ABSTRACT
Interpretations of events around us are ordinarily accurate enough to get us through our daily lives. But sometimes, especially when a situation is unfamiliar or ambiguous, our understanding of it can be flawed, or at least at odds with others understanding of it. At many Peace Corps sites, a great deal of time is wasted in trying to correct false perceptions. Ellen Langer argued that the more similar a chance situation is to a skill situation, the more one tends to believe that one has control over the chance situation. Indeed, most social psychologists are skeptical of extrasensory perception. Unlike many hard scientists, they are occupationally familiar with the types of confounds that can creep into ESP experiments with people. The research literature on parapsychology is large, puzzling, and subject to intense debate. It is hard, in general, to produce a repeatable, coherent set of relationships between and within various domains of extrasensory perception.
