68. The Science Of Weird Stuff with Prof. Chris French

 "We're at a time when we need critical thinking more than ever, and sadly, I'm not really seeing it happening." 

Professor Chris French is one of the world's leading researchers in anomalistic psychology and critical thinking. As former head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, University of London, author of The Science of Weird Sh*t, patron of Humanists UK, and former editor of The Skeptic magazine, Chris has spent decades investigating paranormal claims, debunking fraudsters, and exploring the psychology of belief. 

In this conversation, he unpacks why the paranormal is worth taking seriously as a scientific and psychological subject, what his own near-miss with precognition research taught him, why deliberate con artists deserve far more condemnation than sincere believers, and why we urgently need better critical thinking in schools, in public life, and in our politics.

Connect with Professor French

• Chris’s website
• Chris’s Guardian column
• Chris’s Skeptic column
• Chris’s profile page at Goldmiths
• Chris on Bluesky
• Chris being interviewed on the Plutopia podcast
• The Science of Weird Shit on Bookshop.org

Transcript

Welcome Prof. Chris & Defining “Weird Stuff"

James Hogson 0:01

Welcome to Humanism Now, a podcast about secular ethics, curiosity, and compassionate change. I'm your host, James Hodgson. Our guest today is Professor Chris French, one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on scepticism and critical thinking. Professor French was the head of the Animalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmith University of London and is the author of many books, including The Science of Weird Stuff, which we'll be discussing today. Chris is a patron of Humanist UK, former editor of The Skeptic Magazine, and appears regularly across print, TV, and radio, casting a critical eye over paranormal claims. Professor French, thank you so much for joining us on Humanism Now. My pleasure. So I misquoted your book in the introduction. You certainly did. We've had an agreement to refer to it in the interview as the science of weird stuff. But of course, there's a stronger S-word that's used in the title. So perhaps we could start there. How do you define weird stuff? And why settling that as the title?

What Counts As Paranormal And Why

Psychology’s Toolkit For Explaining Belief

Prof. Chris French 1:04

Well, onto the second question first. As you say, I decided to call the book The Science of Weird Stuff, but not stuff really, a different, naughty word. And really, that just started off as a joke. The original title that I had in mind for the book was Why Weird Stuff Matters, which I still think is a good title, and it's a theme that kind of runs throughout the book. That very often the kind of thing that we're going to be talking about today that the book's about is often treated as not something to be taken seriously. If it ever appears on the news, it's always the and finally item. A coaster's been photographed in such and such a stately home, blah, blah, blah. I actually think there are really good reasons, which are set out in the book, to take these kind of claims seriously. But just talking to one or two friends as I was writing it, I just said, Oh, yeah, I'll tell them about the title and said, or I might just call it the science of weird stuff, but not the word stuff. Um and almost without exception, they said, Oh, I'd buy that. So I began to take the idea more seriously. I didn't know whether the publishers would go for it, because it's a very respected publisher, MIT Press. But yeah, they loved it. They went for it. They didn't even want an asterisk where the eye should be. So that's how it ended up with that title. One thing that worried me slightly was I didn't want people to think that I was being dismissive about all of that kind of stuff. Because I'm not clearly, you know, I'm really interested in it. I take it quite all quite seriously. And I knew that would be a risk. Well, I think on balance, it's probably worked well for me as a title, even though quite often on podcasts and so on, I do meet this problem of people not wanting to use that word. And I can quite understand that. Now, with respect to your other question, how would I define the word stuff? It's an interesting question, and there's a whole chapter in the book. You know, devoted to trying to define what we mean by paranormal, because that's mostly what I'm talking about, but not exclusively. And that is that when you come to the question of how do you define paranormal, it depends who you ask. If you ask a parapsychologist, parapsychology typically limits itself to three areas. One is extrasensory perception, ESP, and that comes in three varieties. There's telepathy, alleged direct mind-to-mind contact. There's clairvoyance, the ability, allegedly, to pick up information from remote locations without using the known senses. And there's precognition to know what future events will take place, other than just by normal reasoning, etc. So that's ESP, that's the sensory side of the paranormal. You've also got uh psychokinesis, or sometimes called telekinesis, the alleged ability to influence the outside world just purely by the power of thought, the motor side of the paranormal, and then also evidence relating to the possibility of life after death. And parapsychologists would go for that, generally say that's what parapsychology is about, the investigation of those areas. The mass media and anomalistic psychologists tend to have a much wider definition of anything weird and wonderful. So we will include in things like alien abduction claims, the Bermuda Triangle, astrology, anything that's just weird, basically. And really trying to look at what's the psychology behind it. If these claims aren't true, and on Alan's, I don't think any of them are, I could be wrong on that. Then what's going on? Why do people, first of all, believe in this stuff? And secondly, a sizable minority claim that they've had direct personal experience of these things. So there's something there that needs to be explained, and particularly from a psychologist's point of view.

