Christopher French

Introduction

Christopher Charles French (born 6 April 1956) is a British psychologist and one of the principal figures in modern anomalistic psychology, the sub-discipline that tries to explain reports of paranormal experience in terms of ordinary psychological and physical processes rather than supernatural ones. He is Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, and founder and head of its Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit, which he established in 2000. He is a Chartered Psychologist, a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and a Fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.

French's central subject is not whether ghosts exist but why so many people genuinely experience them. He has argued repeatedly that the prevalence of paranormal belief is itself a psychological finding worth taking seriously, whether or not the beliefs are true. His empirical work covers sleep paralysis, false memory, hauntings, alien abduction reports, out-of-body experiences, astrology and the placebo effects of alternative therapies. He has also been unusually candid about his own position: he was a believer in the paranormal into adulthood, became what he has called a dogmatic sceptic, and has since argued that parapsychology is a genuine science even though he personally does not accept that psi phenomena exist.

Early Life and Education

French was born in England and has described a childhood fear of the dark and an appetite for science fiction, UFO literature and ghost stories. By his own account he entered psychology as an undergraduate in the 1970s still broadly sympathetic to paranormal claims.

He took his first degree in psychology at the University of Manchester, graduating in the 1970s. He then completed a doctoral degree on brain function and hemispheric differences, a topic in the cognitive and biological mainstream of the period, rather than anything to do with the paranormal. The decisive shift came part-way through that doctorate, when he read James Alcock's Parapsychology: Science or Magic?. French has said it was the first sceptical treatment of these topics he had encountered and that he found it convincing; he has also said that at the time he had previously regarded believers as irrational and probably unintelligent, an attitude he later abandoned.

After completing his doctorate he taught adult education classes, where requests from his students led him to address astrology and extrasensory perception directly. That teaching experience shaped the communication style he has used ever since: explaining the mechanisms behind an experience rather than dismissing the person who reports it.

Academic and Professional Career

French joined the Department of Psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London, in 1985. He has said that his interest in anomalistic topics was tolerated rather than encouraged by colleagues and that for years he ran a parallel programme of more conventional work on cognition and emotion, including automated assessment and collaborative research with his wife. It was roughly a decade after arriving at Goldsmiths that he judged he knew enough to build a full undergraduate module on the psychology of paranormal belief, which became extremely popular with students.

In 2000 he founded the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit at Goldsmiths, one of the first research groups in Europe devoted specifically to the psychological study of paranormal claims. Under its remit the unit has pursued two strands: formulating and experimentally testing non-paranormal explanations for apparently paranormal experiences, and directly testing paranormal claims under controlled conditions. French retired from full-time teaching in 2020 and holds the title of Professor Emeritus.

Alongside the academic work he has been a prominent science communicator. He served as editor-in-chief of the UK magazine The Skeptic and oversaw its relaunch in 2009, co-edited the anthology Why Statues Weep: The Best of The Skeptic, wrote a column for The Guardian from 2009 to 2016, and has appeared frequently on British television and radio as a sceptical commentator. He is a patron of Humanists UK.

Major Contributions to Psychology

Anomalistic psychology as a research programme

French's principal contribution is institutional and methodological: he made the study of paranormal belief a respectable, teachable, fundable part of British psychology. The field's defining move is to treat the subjective reality of an experience as given and the paranormal interpretation as the thing to be explained. French has summarised the difference between his field and its rival by saying that parapsychologists start from the assumption that paranormal forces exist and look for evidence, while anomalistic psychologists start from the assumption that they probably do not and look for psychological explanations.

Sleep paralysis and the architecture of anomalous experience

Much of the unit's most cited work concerns sleep paralysis, a disruption of the sleep-wake cycle in which the mind wakes while the body remains immobilised. Its ingredients, paralysis, a sense of pressure on the chest, a felt presence, and vivid and often frightening hallucinations, map closely onto historical accounts of the incubus, of nocturnal visitation and of alien abduction. A review co-authored by French and colleagues examined 42 studies of variables associated with sleep paralysis and found associations with substance use, stress and trauma, genetic influence, sleep problems and symptoms of psychiatric illness, with particularly strong links to post-traumatic stress disorder and, to a lesser degree, panic disorder.

The broader argument is that a single underlying mechanism plus a cultural script can generate very different reported entities: a ghost in one tradition and an alien in another. French has said he was struck early on by hearing two men describe identical nocturnal experiences on different television programmes, one attributing it to a ghost and the other to an alien.

