What’s with these latest opinion polls on ghosts and cryptids?

This past week, two sets of survey results came out in regard to belief in questionable, and scientifically undetermined, entities. Both opinion polls appear to show high rates of belief in ghosts, the devil, aliens, and several cryptids. Let’s take a closer look at what’s happening here.

RealClear poll is not perfectly clear

The opinion research organization RealClear Opinion Research published results of a poll of 1000 Americans, where the pollsters asked about religious views. You can see the breakdown here. It was a fair poll, but note that the context framing was “religion”. I suspect people are more generous in expressing their religious beliefs than belief in the paranormal (though the stigma is much less now). Here are some general results:

In response to the question, “Please indicate for each one if you believe in it or not.”

Ghosts – 61% yes
Aliens – 57% yes
Devil – 70% yes

None of the results are very surprising, even though they might concern critical thinkers, scientists, and atheists. I’ve been tracking ghost belief since surveys of 2003. The results fluctuate from year to year, almost certainly due to cultural factors, including what’s disseminated in the news and popular media offerings. This is the highest ghost belief result I’ve seen in a representative poll. But note that 2008 was the next highest at 57% followed by a low in 2009 (18-33%). I don’t think this means a lot and you’ll see why in a bit.

There is no shortage of supposedly nonfictional depictions of ghosts and demons in visual media. And, aliens have been all the rage for a few years now. That topic exploded in popularity after it appeared to be dying out around 2017. You just never know what is going to suddenly surge in pop culture.

That brings me to the next set of results that relate to cryptids.

Cryptid communication poll

This survey came out in a paper published in the International Journal of Communication 18(2024) titled “Cryptid Communication: Media Messages and Public Beliefs about Cryptozoology” by Dawson, Brewer, and Cuddy. The research goal of this paper was to examine some of the effects of media messaging on belief in cryptids, which is a highly complex situation that may not ever be well understood.

What is “belief”? Each person has different stages of, criteria for, and reasons for “belief”. Because of those reason, these opinion surveys results are squishy and not very useful.

Feel free to read the entire study for yourself – it has other issues that make it a bit weak. But, I’m just going to focus on the survey results they published as part of their experiments.

Belief in cryptids was measured by asking respondents whether they strongly believed, believed, disbelieved, or strongly disbelieved the following statements:

“Bigfoot is a real creature” (12% strongly believed, 34% believed, 35% disbelieved, and 20% strongly disbelieved),
“Mermaids are real” (11%, 22%, 42%, and 25%, respectively),
“The Yeti, also known as the abominable snowman, is real” (12%, 29%, 39%, and 20%, respectively), and
“The Loch Ness Monster is a real creature” (10%, 31%, 39%, and 20%, respectively).

Combining the two “yes” categories and the two “no” categories (ignore rounding errors), we have this:

Does this fairly translate to: “Look how many people believe in Bigfoot and the Loch Ness Monster!”. I would not go that far. The “strong belief” is only 10-12% for each cryptid. This correlates to previous surveys about belief in Bigfoot as “real” that ranged from 16-20% and likely reflects the portion of the population who deeply believes in these concepts.

Perhaps the moderate “belief” value (of around 30%) is reflective of people casually playing around with the idea, those who want it to be true, or those just having fun with it without any consideration of evidence.

There are countless other factors that influence how respondents might answer the question about “belief” and reality. One example is that mermaids are very much a cultural belief in other countries, where they are magical creatures. Another example may be if a person had an experience that they interpreted as a Bigfoot. It could have been a bear, but witnesses may be very much affected by the idea they encountered Bigfoot, and it bolsters their belief.

This study also included a second part that brought Mothman and megalodon into the discussion.

Belief in cryptids was measured by asking respondents whether they believed Bigfoot (42% yes), “the Mothman creature” (13% yes), and “the megalodon shark” (45% yes) “may currently exist.”

Megalodon is a long-extinct, super-sized shark. While many people claim it still lives in our oceans, it most certainly does not. But the fact that it was a genuine, real animal means that it feels more likely it still could be out there. (Most people don’t have any sense of the timescale when they lived and died out.) Again, we may be dealing with an effect from the availability heuristic – people have a good idea of what a giant shark would be like in modern times because we’ve seen so many real and realistic depictions of sharks.

Mothman is by far the most unrealistic of all these cryptids in the study. It doesn’t resemble any known zoological animal and, from its origin, has supernatural connotations. Even though it’s a popular cryptid, it’s not a realistic one. That mothman has the lowest level of belief is unsurprising.

Beware of opinion surveys

Belief opinion surveys are so messy. Even if the questions are phrased precisely so that every respondent is clear about how to respond, people’s opinions are messy, culture changes across area and time, and we use our own conceptions of the world to make personal sense of it. This is all reflected in each person’s individual response. We also don’t know how truthfully they responded, or if they might change their answer tomorrow. Finally, it’s a huge mistake to infer that a high rate of “belief” means a greater likelihood that the cryptid is “real”. That’s a serious logical error we should all be careful we don’t make.