James Hogson 4:38

What was it that first drew you to studying the paranormal? And do you find that these three broad areas there are similarities in studying them in terms of the reasons why we believe?

Prof. Chris French 4:52

First off, I should say I used to be a believer. I used to believe in a lot of this stuff until kind of quite well into early adulthood. And once I'd changed my mind on that, when I've had a, I think, a kind of greater appreciation of the way that our own minds can fool us, basically, the interest continued, even though now I was looking at it from a skeptical perspective and trying to answer that question of well, okay, if people aren't really seeing ghosts and they're not really being abducted by aliens, and they don't really have psychic powers, what's the psychology that's going on that explains that? And it turns out that there is a lot of relevant research in the kind of psychology as a whole. You can take each of the different subdisciplines of psychology and they've all got something to say that's relevant to the weird stuff. So if you think about developmental psychology, you can ask questions about what do children understand? What are children's beliefs? And why don't we, you know, we tell our children that kind of Santa Claus comes down the chimney every Christmas and so on. We encourage them to have some beliefs. We even provide evidence for it, for goodness sake, you know. And then about other things, we say, oh no, there's no such thing as ghosts. You don't need to be worried about monsters under the bed and so on. But most of us grow out of those kind of ideas, but not everybody does. So you can look at it developmentally, you can look at it from the point of view of the cognitive processes that are involved, the different cognitive biases that might be relevant. You can look at it from the point of view of neuropsychology, what's happening in the brain when people have an out-of-body experience. And basically, you can take every single subdiscipline of psychology and say, what might it have to offer in terms of explaining these things? And then that's a bit, I suppose, is a kind of reciprocal thing there. On the one hand, anomalistic psychology borrows from all those other areas, but sometimes it can feed stuff back as well. One of the areas that we're particularly interested in is memory, because typically when people report their paranormal experiences, you are dealing with their report of it. You're not dealing with the experience or the event itself. That's gone. And so the issues like the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the possibility of false memories, and so on and so forth, they become quite central when you're trying to address these kind of issues.

James Hogson 7:03

And you draw the distinction in the book between sheep and goats. So uh who are these two groups? And uh do they fundamentally think in different ways?

Can Experiments Change Minds

Prof. Chris French 7:14

It's an interesting question. First off, the label sheep and goats comes from parapsychology. Well, originally it comes from the Bible. It comes from when I think it's in Matthew, I think it's chapter 23, but I'm not a biblical scholar. When Jesus on judgment day is separating those who are going to be saved from those who aren't, as a shepherd would separate the sheep from the goats. So the sheep within parapsychology, sheep are believers, goats are skeptics. And I think that's that's fine. I don't think either term is particularly complimentary. I don't know whether you prefer to be thought of as being a kind of fairly dumb sheep or a smelly goat. You know, you can take your choice there. And it's fine, it's not meant to be kind of insulting in any way, it was just a useful kind of shorthand. So in parapsychology, they talk a lot about sheep-goat effects where they say there are differences between the sciabilities of believers and non-believers and all sorts of other stuff. The phrase was used in psychology for some time, but then people decided it wasn't politically correct. So uh we have to kind of generally try and stop using that phrase. But there is a very famous scale which is still widely used to measure your level of belief in the paranormal, and it's called the Australian sheep-goat scale. And so, you know, the higher you score on that, the more of a sheep you are, the lower your score on that, the more of a goat you are. And in terms of thinking, do they think differently? Basically, what we're usually doing, I mean, a lot of the experiments that we've carried out when we're trying to tease out whether there might be differences between sheep and goats in terms of cognitive biases, we'll give them something like the sheep-goat scale, and then we'll give them some kind of test or that measures a potentially relevant cognitive bias. To give you one example, lots of people have argued that part of the reason that people go for paranormal explanations is because of the fact that we're all very poor intuitive statisticians. We're not very good at probabilistic reasoning, in you know, in everyday situations, even. And so, because of that, you might get situations where something happens where the most obvious explanation is maybe it was just a coincidence. Maybe that dream you had that seemed to come true three days later or something happened in real life that matched it. Well, maybe the match was just a coincidence. That doesn't feel very satisfying as an explanation. But when you actually dig a bit deeper and think about coincidence, it's bound to happen. Mathematicians talk about the law of truly large numbers. Even if something's very, very unlikely, if there's enough opportunities for it to happen, then it probably will. And it turns out that there's some evidence to suggest that maybe people who believe in the paranormal were all poor at this kind of probabilistic reasoning, but maybe they're a bit worse than the people who don't believe. And it's usually that kind of thing. You're talking about slight differences between this group and that group. It's not saying every individual in this group is worse or better than every individual in that group, but in terms of group differences, the the profile, the psychological profile will differ between the believers and the skeptics.

