cognition.

Evidentialism and Belief Formation

Drinkwater contributed to a comprehensive analysis of the relationship between paranormal belief and evidentialism, the philosophical principle that beliefs should be formed, amended, and relinquished solely on the basis of available evidence.³ This work examined whether paranormal believers adhere to evidentialist standards or systematically violate them through cognitive biases and motivated reasoning.

The analysis identified several characteristic violations of evidentialist principles among paranormal believers. These include belief inflexibility (resistance to changing beliefs in light of disconfirming evidence), belief inconsistency (holding contradictory beliefs simultaneously), confirmation bias (selectively seeking and interpreting evidence that supports existing beliefs), and disconfirmation effects (discounting or dismissing evidence that contradicts beliefs).³

Importantly, Drinkwater’s work suggests that these violations may not reflect irrational thinking per se, but rather reflect a different priority system. The research indicates that a need for meaning and mastery over life events may lead believers to prioritize coherence and psychological comfort over strict adherence to evidential standards.³ This perspective reframes paranormal belief not simply as a failure of rational cognition but as reflecting different values in belief formation.

Skeptical Critiques

While Drinkwater’s psychometric and cognitive research has been methodologically rigorous, skeptical perspectives raise several concerns. One critique concerns the interpretation of correlations between paranormal belief and cognitive biases. Critics argue that finding associations between belief and reasoning patterns does not establish causation, it remains unclear whether cognitive biases lead to paranormal belief, whether paranormal belief encourages biased reasoning, or whether both reflect a third underlying factor.

A second concern involves the framing effects observed in probabilistic reasoning tasks. Skeptics question whether the facilitation of performance when problems are framed in paranormal contexts actually demonstrates something meaningful about paranormal belief, or whether it simply reflects task-specific effects that have limited bearing on real-world reasoning about paranormal claims. The fact that context influences reasoning performance is unsurprising from a cognitive psychology perspective and may not illuminate the mechanisms sustaining paranormal belief.

Third, skeptics note that Drinkwater’s research, while documenting deviations from evidentialist principles among paranormal believers, does not establish that paranormal beliefs are unjustified. The observation that believers show confirmation bias or belief inflexibility does not prove that the beliefs themselves lack evidential support, it only documents the cognitive processes through which beliefs are maintained. This distinction between the psychology of belief and the justification of belief is crucial to skeptical evaluation.

Responses and Evaluation

Drinkwater’s research program provides several responses to these critiques, though important questions remain open. Regarding causality, while his correlational studies cannot definitively establish causal direction, the use of latent profile analysis and structural equation modeling provides stronger evidence about the relationships among variables than simple correlations. The finding that belief in the paranormal mediates the relationship between schizotypy and statistical bias, for instance, suggests a specific causal pathway rather than mere association.⁶

On the question of framing effects, Drinkwater’s work demonstrates that these effects are not trivial artifacts but reflect meaningful interactions between individual differences and contextual factors. The systematic variation in how different belief groups respond to paranormal versus standard framing provides insight into how beliefs shape cognitive processing. This is relevant to understanding how paranormal beliefs become self-sustaining, they may create interpretive frameworks that make certain reasoning patterns more salient or accessible.

Regarding the distinction between psychology and justification, Drinkwater’s research on evidentialism explicitly engages with this philosophical question. By documenting systematic deviations from evidentialist principles, the work does not claim that paranormal beliefs are false, but rather that believers tend to form and maintain beliefs through processes that would be considered epistemically problematic from an evidentialist standpoint. This is a meaningful empirical finding about belief formation processes, even if it does not settle questions about the truth or justification of paranormal claims.

The strength of Drinkwater’s approach lies in its methodological rigor and its systematic decomposition of paranormal belief into measurable dimensions. By moving beyond treating paranormal belief as a unitary phenomenon and examining its relationship to specific cognitive processes, personality traits, and contextual factors, his work provides a more nuanced understanding of how unconventional beliefs develop and persist. The bifactor structure of the RPBS, the identification of distinct psychological pathways to different anomalous beliefs, and the documentation of framing effects all contribute to a more sophisticated psychology of paranormal belief than earlier, simpler models provided.