The cognitive correlates of belief

A third strand asks what distinguishes people who report paranormal experiences from those who do not. Across a series of studies French and his students found that believers and experients tend, on average, to score higher than sceptics on measures of dissociativity, fantasy proneness and temporal-lobe lability, and to show subtle biases in reasoning about randomness, probability and coincidence, such as extracting patterns from noise or judging personally meaningful coincidences too improbable to be chance. French is careful about how these results are framed. He does not present them as evidence of irrationality or of any deficit, and has repeatedly criticised his own earlier view that believers must be less intelligent. He treats the findings instead as exaggerations of universal tendencies: the same pattern-seeking machinery that makes ordinary inference possible can, under conditions of emotional arousal, ambiguity or sleep disruption, generate compelling impressions of agency and meaning.

False memory, suggestion and eyewitness testimony

A second strand applies mainstream memory research to paranormal and disputed claims. French and collaborators have shown how suggestion and social influence distort eyewitness reports: in one study participants watched a video of an apparently paranormal metal-bending demonstration and were far more likely to report that the key kept bending if a fake psychic or a confederate suggested that it did, with believers in the paranormal markedly more likely to report the effect than non-believers. Related survey work with clinical psychologists and hypnotherapists examined professional experience of recovered memory, satanic ritual abuse and dissociative identity disorder, documenting the contested territory where therapeutic practice and false memory intersect.

Testing the claims directly

French has also run controlled tests of ostensible psychic ability, on crystals, hauntings and mediumship. In a study of healing crystals, participants given a fake crystal reported as many sensations as those given a genuinely attuned one, consistent with an expectancy or placebo account. The "Haunt" project took the opposite route: rather than measuring a reputedly haunted location, it built an artificial one. Seventy-nine participants spent fifty minutes in a chamber in which infrasound and complex patterned electromagnetic fields were systematically varied. The environmental manipulations did not produce the predicted effects; what predicted anomalous sensations was instead the participants' prior belief and suggestibility.

Major Publications

• Anomalistic Psychology: Exploring Paranormal Belief and Experience (2014), with Anna Stone
• Why Statues Weep: The Best of The Skeptic (2009), co-edited
• The Science of Weird Shit: Why Our Minds Conjure the Paranormal (2024)
• Over 150 articles and chapters in journals including the British Journal of Psychology and the Journal of Abnormal Psychology

Impact and Legacy

French's influence is visible in the fact that anomalistic psychology now appears as an option in British psychology degree programmes and in the A-level psychology syllabus, and in the cohort of researchers he trained at Goldsmiths. His work has shifted public discussion of ghosts and abductions away from whether they are real and toward what experiences people are actually having.

The criticisms are real, and they come from both directions. From the parapsychological side, the biologist Rupert Sheldrake has argued that anomalistic psychology is a blunt weapon deployed in a generic way: it is true that human judgement is fallible and prone to bias, he says, but using that fact as a blanket explanation does not engage with the specific content of precognitive dreams or telepathic incidents, and nobody in the field appears to investigate where the explanation peters out. Sheldrake's sharper version of the objection is that for a committed sceptic the framework becomes defensive, wheeled out whenever inconvenient evidence appears. Parapsychologists have also pointed out that anomalistic psychology builds a negative conclusion into its starting assumptions, an asymmetry French has acknowledged and defended rather than denied.

French has answered in ways that have themselves attracted criticism. He has documented his own trajectory from a sceptic who regarded believers as irrational and possibly psychopathological, and believers in the paranormal as dangerous, to someone who maintains that parapsychology is a science rather than a pseudoscience. He attributes the change partly to professional relationships with parapsychologists such as Robert L. Morris and Caroline Watt and partly to an empirical review by Marie-Catherine Mousseau that found little evidence of the standard markers of pseudoscience, such as confirmation bias, an unchanging body of belief, reliance on anecdote or failure of self-correction. That position remains a minority one among sceptics, and several of his fellow campaigners have said publicly that it concedes too much. He also maintains that the unit's findings about cognitive bias apply to everyone, sceptics included, and that his own field is not exempt from the methodological problems that have affected psychology more broadly.

French has stated that he does not believe in telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition, that new evidence could in principle change his mind, and that he is not holding his breath.

Learn More

• Richard Wiseman
• Ray Hyman

References

• French, C. C., & Wilson, K. (2006). Incredible memories. The Skeptic.