James Hogson 10:13

And the book is fantastic at breaking down each of these areas of paranormal belief that you've defined, but also the design of the experiments that that have been used that crucial. Many of them by exactly many of them by your own lab in how to accurately test these claims and be open-minded about that, not seek just to disprove them, but actively test them. So do you find that controlled experiments and well-designed scientific tests have been able to persuade believers? How effective are they as a tool to change people's minds on the effectiveness of these paranormal claims?

Prof. Chris French 10:51

The problem we've got here is that if I carry, as I have, carried out an experiment to test some kind of paranormal claim, and I don't find results that seem to support that claim, it's perfectly rational for somebody who is convinced that these things are real to say, well, okay, so your experiment didn't show it. But that doesn't mean that the paranormal isn't real and isn't genuine. People often say you can't prove a negative. Well, I think that's a bit of an overstatement, because there are some negatives that you can prove very easily. But the idea that certain paranormal phenomena are beyond explanation in terms of conventional science is one of those examples that you can never prove it. No matter how many experiments you do that fail to get significant results, no matter how many paranormal claims you debunk, that it's always possible that the proof is just around the next corner. And in fact, the whole history of parapsychology has been a history of false dawns. It's always seems to be the situation that they'll use some particular technique and they're all getting very excited about that. And then as other people are kind of failing to replicate and pointing out problems with the methodology or the analysis and so on, then they move on to something else. And no, no, okay, so forget that. What we're doing now, this is going to prove it, you know, this, but they never quite seem to get to that holy grail of a replicable, robust phenomenon. And all you need is one paranormal effect that was, it doesn't have to be 100% replicable, but just replicable enough to convince the wider scientific community. And we never seem to get to that point.

James Hogson 12:29

Has there been anything in your research career which has made you think twice and think, oh, there could be something here?

