Paranormal depictions in the media: how do they affect what people believe?

Media depictions of the paranormal do seem to influence the way people think about the subject - but the connections are more complicated than you might think.

For nearly twenty years, I have been conducting research on the general effects of mass media, particularly the emotional effects of frightening movies and television programs on children. In the course of studying scary movies and television shows, it became apparent that many of them dealt with themes of the supernatural or the paranormal. For example, one movie that children found to be particularly terrifying was Poltergeist. In one of the classic scenes, a small child sits entranced by the static on her family's television set as she watches evil spirits shoot out of the screen and into her parents' bedroom, rocking the furniture like an earthquake. When Poltergeist was released, I was concerned about the films emotional impact on children. It is now well documented that such films can dramatically elevate levels of physiological arousal and induce a variety of post-viewing effects such as bad dreams, haunting images, fear of being alone, and the fear of going into certain rooms of a house (e.g., the basement or the attic) (Cantor 1994; Cantor and Sparks 1984; Sparks 1986; Sparks, Spirek and Hodgson 1993).

At the same time that I was busy documenting the emotional effects of movies like Poltergeist, I remembered a conversation from my days in graduate school with Dave Lindberg, a professor in the History of Science Department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Professor Lindberg encouraged me to begin investigating the impact of media depictions of paranormal phenomena on people's paranormal beliefs. Lindberg was concerned about the gullibility of many of his students and their easy, uncritical acceptance of the paranormal claims that were often disseminated through the mass media. I thought his idea was worth exploring, but at the time I was busy with my doctoral dissertation on children's fright responses.

In the early 1990s the time was right to begin studying what Lindberg had suggested. My casual observations of media content suggested an increase in "paranormal" content over the past several years. Programs like Unsolved Mysteries were routinely depicting people's encounters with UFOs, space aliens, and ghosts. Of course, the viewing audience was never actually presented with clear, compelling video evidence of these supernatural beings. Instead, viewers were typically supplied with dramatic recreations that certainly looked real and tended to capture the audience's imagination.

Viewers can turn the channel to witness dramatic testimonials about how psychics predict the future and change people's lives. Viewers are encouraged to call in immediately in order to speak with psychics and get their lives on the right track. Once I began to notice the prevalence of these themes, I concluded that they constituted a significant portion of daily television programming. Much of the skeptical literature (including many articles from SKEPTICAL INQUIRER) was filled with statements that assumed that the media depictions of the paranormal had great influence on the public. I found it curious that many of the same skeptics who insisted on rigorous empirical investigations in order to establish a claim about paranormal phenomena were oblivious to the absence of empirical evidence for their own claims of media impact of paranormal messages on the viewing public.

Searching the literature, I discovered almost nothing about the impact of paranormal media content on viewer beliefs. The citations were filled with studies of media violence - but there was almost nothing on paranormal content. Some theories of media impact might be extended to imply that the public will be affected by paranormal content in programs and movies, but until the empirical evidence on this point is well documented, we can't be certain. The lessons of science are quite clear that sometimes what seems like a reasonable assumption turns out to be wrong. I began to study this area. Although only five studies have been done to date on this topic, the current findings point in a consistent direction.

The first study: Disclaimers and Truth Claims

I started my investigation with a simple experiment that was inspired by a 30-minute entertainment series, Beyond Reality, that appeared weekly on one of the major cable television networks. Each episode featured a team of paranormal investigators who became involved in a particular paranormal incident. What initially caught my attention was the brief introductory tag that preceded the opening scene of each episode: "The following story of paranormal activity is based on reported incidents." I wondered about the impact of this tag in promoting belief in the sorts of events that were depicted. I also wondered how this tag might compare in impact with other tags that might be created. The complete description of the experiment I conducted with this program was published in the Summer 1994 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER (Sparks, Hansen, and Shah 1994).