Correlation of the Religious and the Paranormal Beliefs to Personality

Beliefs happen to be the most significant indicators of a person’s overall personality and provide us a window on his mental constructs. The study of the paranormal activities and phenomena has been riddled with controversy since its conception and previous researches revealed mixed and contradictory findings. The present study focuses to study correlation between Religious beliefs, paranormal beliefs and the personality factors across different religious groups, among individuals of different age groups and socio-economic status. Significant positive correlation was found between religiosity and paranormal beliefs as well as between religiosity and the traditional religious beliefs, psi and witchcraft subscales of the paranormal beliefs scale. Results also report a negative correlation between religious beliefs and the spiritualism, extraordinary-life-forms and precognition subscales of the paranormal beliefs scale. Neuroticism was found to be the only personality factor significantly predicting paranormal beliefs. Muslims scored higher on the traditional religious beliefs subscale in comparison with the Hindus. On the other hand, among the Hindus a higher degree of endorsement of witch-craft was observed. However, so far as the Christians are concerned no significant differences were observed either on global paranormal beliefs or any of the subscales of the paranormal beliefs. Socially marginal groups were found to be more susceptible to paranormal beliefs. They scored higher on psi, witchcraft, superstition, spiritualism, precognition as well as the total- paranormal beliefs scale.