Prof. Chris French 12:36

Well, funnily enough, the most recent article I published for the Skeptic magazine, which is it's the UK Skeptic magazine, which is online and it's free, so people can go on there and check this out if they want to. It was a three-parter. It was a kind of almost a kind of spin-off from my book. In my book, I thought I'd finished writing the whole damn thing. And it was sent out to various independent reviewers, and they all said very nice things about it, which was nice. But one of them said, wouldn't it be quite nice though, just to maybe throw out a little bit of something for the believers to hang on to? Just and yeah, my editor liked the idea, so I ended up having to write an epilogue. And so the epilogue, I focused on asking the question, what would it take to convince me to becoming a believer again? What would drag me back over that line? That's what the epilogue was all about. One of the things which I included in that discussion was an experiment that we were just about to start. What had happened is I had, when I was writing the chapter on out-of-body experiences, I'd sent out a tweet saying, has anybody got any first-hand accounts that maybe I could include in the chapter? And a guy had got in touch with me who was a lucid dreamer. Lucid dreaming is when you become aware of the fact that you're dreaming during the dream itself. And skilled lucid dreamers can actually learn to take some kind of degree of control within the dream. So it's pretty interesting stuff. And it's a phenomenon which has been proved and is accepted that it is a real thing. This guy, Dave Green, he was an artist. And so his USP was that if you commissioned a picture from him, he would go to sleep, start dreaming, think, oh, right, James has commissioned that picture. I'd better get I'd better do it. So within his dream, he would take a pad and a pen, start drawing, and then the drawing would just finish itself off. He would have no idea how it was going to finish itself off. So that's pretty cool as well, you know. And then when he woke up, well, he would reproduce what had happened in the dream in waking life. And that's your picture. So that was pretty cool. But it also turned out that he was collaborating with an experimental psychologist called Julia Mossbridge, who is a firm believer in precognition. And apparently they'd done one small-scale pilot study and got significant results, just about marginally significant results. And he said, Would I like to get involved in this project? Sounds like it could be fun. So yeah, so then we did another small-scale pilot, and we again seemed to get marginally significant positive results. So this was really intriguing. This was the stage it was at when I wrote the epilogue. And so then it was just a thought experiment. How, you know, we were about to do the bigger, larger scale study. How would I react if we got significant positive results? How would I react if we didn't? I'm just exploring that as food for thought, really. Anyway, then we did the big study, and it looked like we'd again got significant results. So I'm there thinking, oh wow, didn't expect that. And I had a few days of basically, yeah, we'd agreed in advance that if we get these results, that's we're write it up like this. We've got those shots. So I wasn't, it wouldn't have been fair for me to call out and say, I had nothing to do with this. My name was going to be going on the paper. And it's it was a few days I was, yeah, I would really I was very surprised. At the very least, I'd want to replicate the results to make sure that even though we had apparently got three significant results on the trot, it wasn't just some weird statistical blip. And if it had been evidence for precognition, I won't describe the actual technique we use because I know you don't got much time, but if we really had got that evidence, well, you know, fine. That's what the evidence says. You have to go where the evidence goes. But then I began to have some doubts about the way we'd analyzed it. Now I should emphasize Julia had written the protocol, including the analysis, and I had approved it. I had every opportunity to look at it. So, but it turned out that the way that we collected the data meant that we couldn't really do the analysis we thought we were doing. And so, really, the results were not significant after all. So, in the end, I could cling to my skepticism, even though I had genuinely thought, oh, we're onto something here that's not what I expected at all. There were a couple of kind of aspects to the results. I mean, people can read it up if they want to, that were quite surprising, but were not statistically significant in any way. So we ended up with this kind of beautiful situation where the believers could carry on believing and the skeptics could carry on being skeptical. So maybe we'll do another, maybe we'll do another study along those lines in the future. But that was quite an interesting experience.

James Hogson 17:11

A very fascinating near hit there.

Prof. Chris French 17:13

Yeah.

Changing Minds on the Paranormal

James Hogson 17:13

Yeah, yeah. And I'm always curious about what does change people's minds. Our standard question on the podcast is what's something you've changed your mind on. And I wanted to ask about what's worked well, what tends to work well, where people are completely convinced by paranormal claims, you know, how if it's not experimentation, what other techniques can break the spell? But I'd be interested perhaps to know what changed your mind as a previous believer. Would was it a sudden or more of a gradual shift?

