The reasoning mistake that Yvain and a lot of people here are making is: they think that if someone is scared in a supposedly haunted house there must be a believe in ghosts hidden somewhere inside his brain. What happens in reality is that the mind is hardwired to be scared when certain conditions are met. Being out in the dark is scary, not because you have a believe in ghosts but because there used to be predators roaming about in the ancestral environment and so the brain triggers accordingly. Now this whole ghost issue is probably a post-factum rationalization. Our verbal reasoning just pops out with an explanation of why we are scared(I was scared without a reason so I must have a believe in ghosts somewhere in my mind!). The real reason is below the surface and inacessible because we lack the ability for introspection.

I did a similar experiment on myself when I went on an organized trip to Israel. When we stopped at the Whaling (Western) Wall, I decided to test out my rationality. As you know, you're suppose to write down a wish on a piece of paper and put it in the wall i.e. another way of praying. I decided to write down "I wish my family would die in 2 weeks," and put it in the wall to see if I can do it.

To my surprise, I did feel a bit weird, a little anxious, but after a while I was fine. It is hard to overcome the emotions induced by our biases, but can be done with practice.

Just curious, would anyone not write the note (that I wrote)? Assuming you'd be compensated for your effort to write it and put it in the wall.

Has anyone had the opposite experience where a rational realization has an immediate emotional impact? For example, as a child I was quite afraid of the dark and would have to switch lights off in a particular order to ensure I was never subjected to too much darkness. I vividly remember the exact moment I overcame this fear. I was in the bathroom at the sink trying to avoid looking in the mirror because I had just watched a horror movie involving mirrors. It suddenly occurred to me that all my life I had been looking in the mirror without fear and that nothing had changed except my own disposition. This epiphany rushed through me. I suddenly realized that all such "supernatural" things were my own superstitions and not "out there" in the world. The world was concrete and could not change in inexplicable, "supernatural" ways (the concept of which was almost completely associated with camera trickery in movies for me - i.e., if it was dark something might happen, if I look away and look back something might be there, etc). I immediately lost my fear of the dark and it never returned. It could be, of course, that this loss of fear had been building over time and only in this moment did I manage to disassociate the rituals I had built around it, etc, rather than it being the case that this rational epiphany led to my loss of fear.

There are no ghosts, but there are things besides ghosts to be afraid of. Haunted houses are approximately equivalent to abandoned houses, and abandoned houses may contain human criminals, wild animals, infestations, and other unknown dangers. Ghosts are a psychological stand-in for risks that you aren't individually aware of.

I recall a study (unfortunately I don't have a citation handy) which looked into the environmental factors which produce unease and make people believe that areas are haunted. The main ones were low light, cold drafts, and unidentifiable sounds - all things which, at least in the ancestral environment, could indicate a place that is dangerous.

Is it silly to be scared by a horror movie, since it's just a made-up story? It seems like the same kind of effect - there must be some level of cognition that isn't affected by the "no, it's just a made-up story" filter and simply reacts to what's going through your head and senses.

(For example, consider this classic "test of faith in science": hold a pendulum's bob up to your nose, release it, then let it swing back at you. Because energy is conserved, the bob won't break your nose on the return trip - but good luck overriding the reflex to move your face away.)

Another thing to consider is the fact that being tired, or "half-asleep", or in that twilight state one might manage to maintain when getting up to use the restroom or fetch water at night, is different from being in a state of normal waking consciousness.

Even if the skeptics attempting to spend the night in the "haunted" house don't plan on actually sleeping, unless they're already night-shift workers or have otherwise pre-configured their body clocks so that they'll be awake all night, they are likely to at some point during the night start suffering impaired judgment. I suspect that the nearer a person gets physiologically to a state where their brain might initiate dreaming, the more difficult it becomes to maintain rationality.

I've noticed that when I get up at night after having been asleep, even in my own familiar apartment, I have a type and level of wariness that is not present during my normal waking conscious state. E.g., I find myself reluctant to stare into mirrors or peer behind the shower curtain, or look out the window, and I also find myself practically running back to bed after getting up because of an unnerving feeling that something might &qu... (read more)

Certainty in the rational conclusion is how I overcame a number of irrational fears. The fear has actually gone away with practice. But generally, the point is valid, as there are just preprogrammed things to which your organism reacts, and this is not necessarily a statement about you. In other cases, you probably should follow the urge, if the context itself is valuable to you. For example, it might be inhumane to not flinch from the sight of dead bodies, even if you know that they are just a very realistic illusion produced by a computer program.

So although it's correct to say that the skeptics' emotions overwhelmed their rationality, they wouldn't have those emotions unless they thought on some level that ghosts were worth getting scared about.

I disagree. We have the emotions because our brain is designed to react with alarm to nearby strange sounds. It has nothing to do with ghosts. It's simply the primitive brain circuitry firing.

Regarding the fan did you read this section? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death#Fan-related_hyperthermia_research It seems that in fact a fan can cause death, a... (read more)

I don't think it is so much magical thinking or superstition as it is that emotions tend to get aligned with beliefs, but it takes time. And to realign your emotions you need to "deprogram" the now-unconscious memories causing the fear. Just how often do you get the opportunity to face the fear of ghosts that you caught from ghost stories and horror movies when you were younger?

I watched too much Twilight Zone and Outer Limits and so on myself - despite being more at home in the dark than anyone else I have ever met, I still have a visceral fee... (read more)

The haunted rationalist is probably an example of a physiological response tied to a shared cultural delusion. In strange places, when we are alone, we often can feel nervous or fearful. I remember feeling this way when I was alone in our church growing up, or when I was alone in our own house for the first time as a teenager.

There's probably a physiological reason for this. Perhaps we produce more adrenaline when left alone after a period of close cohabitation with others. This would be a useful evolutionary trait allowing us to be more aware of our s... (read more)

If I believed in ghosts and wanted to investigate a haunted mansion I think it would be in my best interest to persuade myself temporarily to not believe in ghosts for the length of the investigation. In fact, I'd benefit only if I turned myself into a Narnia-style sceptic about them (one who wouldn't believe or alieve in them in spite of the evidence). Given what I think are the rules of how ghosts are supposed to work [1] I would assume that a ghost out to kill me couldn't do so by physical violence (e.g., lifting and throwing a kitchen knife -- unless i... (read more)