·      Langston, W., Hubbard, T., Fehrman, C., D’Archangel, M., & Anderson, K. (2020). The role of personality in having a ghost experience and the role of personality and experience in the development of ghost belief. Personality and Individual Differences, 163, ArtID: 110077.

·      Langston, W., & Hubbard, T. (2019). Shadow walking: Will a ghost walk tour affect belief in ghosts? Journal of Parapsychology, 83, 47-68. http://doi.org/10.30891/jopar.2019.01.04

·      Langston, W., Fehrman, C., Anderson, K., D'Archangel, M., & Hubbard, T. (2018). Comparing religious and paranormal believers. Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, 24(2), 236-239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/pac0000342

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·      Langston, W., & Kittani, S. (2021, November). The role of self-talk and identity in astrology belief change. Poster presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, virtual event.

·      Langston, W. (2020, November). The role of personal experience in reducing belief in the ability to detect stares. Poster presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, virtual event.

·      Langston, W., Bibb, E., & Kah, A. (2019, November). The relationship between vaccine experience and vaccine harm belief. Poster presented at the 60th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Montreal, Quebec, Canada.

·      Langston, W., & Frosh, I. (2018, November). Comparing paranormal believers and self-identified geeks. Poster presented at the 59th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, New Orleans, LA.

·      Langston, W., Frosh, I., Davis, J., & Cowden, R. (2018, March). Measuring Personal Religious Experience. Poster presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Psychology of Religion and Spirituality Preconference, Atlanta, GA.

·      Langston, W., Fehrman, C., D'Archangel, M., Anderson, K., & Hubbard, T. (2017, November). Is experience necessary for belief in ghosts? Poster presented at the 58th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, Vancouver, B. C., Canada.

·      Langston, W., Fehrman, C., D'Archangel, M., Anderson, K., & Hubbard, T. (2017, June). Exploring the relationship between experience and belief in ghosts. Poster presented at "The Cognition of Belief" Conference, Georgetown University, Washington, D. C.

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My research is centered on understanding belief. The motivation is to understand how beliefs form and how they are updated. Ideally, this information can be used to develop ways to change consequential misbeliefs—those that might cause harm to the person holding them or to other people (e.g., anti-vax beliefs).

The research outline was developed from a model proposed for clinical delusions by Freeman et al. (2002). The model treats belief formation as a separate step from belief updating. My research program involves three types of projects addressing these two stages:

1. What variables influence the formation of beliefs? We have worked primarily with paranormal believers to work out a data collection model and analysis scheme to address this question. We survey large numbers of people (from a variety of sources) on experience, belief, and personality. Then, we look at the relationship between personality and belief and see if it is mediated by experience. An example of this was presented in Langston et al. (2020). From that project, we found that sensation seeking, schizotypy, transliminality, openness, private self-consciousness, absorption, and anomalous perception predict experience, and the indirect pathway through experience is significant for those variables. There was also an indication that different personality variables predicted different types of experience. For example, empathy, neuroticism, and threat perception predicted story experience, but other variables did not predict this experience.

The expectation is that this research will help to predict who is susceptible to forming various beliefs. A second expectation is that understanding the origins of beliefs will help to design belief-change interventions. For example, experience-based beliefs might best be changed with experience-based interventions.

Other projects in the lab that deal with astrology belief, stare detection belief, and pyramid power belief are showing that the variables that predict experience differ for different beliefs. This supports the notion that there is not some universal “believing” personality type. Belief is a function of personality, experience, and the belief itself.

Current descriptive projects are looking at incels (men who believe women are engaged in a conspiracy against them to deny them sex), TERFs (trans-exclusionary radical feminists), and people who oppose Black Lives Matter.

2. Can we find double dissociations between experience and belief for different beliefs? If experiences are specific to specific beliefs, then these double dissociations should exist. Alexander Kah and I have submitted a manuscript comparing religious and ghost beliefs. If experience is specific, then ghost experience should significantly predict ghost belief and religious experience should significantly predict religious belief. In the study, ghost belief was predicted by ghost experience but not religious experience, and religious belief was predicted by religious experience but not ghost experience.

Again, the data show that predicting who will be a believer is complicated. Different personality variables predict different types of experience (either different experiences for the same belief—as in personal, close other’s, or story experience for ghosts—or different experiences predict different beliefs—as in ghost belief vs. religious belief). These data also suggest that it might be necessary to know where a belief came from in order to change it.

3. What variables are associated with changing belief? This research is more complicated because it requires measuring belief and providing an intervention. There have to be experience-based interventions and non-experience-based interventions. For example, in a study on stare detection—a belief held by over 90% of the population—we had to bring people to the lab and show them that they could not tell when an unseen person was staring at them. We also had a different group simply read about the experiment and the inability to detect stares. This project took almost three years for data collection. It is part of a package with a project looking at pyramid power (a belief held by almost no-one in the population) and ghost belief (held by around 40% of the population). The ghost belief intervention took over a year. Pyramid power started in the spring of 2020, so the pandemic slowed it down significantly. When the package is complete we will have intervention type and belief change data for beliefs held by nearly everyone, about half of the population, and nearly nobody.

An interesting finding is coming from this project. Many of the personality variables correlate with belief formation. This is not surprising because they were chosen based on the belief formation research. However, almost none of the variables correlate with belief change.

The positive news is that the lack of overlap suggests that forming a belief is definitely a separate stage from updating it. But the data provide no leverage in predicting who will change their mind. These and other data are suggesting that belief change does not depend on how people got to a belief in the first place. For example, experience-based interventions do not appear to be more effective for experience-based believers vs. non-experience-based believers. One possibility is that one of our basic assumptions—that finding a different origin for every belief means a different change mechanism is necessary for every belief—is incorrect. Unfortunately, each of these studies has problems. If almost everyone believes in stare detection, then there isn’t much room for personality differences to matter. The astrology data produced less belief change than expected. The standard “more work is needed” applies.

A different possibility is that we have the wrong end of the stick. Maybe instead of studying believers, imposing change manipulations, and seeing what variables are associated with belief change, we should study people who quit believing on their own. A project underway now looks at people who have left the QAnon movement. Do personality variables predict an experience that leads to a decrease in QAnon belief? If we can find the variables that predict “leaving experiences,” then we can predict who will be susceptible to interventions. This project has been in development for a while because we have had to reconceptualize the idea of experience from a ghost encounter (“something touched me,” “I sensed a presence”) to what an experience prompting an abandonment of QAnon would be. However, as this project enters the data collection phase I am very excited that we might be able to evaluate this relationship effectively.

References

Freeman, D., Garety, P. A., Kuipers, E., Fowler, D., Bebbington, P. E. (2002). A cognitive model of persecutory delusions. British Journal of Clinical Psychology, 41, 331-347. http://dx.doi.org/10.1348/014466502760387461

Langston, W. (2020, November). The role of personal experience in reducing belief in the ability to detect stares. Poster presented at the 61st Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, virtual event.

Langston, W., Hubbard, T., Fehrman, C., D’Archangel, M., & Anderson, K. (2020). The role of personality in having a ghost experience and the role of personality and experience in the development of ghost belief. Personality and Individual Differences, 163, ArtID: 110077

Langston, W., & Kittani, S. (2021, November). The role of self-talk and identity in astrology belief change. Poster presented at the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society, virtual event.  

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