Prof. Chris French 17:42

It was fairly sudden. I was going to save this to the end because I thought this was your era. Okay. Yeah, as well. But no, I can say I'll do it now. I'm quite happy to do it now. I did skirt over it when we first talked about it and just said, yeah, and then I became a skeptic. And really? Well, what had happened was I'd gone all the way through doing an undergraduate degree at Manchester. I was doing my PhD at Leicester, and that was not in this kind of an area at all. It was all very scientific stuff. It was uh EEG and hemisphere differences and so on. And someone else in the department, one of the members of staff, recommended a particular book he'd just read that he thought I'd like. It was called Parapsychology, Science or Magic. And it was by a Canadian social psychologist called James Alcock. And it was the first skeptical treatment of all this stuff that I'd ever come across. And it really did, you know. I A, I enjoyed the book. I think it's I've still occasionally use it. It's a very good book. But also, it opened up this whole new world of scepticism that I didn't know existed. Because in general, it's still very bad these days. You go into the average bookshop, and in the parapsychology section, there'll be very few, if any, sceptical or critical books. There'll be loads and loads of pro-paranormal books. It was probably, if anything, even worse back then. So this was the first time I'd come across a serious academic treatment of these kinds of issues, but from a sceptical perspective. And as I say, it opened up a whole new world for me. There were lots of references in the reference list at the back to a magazine called Skeptical Inquirer that I'd never heard of before, but I started to subscribe to that. And uh looking back now, I can see that it was just about that time. It was 1981 the book came out. I started at Goldsmith's in 85, and by that point I had become a skeptic. I did a couple of lectures on one of the courses on the paranormal, this time from a very skeptical perspective. I had previously taught an adult education class from a totally unskeptical perspective, so probably ruined all of their minds on this topic. But yeah, and it grew from there. It started off as a kind of side interest, just as a hobby. As time went on, I would do the occasional little student project and doing some research and maybe write it up, and but it was very slow. Interestingly, my kind of interest in this stuff, even though I was doing it from a skeptical perspective, was tolerated but not encouraged. I can remember a head of department pretty explicitly saying that I could carry on doing that kind of research as long as I also did more scientifically respectable research as well. So for quite a long time I had kind of twin track of doing stuff that was much more mainstream. But I really got to a point where I realized it was this weird stuff that really fascinated and interested me. And so eventually I uh jumped ship and just devoted myself to that. And I'm glad I did. I wish I'd done it earlier, in fact, but yeah, that's life.

Making Skepticism Compelling

James Hogson 20:36

But it is hugely important, and the book is a it's a brilliant, fascinating read. Thank you. No, thank you. And obviously, that there's the work that you're doing, and and I know Richard Wiseman wrote the forward, who has lots of fascinating content in this space, and much of the opening is dedicated to James Randi and his debunking efforts. So there is compelling debunking sceptical content out there, but I think you're right to point out it's still massively outweighed by the amount of books, podcasts, TV shows, even news time. I notice on mainstream news channels that's dedicated to possibly the supernatural or paranormal is true. So do you think there is an importance on the storytelling element of making the scientific explanation, the skeptical inquiry as compelling, fascinating, reaching out to people and trying to make it entertaining in the way that a lot of these claims are a form of entertainment for the believers.

Mediums, Comfort, And Consent

Prof. Chris French 21:33

Well, that's I'd say it's one of those areas, whether you're a believer or a skeptic, most people do find this stuff interesting. It's the kind of thing that you'd talk about down at the pub or at a dinner party, or when you're just talking and relaxing with people. Most people have got views, some people have got their own personal experiences and so on. So lots of people are interested in it. But I do think you're right that one of the problems that skepticism has. Hate to think about assuming some sort of movement because it's not in its ideal form, it's not about telling you what to think, it's more about critical thinking skills and hopefully help telling you how to think and evaluate evidence and so on. But the very word skeptic has all kinds of negative connotations. People imagine. I run Greenwich Skeptics in the pub, okay? And oh, it still makes me smile thinking about that phrase skeptics in the pub. I imagine grumpy old men sitting around with pints of warm bitter all saying, Oh, I don't believe that, do you? You know. And in actual fact, it's a much happier thing than that. You know, skeptics conferences are really great places to go. They're very entertaining. There's lots of really interesting, funny people. And so we do need to package it well. I mean, Richard Wiseman, being a master at this, he's very good at making scepticism a positive thing. But again, I think we can all do that. I mean, I certainly tried to I tried to do that in my talks and in the book by including in the odd funny anecdotes. There's so much within the world of the paranormal that is just it it's sometimes it's almost too ridiculous. It kind of just sounds made up. I remember talking to John Ronson about his book, Men Who Stare at Goats. And some of the stuff in that is completely, you think, Well, really, those serious military people that were taking all this stuff seriously. He said that most of the stuff I left loads of stuff out because people just would not have you know, it was going, it was even weirder, it was even more bizarre, and so it is fascinating. But we need to be kind of selling it well. Trying to tell a good story about uh humanism generally, for some people, it's quite a hard sell, you know. The idea, a lot of people prefer the idea that when you die, you go to heaven or you go to some other place and it's all lovely. And even maybe the idea that there's a personal God who takes an interest in you and you can pray to him, and if he's in a good mood, he will make miracles happen for you, and so on. That's much more of a comforting world of view for many people than the thing that science puts forward is basically there is no ultimate meaning, you're just an accident that happened, you know, you just evolved, there's no life after death. When you die, that's it. That can be quite a hard sell. Now, I think obviously, as a humanist, that's the way I think things are, and I think therefore the take-home message is live this one life that you've got the best way you can. But in terms of trying to convince people, then I think you need to try and spin it in a more positive way. And also, I mean, the whole thing with the paranormal, particularly as it relates to matters of life after death. As I say, you are up against that thing of people want to believe in life after death. I think really we all want to believe in life after death. The idea that when we die, that's the end of us, is something that most people find pretty troubling. And the idea that when our loved ones die, that's it. We'll never see them again, we'll never talk to them again.

