The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish path to romance. Download chapter one for free at Dr kenner.com and amazon.com. That's the prize, a free buffet. Oh well, no, actually, it's not a buffet. It's a special reception at 10 o'clock in the penthouse conference room where a spectacular once-in-a-lifetime opportunity awaits you.

What do you think?

I think it's some kind of scam.

Oh, good, a scam. We'll do it.

There's a jackpot out there that's available to anyone. It's a cool million dollars to anyone who can scientifically prove the paranormal. The money is waiting. It's in the bank, and it’s put there by a former magician. Actually, he's called the Amazing Randi, who wants to help protect you from being taken in by frauds.

Now, what fraudulent claims are out there? With me to discuss this is Dr. Buckner, a part-time educational consultant who received his PhD in educational leadership from Georgia State University. He's the executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism, and he received the award for excellence in teaching from the Georgia State University Foundation in past years. And I want to invite you to the show.

Thank you. I'm honored to be on your show. I do have to make a slight correction in what you just said. It turns out that being the executive director of the Council for Secular Humanism is very much a full-time job, and I haven't had time to do any consulting. That's in my past.

Okay, well, you had a very interesting past.

Oh, I've had a checkered career. But anyway…

From teaching statistics to working in the criminal justice system. I mean, that's quite a range, but you have a very strong science background. So with that, tell me about this idea of the paranormal. Why do people love the paranormal, the psychics, the ESP? Why is it so popular?

It's hard to know for sure, and I think different people have different motivations and different things that drive them. But I really think the most important explanation of all of this, and I don’t want to be rude to people, but I think most of it is pretty foolish. I think the basic driving force behind all of that is that people, just we human beings, have evolved to want to have explanations for everything. And if we can't explain something, we cast about until we find something that comes as close as possible to what we think is an explanation, and then we get devoted to it. We just can't stand the idea that there's something we don't know or can't know.

So that would explain something. When my husband and I went to Santorini—it's way over in Europe—and they had a huge volcanic explosion, people thought it was the gods getting angry, because they didn’t understand what volcanoes were. So they were sacrificing children. And they wanted an explanation, and the explanation they happened on led to their deaths. They were killing their own children, murdering their own children.

Well, irrationality has caused that sort of difficulty in many, many cases throughout human history. Of course, it’s not just that we want answers. We also want to believe that we, individually and as a species, are important. And of course, we are important to ourselves. And I want everyone to understand that secular humanists believe that human beings are important, and their rights are important, and they should take care of their relations with each other as well as themselves—that ethics matter. But that does not tell us anything about whether there’s anything supernatural or anything beyond the life that we know about and that we can measure.

Okay, so help me understand why people would be attracted to, let’s just pick one of those—a psychic.

Well, you know, one reason, probably the main reason, that people are interested in psychics is they just can’t let go of the fact that somebody they care about has died, and they can’t talk to them anymore. And if they can have a psychic tell them, you know, “I can talk to your beloved uncle and pass a message from him to you, and he says everything is okay in the next life, and everything is going to be okay for you,” that can be very comforting. I think it’s false comfort. I think it can be quite dangerous when people believe that something like this is happening, and in fact, it’s not. I would hasten to add, although I think some of the television psychics and the ones that have made the most money and are most successful are probably frauds and don’t really believe any of this stuff themselves, but are just taking advantage. I don’t question that there are people who really do believe they’re communicating with the dead and who think they are able to pass on messages from the beyond. They get reinforced when they do what amount to cold readings. They have a conversation with somebody, and that person is saying, “Oh yes, that’s true about my so-and-so.” And they say things that are hits, and people notice the hits. They don’t notice the ones that are not hits.

Could you give me an example of that? Could you do a quick cold read on me?

Well, I’m not particularly good at it, but I could probably attempt to do something like that. I could say, “Well, I sense, Dr. Kenner, that you’re very interested in education, and that your concerns in this life reflect things that have happened to some of your ancestors and people that you have known, and that there’s probably somebody who’s passed on who really wants you to encourage people to be rational, and that person’s trying to send a message to you now to let you know you’re doing the right thing.”

Oh, I can’t wait to get it.

Unfortunately, I just made it up.

I know, I know. There are two terms. One is a cold read. You say so much that there's bound to be something true in it, and you slip in some flattery.

Yeah, it’s a lot of that. And I really think that can be done unconsciously, on both people’s part. I think it’s possible for somebody who honestly thinks they’re communicating with some very illusory and difficult-to-pin-down other world to believe that they’re actually learning something and saying something important, and that something is coming through them when it’s not. It’s really surprising when you think about it. If psychics really can do things, then why didn’t they tell us where Chandra Levy’s body was before she was found, or why didn’t they warn us about 9/11?

Sure, I know that it offends religious people to have religion lumped into the same sort of thing as the paranormal. But for me, it’s very much part and parcel of the same irrational thinking.

I think people love using their minds well, and they can sense when they’re doing it just based on a feeling without evidence versus based on evidence. John Stossel did something very fascinating on a show called The Power of Belief. He went into a group of students, and he gave them all envelopes with their horoscopes. And people were reading it and saying, “This is so much like me,” or “This is pretty close to capturing the essence of me.” And then he told them all that they had the same horoscope, and that it was a horoscope of a mass murderer.

I had heard of that variation. I know the Amazing Randi did something similar, where everybody got the same one and didn’t realize it. It’s been done before, but it works very well. People just assume that, by golly, this is so important. When I was a kid, somebody did handwriting analysis on a group of young folks. I was part of a church youth group. This person was telling me that I was sensitive and that this loop in my ‘T’ showed that I was open, and all kinds of things. Well, you know, I wanted to hear that. It was good stuff. And even the things he said, “You have to be careful not to be so-and-so,” in an indirect way, were flattering.

So it’s hard to be a good critical thinker. It’s difficult for all of us. All of us human beings have a tendency to hear what we want to hear, or hear what we’re afraid of, instead of what makes sense.

When you know the value of critical thinking, it’s not hard, because you love being in touch with the facts, with the evidence, and seeing your own mind work. Actually, it provides—and this is what a lot of people don’t understand—if you use critical thinking and you stress rationality, you have a richer, fuller life.

And I want to thank you for joining me, Dr. Buckner.

This is Dr. Ed Buckner.

Thank you.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com.

Here’s an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner and co-author Dr. Edwin Locke:

Wanting appreciation for your good qualities and actions, which we call wanting visibility, is the opposite of wanting approval to eliminate your self-doubts. The essence of love is not filling a self-esteem void, but valuing genuine good traits in one another. Parents can greatly harm a child by acting irrationally and convincing the child that whatever goes wrong is the child’s fault. Parents can also instill self-doubt and anxiety by not showing love and concern for their child. Some poorly treated children spend their lives trying to undo the damage by getting others to parent them, often their partners. This does not work. You need to learn to value yourself, perhaps with professional help.

You can download chapter one for free by going to DrKenner.com and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.