Paranormal Beliefs in Relation to Personality, Religiosity and Modernity

This study examined whether belief in the paranormal is linked to Big-Five personality traits, religiosity, and modernity. It has also explored the extent to which these three variables of individual difference jointly contribute to paranormal belief. A total of 280 adults (140 men & 140 women) in the age range of 19 to 50 years served as sample for the study, all of them belong to traditional Hindu religion by birth. Participants were administered four psychological instruments, i.e., Revised Paranormal Belief Scale, NEO-Five Factor Inventory, Religiosity Scale, and Modernization Scale. Only the global paranormal belief score was used in the study instead of individual scales. The results revealed that paranormal belief has a modest positive correlation with personality trait Openness (.30, p<.001) and Extraversion (.24, p<.001). A strong positive correlation (.43, p<.001) has surfaced between religiosity and paranormal belief. Among scales of modernity, Socio-religious (-.32, p<.001) and Marriage (-.13, p<.05) were found to have significant but negative association with belief in paranormal. Results of multiple regression have indicated that the measures of personality, religiosity, and modernity jointly account for 34.3% of variance (R=.586, p<.0001) in global paranormal belief, wherein Openness, Extraversion, Neuroticism, religiosity, and modernity in marriage system are the significant predictors. These results further suggest that in the prediction of paranormal belief the predictor variables form a linear combination, which is slightly different form their relationship surfaced in bivariate analysis.