When Can Paranormal Beliefs Harm & Exploit

James Hogson 24:55

It's hard to cope with. That does seem to be the foundation of a lot of this is that desire to believe and that the want for these claims to be true. And it is difficult if you're this skeptical mind in a group, because you know, very intelligent people, as you say, there's no difference in it in levels of intelligence, but people can believe these things. It's very hard in a group to to be the one to maybe push back, question, or flat out reject the claim and not sound like the buzzkill, because it is the believers that have the more romantic option if they're talking about well, one area that you know I think always concerns me is you mentioned about obviously clairvoyance and people who might have that they want to be a believe that they can somehow communicate with people that they've lost. And again, this sounds like something if you sort of to question it is to take something away from them a little bit. But at the same time, it's hard not to feel like people in that area are being exploited by the proprietors of those claiming to offer this solution. Do you distinguish between the practitioners of some of these beliefs, particularly where they're selling it as a service, versus the people who maybe believe it, for again that feeling of wanting it to be true?

Prof. Chris French 26:06

Well, yeah, very much so. In my personal opinion, and this is again, it's kind of quite interesting in terms of the way that my own thinking's changed on this, that having gone from being a believer, when I first discovered the joys of skepticism, I think I became quite uh an extreme skeptic and held some views then that I've softened on. You know, now what amongst those would be that anybody who claims to be able to talk to the dead is either crazy or stupid or a con artist. Now, there's an element of truth in each of those statements, but I suspect, and my own personal opinion now, is that most of the people who claim they've got these abilities genuinely believe that they have, and genuinely believe that they are helping people, helping the bereaved, and indeed, in many cases, may well be providing psychological comfort to the bereaved. And so for me, I genuinely am not out to try and change everybody's mind and convince everybody that's you know, oh no, there's no such thing as talking to the dead and so on and so forth. If you want my opinion, my honest opinion as a scientist, then that's what I will I'll tell you, that's what I believe. But if you take great comfort from your belief in life after death, why would I want to take that away from you, providing you're not doing anything that's harming others? And so, you know, genuinely, I'm not out to try and um change everybody's mind. But as I say, I'm interested in on the one hand, is it even possible that some of these claims might be true? I'm certainly not convinced that any of them are, but I could be wrong. And secondly, well, if they're not true, what's the explanation for them? Now, when it comes to mediums, those who genuinely believe in what they're doing are a completely different category for me to the deliberate con artists. Deliberate con artists, if I come across them, I'll go in guns blazing, and I think they're basically the scum of the earth. They are really despicable people who are exploiting typically vulnerable, often sick and uneducated people just for their own greed, and I've got no time for them at all. They are horrible people. If someone genuinely believes that they have a gift, and even if they charge for it, a lot of sceptics say, well, if you think you've got some kind of genuine gift, you shouldn't charge for it, then, you know, well, actually, why not? But if you've got to give up your time, if you've got you've got healing powers and it's going to take you an hour for you to do your work, your magic, well, that's an hour of your time. And provided that you're you genuinely believe it and you're not charging excessively, I don't think there's anything that wrong with even saying, you know, you it's okay to ask for some kind of payment. But that's very different. As I say, if you go and see any kind of diviner of any sort, a medium, a tarot card reader, whatever, and they give you some kind of message along the lines of, oh, well, the reason your life is so terrible is because you're cursed. And I can remove the curse, but it's going to cost a lot of money. I mean, there's a documentary on recently, I don't know if you saw it. The I can't remember the title of it now. I think it was on iPlayer, where this is it happens every year. There are people who lose tens of thousands, even more than that, pounds or dollars, because they've fallen for these scams. And often they don't even report it because they feel really stupid once they've realized that they have been conned. But yeah, those people, as I say, are just awful people. But the vast majority are not. They are they are nice people who'd really think they're helping others. And maybe, as I say, in some cases they're there's been very little research on what kind of psychological benefits might people get from going to see mediums, what kind of psychological damage might be being done? Because it's not something that there's a lot of research on that I'm aware of.

