How Media Create Ghosts

Abstract

The subject of the article is the representation of ideas about the paranormal in the media. This issue is often brought up by psychologists, who directly point to the leading role of the media in the formation of such representations in present-day time. The author points out the kinship of research in the field of “paranormal psychology” with the studies of induced phenomena by Vladimir Bekhterev, who directly pointed out the role of mass media in the formation of induced ideas. The empirical part of the work consists in the analysis of a sample of media reports on the presence of ghosts, catalogued by the author. The main research question is how the features of the localization of the ghost phenomenon stated in the media can provoke its representation. The author concludes that the media are not only conductors of paranormal ideas, as noted by other researchers, but also partially demonstrate the causal relationships underlying the formation of paranormal ideas. The author underlines the close connection between a particular location, its history and the very report of paranormal phenomena in it. The author identifies the main descriptive techniques of the media associated with paranormal ideas, as well as shows the specifics of their distribution in the media environment. In fact, the article is intended to fill a kind of “information vacuum”, which has formed in the studies of ideas about the paranormal both in the Russian and foreign scientific environment, which makes this study very relevant.

Keywords

• paranormal
• ghost
• media psychology
• formation of cultural objects in media
• cognitive distortions
• cultural memory
• perception of environmental objects
• suggestible states