lation between Neuroticism and paranormal beliefs. More spe-
cifically, Neuroticism is presumed to be most strongly corre-
lated with Superstition, Traditional religious beliefs and pos-
sibly Precognition, as those subscales imply a certain deter-
mination, predictability and a sense of control. However, Neu-
roticism has also been negatively related to Religious funda-
mentalism and Orthodoxy (Saroglou, 2002), making it diffi-
cult to formulate adequate predictions on the direction of this
relationship. Finally, a more precise hypothesis can be made
in regard to the Openness dimension. This dimension has been
the most important predictor of religiosity (Saucier & Skrzy-
pińska, 2006), and paranormal beliefs (Egan et al., 1999; Mac-
Donald, 2000; Smith et al., 2009) within the Five Factor Model.
Presumably, receptiveness to new ideas, approaches, and ex-
periences as captured by the Openness factor (McCrae & Co-
sta, 1997), leads away from traditionally rigid religious beliefs
and toward more stimulating beliefs and worldviews. We there-
fore expect Openness to be negatively related to Traditional
paranormal belief while positively related to all concepts regar-
ding Psi, Spirituality, Precognition, and Extraordinary life forms.
METHOD
Participants
The participants were 307 undergraduate students from the U-
niversity of Zagreb, of whom 88.3% were women. The average
age of participants was 21.9 years (SD = 2.5, range 19 – 45). All
participants were students of social and humanistic disciplines,
most of them studying psychology (N=217) and educational-re-
habilitation sciences (N=59). The majority (78.4%) reported
being Christian, with 16.1% being atheist or agnostic, and the
rest reported some other religious affiliation. The study was
conducted in classroom settings. Subjects were approached at
the beginning of the class and asked to participate in the stu-
dy. Participation was voluntary, and the subjects willing to par-
ticipate were given enough time to fill out included measures.
Although fairly common and comparable to most of the stud-
ies on this subject, we must note that this was a convenience
sample which could have an effect on the results.
Measures
Paranormal beliefs were measured using the Revised Para-
normal Belief Scale (RPBS) by Tobacyk (1988). The 26-item scale
provides a result on seven dimensions of paranormal beliefs:
Traditional religious belief (e.g. There is a devil), Psi (e.g. A per-
son's thoughts can influence the movement of a physical object),
Witchcraft (e.g. Witches do exist), Superstition (e.g. Black cats can
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MIKLOUŠIĆ, I., MLAČIĆ,
B., MILAS, G.:
PARANORMAL BELIEFS...
bring bad luck), Spiritualism (e.g.
Your mind and soul can leave
your body and travel), Extraordinary life forms (e.g.
The Loch
Ness monster of Scotland exists) and Precognition (e.g.
Astrology
is the way to accurately predict the future). The responses are
scored on a seven-point Likert scale. Higher rating indicates
stronger endorsement on all but one item from the Psi sub-
scale (23. Mind reading is not possible) which in turn needs to
be negatively scored (Tobacyk & Milford, 1983). The sum of all
items is indicative of a general tendency to adopt paranormal
belief, while subscales can be used to measure specific dimen-
sions of paranormal belief (Tobacyk, 1988). Since this was the
first use of this scale in Croatia, in order to assure the ade-
quacy of translation, a standard translation/back-translation
procedure was conducted by the authors. During this proce-
dure none of the items were perceived as culturally unreco-
gnizable and unfamiliar, therefore no items were replaced. The
only slight reformulation was in renaming the "Abominable
snowman of Tibet" to "Yeti", since the former has no direct
translation in Croatian.
Personality factors were assessed by a 50-item Internatio-
nal Personality Item Pool (IPIP, Goldberg et al., 2006; http://ipip.
ori.org/) aimed to measure Costa and McCrae's (1992) Five Fac-
tor Model. This measure consists of 50 short statements in
which every dimension: Neuroticism, Extraversion, Agreeable-
ness, Conscientiousness and Openness, are represented by 10
items. We decided to use the Five Factor oriented IPIP mea-
sure, in order to include the Openness dimension, which in
the Big Five structure is replaced by Intellect. Although there
is a significant overlap between the two dimensions (Saucier,
1992), we chose the former due to the number of existing stu-
dies regarding its relationship to the paranormal beliefs. The
IPIP measure was validated on a Croatian sample by Mlačić
and Goldberg (2007), while Gračanin, Kardum and Krapić
(2004) adapted the Openness scale. Both adaptations replicat-
ed previous findings on the dimensionality of the measures,
and showed high reliabilities of all the subscales on the Cro-
atian sample.
RESULTS
Factor structure of the RPBS (Tobacyk, 1988)
We focused on the exploration of the original Tobacyk's seven
factor structure using the principal axis factor analysis with
oblique rotation. In the original study by Tobacyk and Milford
(1983), the authors used varimax rotation in their analysis. How-
ever, due to subsequent criticism showing high scale intercor-
relations, along with lack of theoretical explanation which would
support the orthogonality (Lange et al., 2000; Lawrence et al.,
187
DRU[. ISTRA@. ZAGREB
GOD. 21 (2012),
BR. 1 (115),
STR. 181-201
MIKLOUŠIĆ, I., MLAČIĆ,
B., MILAS, G.:
PARANORMAL BELIEFS...