Experts & Expertise

Honours Programme: Why People Believe Weird Things (2011-2012 & 2012-2013).

I teach this course together with Herman de Regt. The course is in English.

Theme
Many people hold weird beliefs. Even smart people may entertain beliefs that do not stand up to reasonable scrutiny. Yet, these people themselves need not be weird. To the contrary, many psychologically normal people keep faith in very strange beliefs. Why? How do they acquire these beliefs and why do they stick to these weird beliefs?
Recent psychological research and (perhaps not so recent) philosophical analysis offer possible answers to these issues. They also point out that different explanations might be expected depending on the kind of weird belief.
Finally, we think it is important to inform as many people as possible about the weirdness of many of their beliefs, since wrong ideas about the world and humans can have dreadful and terrible consequences. If not for yourself, the more so for other people whose welfare and well-being (possibly) depend on the decisions you (will) take.

Course description
The aim of this course is (1) to make students familiar with the latest developments in thinking about the origin and persistence of weird beliefs in normal people and (2) to make students aware of the importance of weighing the scientific content of their beliefs.
Part of the definition of a weird belief is that it goes against the scientific grain, so we will have to briefly address the question what science is and consider the role of science in establishing beliefs. We will do this by presenting a naturalist and pragmatist framework for thinking about science and belief. Next we will investigate a number of controversial case studies to show the variety of weird beliefs normal people entertain; beliefs about (among other things) hypnosis and past lives, out-of-body experience during near-death experiences, talking to the dead, homeopathy, belief in God, etc. A further step we then take is to see how false beliefs or memories can quite effortlessly be generated and how easy it is to trick people by an act of magic or mentalism by appealing to their natural thinking habits. All this will lead to a deeper insight into why people are so uncritical towards their own (weird) beliefs. We will end by providing an explicit explanatory hypothesis of why it is that so many normal people have so many weird beliefs.