Virtually all known human cultures possess beliefs in the paranormal. This may at first seem maladaptive—how could belief in the unreal be sufficiently advantageous that it would have survived the rigors of human evolution in the all-too-real world of past ages?
Such beliefs may have yielded evolutionary advantages. Although the interaction of culture and human evolution is complex, it is certainly possible that shared paranormal beliefs within any given culture, such as shared veneration of ancestral spirits or god-kings, might have yielded a coalescent group loyalty that would be useful, physically and politically, in dealings with other competing cultures. This might very well have resulted in a selective bias toward dissociative processes, leading to success in those cultures that indulge in such beliefs.
But even if this is the case, a significant psychological question arises—one especially true for the modern world, in which access to scientific information is effectively unparalleled historically— How are such beliefs maintained in the minds of individuals, within any given culture? Why do individual people harbor bizarre beliefs?
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