Teaching Critical Thinking That Sticks

James Hogson 29:59

That was fascinating. I'm interested to know your your views on uh levels of critical thinking in society in general. Do you think we teach critical thinking enough, either at school or at university level, apart from your course, of course? Apart from my course, of course.

Prof. Chris French 30:21

No, not at all. I I remember looking at um when my kids were doing the kind of A levels, and there was some damn there's some sort of general studies type course, and there was part of it was on critical thinking. I thought, oh, this should be interesting. And it was terrible, it was so dull and boring. You know, there was a long list of sentences. Which of the following are facts and which are opinions? Oh, come on, surely you can do better than that. That's one of the one of the joys of teaching the stuff I taught, the anomalistic psychology. Whether the students were believers or skeptics, they found it interesting. And also one of the one of the core themes that runs through it is the need for critical thinking. Making them aware of the cognitive biases that we all suffer from. And even being aware of them doesn't mean that you've escaped them. You will still, you'll still be affected by them, but you won't be as affected. An awareness of the fact that we all suffer from confirmation bias, that we're all lousy estimating probabilities and so on and so forth. I think is some kind of protection. But by being able to do it by talking about kind of ghosts and UFOs and all these really colourful case histories that you can look at, it really brings it to life much more than again. Prime example there would be thinking about complementary and alternative medicine, you know, and why people find those kind of claims convincing. And you can take it apart and look at all the different factors, and I think that kind of really brings it home to people in a way that just talking about it in the abstract often doesn't.

Culture, Schools, And Pushback

James Hogson 32:00

Yes, those concrete examples and real-world examples that people have experienced with does help to change the way in which you think more broadly. What age do you think critical thinking should be introduced? About six months, I'd say.

Critical Thinking Beyond The Classroom

Prof. Chris French 32:26

I mean, I know we blame everything on Tinternet, but it is true that there's so much misinformation and disinformation out there that trying to provide advice about why some sources of evidence are more trustworthy than others, about what you should look for and so on, I think that could probably begin certainly before the age of 11. You obviously can't do it with tiny kids, but as they're getting to that age, I think would be probably about the right time to start. I mean, at one point, I was absolutely delighted because the uh AQA, who run the main A-level provider in the country, for their psychology syllabus, they have three kind of optional special topics, and they decided to do anomalistic psychology. And obviously, I was totally delighted about that because I you know I thought this is gonna be good for this is gonna be good for business, you know. And uh well, it was I was really pleased. So I thought, great, this is a great way to teach critical thinking skills without them even realizing that's what you're doing. And I remember writing a column for The Guardian about this, and your your opening paragraph, you always want to try and grab people's attention. So I think I'd said something like, How would you feel if your teenage son or daughter came home and said they'd been learning about UFOs that day? And oh no, deliberately being quite provocative, and then in the second paragraph saying, Well, actually, it's quite a good idea for the reasons X, Y, and Z, because it'll teach you about critical thinking, yeah, teaching about psychology, blah, blah, blah. And yeah, I could see from the comments underneath the article that some people had not got past that first paragraph. The first comment was just two words, utter drivel. And you think, Oh, you've yeah, I don't think you read the whole article, did you? Yeah, other people were then coming in and saying, You didn't read the full article, he's not for this. One of the other interesting things was the teachers, some teachers were getting in touch with me and saying, I really wanted to teach that auction in my school, and the head wouldn't let them. And that was interesting. I thought, well, what's the what are the possible reasons for that? I'd only think of two personally. One is they didn't read past the first paragraph, and they just automatically go, ooh, UFO's not in my school, no. But the other, which I think is a more interesting one, was that some of them may have picked up on the fact that if you are questioning evidence for life after death, that some of the religious kids might be going home to mummy and daddy and saying, you know what, I don't think we do survive death, you know, and undermining religious beliefs. And I think that might have been a worry in for some of the teachers in these, some of the head teachers in these schools. But more than one teacher got in touch with me to say they really wanted to teach it, but were not allowed to. So I thought that was quite telling.

