Supernatural Sociology: Americans’ Beliefs by Race/Ethnicity, Gender, and Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The authors analyze the 2020–2021 Chapman University Survey of American Fears ( n = 1,035), the most recent nationally representative survey to examine fears of and beliefs about supernatural and paranormal phenomena, including ghosts, hauntings, zombies, psychics, telekinesis, Bigfoot or Sasquatch, Atlantis, and extraterrestrial visitation. This research examines how supernatural beliefs vary by race/ethnicity, gender, and education after adjustment for other demographic characteristics and religiosity. There were five gender differences, such that women were more likely than men to believe in or fear all nonmaterial or spiritual supernatural phenomena, as well as Atlantis. People with a bachelor’s degree or higher were less likely to believe in extraterrestrial visitation, hauntings, Bigfoot or Sasquatch, and Atlantis. There were also six beliefs and fears for which racial/ethnic differences emerged. The results highlight how gender, education, and race/ethnicity are strongly related to complex belief systems, including supernatural phenomena.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".