Recent research published in The Journal of Social Psychology suggests that individuals who endorse certain right-wing political ideologies are more likely to believe in paranormal phenomena. The findings indicate that while a person’s thinking style plays a role in their beliefs, it does not fully explain why right-wing ideologies are linked to accepting the paranormal. This provides evidence that the relationship between political views and supernatural beliefs is driven by multiple, distinct psychological factors.
The study was conducted by Alexander Jedinger, a senior researcher at the GESIS Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences, and Pascal Siegers, head of the Research Data Center at the same institute. The researchers wanted to explore the psychological mechanisms that connect political beliefs to ideas that contradict scientific principles.
Past studies have hinted at a link between right-wing political views and a susceptibility to supernatural thinking. Jedinger and Siegers aimed to break down this relationship by examining specific aspects of right-wing ideology rather than just general political labels.
“There have long been speculations that esotericism and beliefs in the paranormal are related to right-wing beliefs,” Jedinger told PsyPost. “There is much research in history and cultural studies on this topic, and of course, there are a lot of references in popular culture to Nazi esotericism, exemplified in movies such as Indiana Jones and Hellboy. However, there was little quantitative evidence on these kinds of relationships,”
Specifically, the researchers looked at two traits known as right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Right-wing authoritarianism describes a preference for strict obedience to authority, conformity to traditional social norms, and hostility toward people who break those norms.
Social dominance orientation describes a preference for hierarchical societies where dominant groups hold power over subordinate groups. The scientists sought to test whether these two specific ideological traits predict belief in the paranormal.
They also wanted to see if cognitive styles, meaning the way people process information, could account for this connection. People generally rely on two types of thinking: intuitive thinking, which relies on fast gut feelings, and analytical thinking, which involves slow and deliberate reasoning.
The scientists hypothesized that right-wing individuals might favor intuitive thinking, which could make them more accepting of paranormal ideas. They designed their study to test if this shared thinking style was the main bridge between political ideology and the paranormal.
To test these ideas, the researchers recruited a sample of 1,139 adult participants from Germany. They used an online survey company to ensure the participants matched the general German population in terms of age, gender, education, and region.
The survey included a modified scale to measure paranormal beliefs, which focused on concepts that violate basic scientific principles. Participants rated their belief in phenomena like mind reading, witchcraft, lucky charms, ghosts, and astrology.
The researchers separated traditional religious beliefs from paranormal beliefs, as religion usually involves organized doctrines rather than a belief in magical forces that can be directly manipulated. They also measured general political views by asking participants to place themselves on a left-to-right political spectrum.
To gauge specific ideological traits, the participants completed a nine-item questionnaire measuring right-wing authoritarianism and an eight-item questionnaire measuring social dominance orientation. The researchers then measured cognitive styles using both self-reported and objective tests.
Participants answered questions about how much they enjoy deep thinking and how much they rely on their intuition. They also completed a cognitive reflection test, which presents tricky reasoning problems that require people to pause and suppress an immediate, intuitive answer to find the logically correct one.
In their statistical models, the researchers also controlled for age, gender, education level, and general religiosity. This allowed them to isolate the specific effects of political ideology and thinking styles without other demographic factors skewing the results.
When analyzing the data, the scientists found that disbelief in the paranormal was generally more common than belief among the participants. Men, older individuals, and those with higher levels of education were less likely to believe in paranormal phenomena.
However, those who scored higher in right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation were more likely to endorse paranormal concepts. Simply identifying as right-wing on the political spectrum did not predict paranormal beliefs on its own.
The researchers also found that people who relied heavily on intuitive thinking tended to have stronger paranormal beliefs. Those who performed well on the objective analytical thinking test were less likely to believe in the supernatural.
“Paranormal beliefs are linked to authoritarian attitudes and, to a lesser extent, to social dominance orientations, i.e., the belief that societies should be based on hierarchies between social groups,” Jedinger said. “The correlation is moderate to weak, but very robust.”
When the scientists added cognitive styles to their statistical models, they expected the link between right-wing ideology and paranormal beliefs to disappear. They assumed that a lack of analytical thinking was the primary reason individuals with right-wing views leaned toward the paranormal.
Instead, the results showed that right-wing ideology and cognitive styles independently contributed to paranormal beliefs. Accounting for analytical and intuitive thinking did not substantially weaken the connection between authoritarian or dominance-oriented views and belief in the supernatural.
“We hypothesized that associations between paranormal beliefs and right-wing ideology may be explained by a shared propensity to think intuitively about the world,” Jedinger told PsyPost. “However, as it turns out, intuitive thinking was not the key to explaining this association. Intuitive thinking was related to paranormal beliefs, corroborating previous findings, but controlling for thinking styles did not eliminate the observed relationship. Although our original hypothesis turned out to be wrong, we learned something important.”
The scientists caution against misinterpreting the results as proving that paranormal beliefs cause far-right political views or that everyone who has paranormal beliefs also holds far-right political views. Because the study relied on observational survey data, it is impossible to determine exact cause and effect.
“We suspect that there are other explanations for these correlations,” Jedinger said. “One interesting approach is that emotional factors, such as the shared desire for security and control, play a role here.”
The research was also conducted in Germany, a country with a specific historical context where esoteric ideas have occasionally overlapped with far-right movements. The researchers recommend that future studies replicate these findings in other cultures to see if the pattern holds worldwide.
Future research could also benefit from moving beyond standard surveys. The scientists suggest that future projects should experimentally manipulate how people think in the moment to better understand how analytical and intuitive mindsets influence both political and supernatural beliefs.
The study, “The politics of the paranormal: the relationship between paranormal beliefs and right-wing ideology,” was authored by Alexander Jedinger and Pascal Siegers.