James Hogson 35:08

And do you see critical thinking as a like a muscle that needs to be maintained as well as trained? Is it a skill that needs to be practiced to keep a certain level, like learning an instrument?

Prof. Chris French 35:20

It's a good question. I think possibly not. I think I would like to think at least, and I could be wrong on this, and again, I'm not drawing on any particular body of research, but I would like to think that once you get into the habit of it, it's something that becomes quite natural. And that's that's the other thing that you apply it in all areas of life, not just when you're dealing with people saying they've seen a UFO and so on, but all areas of life, at the risk of stating the bleeding obvious politics, the claims that come from politicians, and yeah, we really need more critical thinking being applied in the area of politics. It's frightening. I think it's more extreme in the States, but it's happening over here, and deeply worrying, I think, for humanists and for critical thinkers generally, the fact that people don't really seem to care about the truth anymore. A lot of them, as long as it's something that it's a view that my tribe would sign up to. I mean, you look at the recent events in Minneapolis and the bare faced lies, we can see what happened, and we have officials standing there saying, no, that's not what happened. This is what happened. It's I mean, Orwell's really hit that one on the head decades ago, but it is frightening what's happening there. So we we're at a time when we need critical thinking more than ever, and sadly, I'm not really seeing it happening. There's always gonna be sensible, compassionate people around, and that's how I see humanists. But there's all there's also in the kind of other extreme, and I don't know what I don't know which side's gonna win out ultimately.

The Hard Problem Of Consciousness

James Hogson 36:53

I think things are moving in a very worrying and dangerous direction. I agree. I think the more we have compassionate skepticism, as previous guest Michael Marshall described it, and we remain skeptical, we still care about the truth, but we also approach it with uh compassion and as you've demonstrated, yeah, wisdom and charm as well, and make these stories more just as compelling. I think we have the truth on our side as well. So that should help us on along the way. Well, you've been kind enough to already answer our standard closing question. So I will fall back. I do always like to ask scientists that we have on the show if there was one question, outstanding question that we could learn the answer to during your career, what would that be for you?

Prof. Chris French 37:34

I don't think it's going to happen during my lifetime. But one of the questions that's always fascinated me, and I still don't feel that we're that close to answering it, is that what the philosophers call the hard problem, the nature of consciousness. We've learned an awful lot, especially in recent years, about brain function. And a lot of what we've learned is relevant to that question, the general question of consciousness. But there's still that kind of fundamental question, which I know some people, Anniel Seth, for example, doesn't think that it's a real problem, he thinks I mean he might be right. He's very compelling and convincing in his in his the way he writes about these things. But the idea of how is it that this physical object inside my head and your head, that brains and just patterns of neural firing can lead to subjective experience? I've never come across an explanation of what's going on there that satisfies me. Not even really in terms of the kind of what the general shape of the answer might be. Now it might be, as Anal Seth, amongst others, have argued, that it's going to be one of those problems people used to talk about vitalism, the idea that what is it that's gone from a living being when it dies? There must be something that's left. And we don't talk about that anymore now. We've got enough of an understanding of biochemistry and anatomy and all these other things that that's just gradually just faded away as an issue. And it might be that the same things happen, same things happen with consciousness. But at the moment, I'm still very used to thinking in terms of this kind of mind-body problem. I've yet to come across an explanation that really seems to make sense. Maybe we'll never have one. But if we could, if I could wave a magic wand and say that's the one thing I'd really like to understand and know about. It would be that.

James Hogson 39:19

Well, perhaps it's all just weird stuff. Exactly. Thank you so much. The Science of Weird Stuff is a fascinating read. We will link to everything in the show notes, and this has been a real honor and a pleasure. Thank you, Professor Khrushchev, for joining us on Humanism Now. Thank you, James.

Humanise Live 39:34

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