Our findings help clarifying the distinction between pattern, randomness and coincidence perception, which are often conflated in the literature on nonconventional beliefs and qualifies the widespread idea that believers in conspiracy theories tend to reject randomness. We find that belief in conspiracy theories was best predicted by coincidence perception, whereas paranormal beliefs were best predicted by illusory pattern perception. The present research sought to resolve these issues by assessing the predictive power of several factors in competition, such as pattern, randomness, and coincidence perception, using different paradigms in two studies including four samples of participants, as well as a meta-analysis of all findings, testing twelve hypotheses in the process. And while paranormal beliefs have been associated with randomness perception and are routinely correlated with conspiracy theory endorsement, the exact relationships, and differences of both types of belief remain elusive. Whereas some studies report a strong association between pattern and randomness perception, and conspiracy theory beliefs, others note only a weak association or none at all. There is, however, controversial evidence about the relationships and related explanatory paths. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Ībstract: Perception of randomness, patterns in visual noise, and coincidences have been associated with propensity to endorse paranormal and conspiracist beliefs.

The paranormal believers also evaluated the artifact faces as more face-like and emotional than the skeptics, and a similar trend was found between religious and non-religious people. Signal detection analysis revealed that believers had more liberal answering criteria than skeptics, but the actual detection sensitivity did not differ. Believer groups were better at identifying the previously defined face-like regions in the images but were also prone to false alarms. In a detection task, the participants detected face-like features from pictures of scenery and landscapes with and without face-like areas and, in a rating task, evaluated the face-likeness and emotionality of these areas. We used two tests (N = 47) to analyze the relationship between paranormal and religious beliefs and illusory face perception. Illusory face perception, a tendency to find human-like faces where none are actually present in, for example, artifacts or scenery, is a common phenomenon that occasionally enters the public eye.

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