There is some evidence that those who believe in paranormal phenomena are also more likely to have pooer understanding of coincidences and random events. The famous experiment is one where subjects are asked to generate a pseudo random string of numbers - as if they were tossing a die, 100 hundred times in a row. Those with paranormal beliefs are more likely to produce a string which is non random in particulr ways. They have fewer than expected "co-incidence" substrings, eg 2two sixes occurring consecutively, or 1 followed by 2 followed by 3. This suggests that part of the reason for paranormal beliefs may be that people misunderstand how likely an event to occur by chance, so that when they see a number of co-incidences, they believe that there must be something behind it and it can't be down to chance.

Bagpuss