Citation

Although belief in paranormal phenomena has long been studied as if it  were a psychological trait, many commentators recently have preferred to  define beliefs as a psychological state. Somewhat surprisingly, the  psychometric decomposition of a belief into state and trait components  has yet to be undertaken. To this end, we invited a sample of 584  American adults to complete a questionnaire measure of paranormal and  traditional religious beliefs on four occasions at monthly intervals. An  application of latent state-trait models to the data showed both  paranormal belief and traditional religious belief to be predominantly  trait-like constructs, with a small but significant state-like  component. These findings may have specific implications for the  assessment of paranormal beliefs, as well as general implications for a  state theory of beliefs.