Nonconventional Beliefs Among Australian Science and Nonscience Students

Abstract

Attempts to determine the effect of science education on levels of nonconventional (paranormal or superstitious) beliefs have produced inconsistent findings. Many researchers have examined only overall levels of belief, neglecting the subsets of different phenomena. In this study, we investigated whether groups of science and nonscience students could be differentiated according to their degree of belief in a variety of nonconventional phenomena. Students from the departments of science (n = 109), medicine (n = 129), and arts (n = 117) were assigned scores that measured seven nonconventional beliefs: popular science; fake and obscure; traditional religion; alternative medicines; fortune telling; psi; and a “deviant” factor. A discriminant analysis performed on the three groups' scores revealed one significant discriminant function, interpreted as a “pseudopractitioners” function, with medical students showing the lowest level of belief, arts students the highest, and science students falling in between.