Here Comes the Easter Bunny

In a couple of days the Easter Bunny will visit homes of young children across America delivering baskets of treats. According to this source, the origin of the Easter Bunny may be traced to “early pagan celebrations” of “springtime renewal of life and fertility as well as the goddess of dawn and spring, Eastre." Some of these celebrations and myths were adopted and modified by early missionaries to make it easier to win over converts.

Like Santa Claus and the tooth fairy, the Easter Bunny is soon relegated to the dustbin of childhood stories as kids grow up, mature and develop the ability to easily separate fantasy from reality, no matter how appealing and comforting those fantasies might be. Unfortunately, many of their parents persist in beliefs that are equally outlandish long after they have grown up. Somehow the will to believe is so strong that it defies reality.

I am reminded of this when I saw the recent Pew Research report on the number of Americans drawn to “New Age” beliefs, particularly that 41% of adults believe in psychics. Now, I’ve written about psychics before, giving examples of how their annual predictions are consistently wrong, how those who claim to have the psychic power have been discredited again and again, and how they have been convicted for defrauding people. But no matter how often someone explains the techniques of hot and cold readings, no matter how often psychics are embarrassed or proven wrong, the fantasy survives and believers continue to be swindled.

The latest attempt to dissuade believers (February 25) comes from this rather long (21-minute), but quite amusing video from John Oliver. The subtitle on YouTube is “Psychics may seem harmless and fun on TV, but they can make a lot of money by exploiting vulnerable people.” In fact, it’s a $2.2 billion industry. 

This video has had almost 7 million views, and you would think the word would get out. However, when you turn on daytime TV or use a search engine to find out more about psychic powers, people selling the idea that these powers are real overwhelmingly dominate the information posted. As is the case in most social media situations, misinformation overpowers the truth serving up enough credulous customers to keep about 100,000 self-employed psychics in business.

When magicians appear on the stage or on television, they describe what they do as illusions. They are admittedly lying to the audience, trying to fool everyone with misdirection and slight of hand. When the show is over, people go home understanding that it was all a trick but wondering how they did it – what mechanisms, mirrors, technology or fancy moves were involved? What didn’t I see?

When psychics appear, they expect everyone to believe that they can predict the future or can communicate with the dead. When the show is over, people go home, sometimes in shock or with renewed grief, thinking it was real. This is dishonest on the part of the performer and the height of gullibility on the part of the audience. They don’t try to figure out what tricks were involved. They believe!

That’s why magicians are so good at debunking psychics, but how many times will it take? And how will America survive when 4 out of 10 voters are so easily duped into believing in a notion no more real than the Easter Bunny. (Note: Politicians and the news media don’t call it illusion or misdirection either, although it sometimes is.)

The Paranormal

Is there any logical reason to believe in the claims of ESP and other paranormal powers? A few reasons come to mind to support skepticism.

First, I ran across this long list on Wikipedia. It shows a number of prizes offered, past and present, for proof of paranormal powers under controlled conditions. Many of the prizes were in the hundreds of thousands of dollars. The last column shows the outcome as “unclaimed” for all but two. The participants disputed those two but still failed to collect the prize.

If people really had psychic powers, you would expect to see a line at some of these tests. It would be easy money and vindication from all the skeptics.

But the catch is that they must show their skills under controlled conditions. That means, among other things, no outside help, no hidden wires or microphones and no hints from testers. The last is particularly frustrating to those who practice cold reading, a technique of throwing out general statements looking for encouragement from credulous customers and letting them lead the reader to a plausible story. Without these aids and distractions, everyone fails.

People also try to assign some magical force to coincidence. Something unusual or unexpected happens and they automatically think the universe is sending them a message. It reminds me of a feature on an Oprah show years ago about a young boy and young girl who were best friends in a Russian orphanage. They were adopted separately but were reunited by accident in a restaurant in Michigan. The audience was amazed, asking themselves “What are the odds?”

Critical thinking tells us that although this particular occurrence was unusual and heartwarming, the odds of the producers of the Oprah Show looking for and finding any such extraordinary situation in a country with a population of over 330 million, each one eager to share stories of notable coincidences, borders on certainty. Social media proves that it is very likely that several unusual coincidences arise somewhere (and get posted) almost constantly. When you dream of a loss and something remotely resembling it happens, it is attributed to ESP. When nothing happens, there is no coincidence, and the dream is forgotten or discounted as just another bad dream. In the case of the “dream-come-true,” it is comforting to be able to feel some sense of control or connection.

Another example is represented by the man in the moon. The shadows on the moon’s surface are interpreted by the brain to resemble something familiar. Other cultures have seen a rabbit, the silhouette of a woman, a frog, a moose, a buffalo, or a dragon, instead of a face. This tendency to reinterpret random shapes as real pictures is called pareidolia. It was responsible a few years ago for the excitement over the face on Mars where a certain rock under certain lighting conditions looked like a human head. The same phenomenon is at work when someone sees Jesus or Elvis burned onto their toast or in a potato chip.

The question always comes up why people with real psychic powers don’t just go to Las Vegas and use their powers to win big at the roulette wheel. The answer provided is that people with those powers are too ethical to use them for such base purposes. They are more interested in using their powers to benefit humanity.

But couldn’t they benefit humanity a lot more by using their roulette winnings to set up charitable organizations? Couldn’t they benefit humanity more by warning of impending disasters? Where were all the psychics when the twin towers were destroyed or when the Mandalay Bay shooter was smuggling guns into the hotel? There must have been at least a small ripple in the ether. Being home to carefully calculated odds, Las Vegas is far more worried about shooters than they are about psychics.