Is the US population slipping into greater acceptance of magical thinking because a poll showed high results? These are strange times, but society is way more complicated than that. In fact, beware of all opinion surveys.

#beliefInGhosts #Bigfoot #cryptid #cryptids #doYouBelieve #DoYouBelieveInGhosts #Ghosts #megalodon #mermaids #Mothman #surveys

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Ghost belief in the US varies widely by year and source

I collected survey results regarding belief in ghosts beginning around 2010 when I was working on my thesis that eventually became Scientifical Americans: The Culture of Amateur Paranormal Researchers. Whenever new poll results come up, I add them to my table. The percentage of Americans who respond “yes” to “Do you believe in ghosts?” varies a lot. I’d argue that you can’t conclude that belief in supernatural beings has gone up (as most people assume) in the past 20 years because the survey results are all over the place. Take a look:

Let me clarify a few things to be transparent about what these values actually represent.

Bias: All surveys are not the same

I only used decent polling sources in the list. I didn’t use any volunteer polls on websites or ones that are done by entertainment marketing staff to drum up support for their latest paranormal TV series, event, or movie. Those are clearly biased. But the surveys above are also biased. Almost all surveys are biased because they aren’t truly representative of the diverse American population. Some factors that affect belief in paranormal themes include age, education, religiosity/spirituality, and exposure to and/or interest in these themes in information and media.

There are also possibly endless factors that affect how people answer the questions presented to them in a survey. They include mood, personality, comprehension skill, attention span, native language, fatigue, hearing ability, etc. These secondary personal factors of the respondent, we might assume, are problems for every survey so that might balance out.

Comparing results over time

Looking at the range of percentages over 20 years in the table above, there is no pattern. Assuming the results are valid, there is no trend up or down.

I suspect that we are seeing the very high and very low values as representations of certain groups with collective values that reflect high or low belief in the paranormal. Some evidence for this is revealed for the 2023 results detailed below.

Alternatively, the results could be a reflection of what was going on in the culture at that very specific time (week or month of the polling) – maybe it was near Halloween. Perhaps media content or a news event came out near that time that influenced the answers. We could never be sure because the probing questions weren’t asked to make those connections.

We also must consider how the questions were framed – it could be that they were confusing or guided the respondent towards a certain answer.

The skewed population (2023)

The latest poll, by AP-NORC, came out in news headlines as touting the high rate of belief in angels.

When I looked closer, with the help of some other critical thinkers, I found this survey was equally about political views as well as belief. And, there was a question about ghosts, as well as other entities, so I was able to add these result to my list.

In order to make sense out of any one survey, you have to look at details. A link to the survey report is often include in any press releases, so you can read the exact questions and view the tabulated results. You can also see if the news report on the survey made errors in interpretation or grouped “somewhat” and “strongly” responses together to make the cumulative “yes” result, which is dodgy.

The May 2023 AP-NORC poll of 1,680 adults was designed to be representative of the US population, but the sample was drawn from the AmeriSpeak Panel, which was specifically created to target the moderate-conservative population. The poll results reveal that 78% of the respondents identified as Moderate or Conservative. That shines some light on the high belief results. Had it been a more liberal/less religious cohort that was polled, we would expect the belief in supernatural beings of all kinds to be lower.

The December 2023 RealClear Opinion Research poll of 1,000 adults seems to be a good statistical representation, with one exception – it is slightly higher in regard to representation of people in the Southern US (38%, with respect to the Northeast at 17%). This poll, however, was in the context of religious belief. I suspect more people would be open to expressing religious-related beliefs than belief in the context of paranormal topics.

Results are an illusion

Overall, we must use restraint in using these poll-based belief numbers. We may be looking at very different scenarios that produced each result. It’s most interesting to compare two polls in the same year or the same poll over several years. That occurs in the above table (though I haven’t reviewed the question to see if they were exactly the same). But it’s still inconsistent.

With this many examples, however, we can say that there certainly isn’t a significant increase (or decrease) in ghost belief across the two decades.

Many Americans Say They Believe in Ghosts. Do You?
~New York Times, 2018

It’s true that a significant proportion of Americans believe in spirits, angels, God and the devil. It’s fair to say that, in the U.S, it’s around 45%. That’s still high, considering that, after two centuries of effort, we still have no reliable evidence of their reality.

The lesson here is: be wary of survey results. They might be just a fleeting apparition that reflects a specific moment.

For more on paranormal surveys, see Believers are the Majority (2018) also on this website.

#DoYouBelieveInGhosts #ghostBelief #Paranormal #paranormalBelief #pollResults #survey #UnitedStates

https://sharonahill.com/?p=7111