When investigating a case we often find people who are eager to express a particular degree of faith, personal belief or superstition about the matter at hand. Many times they simply want to share their views or offer an explanation to what they believed may have happened but, before long, the explanation evolves into a conversation based on primarily personal beliefs and opinion. Can a person’s beliefs affect the data collected on an investigation? In a word, yes.

            To start, we usually find that if an individual’s parents were of a particular set of beliefs that individual will be of a similar set of beliefs as well, simply tailored to fit their personal outlook on life. If the parents of an individual were from an area of Europe that held beliefs in vampires then that individual may also be prone to believe in such things. If the parents were of a particularly religious bent then the individual may experience what they interpret as religious phenomenon such as angels, demons, visions of saints and so forth.

            Perception of an individual’s external environment comes from their internal environment, their psychology, which will ultimately play upon their interpretation of external events. This perception would have initially been created and built upon during the formative childhood years and reinforced as the individual progressed through life into adulthood. Various events, reinforcing the individual’s beliefs, are then attributed to the external powers that the individual is inclined to believe in. In many cases such as this the individual has, from birth, been taught to rely on undistinguished but preconceived ideas about how the world works.

            These superstitious or religious beliefs, often deeply rooted, are an integral part of that person’s psychology and generally comprise a certain component of their personal faith or beliefs. These personal convictions can, and sometimes do, create a certain predisposed outlook on events within that individual’s mind that would seem to agree with or reinforce that individual’s ideas about the world around them. This psychologically “hard wired” predisposition causes the individual to be prone to a subconscious association of external events that they believe connects to their own circle of beliefs. This perception of the events, combine with their own subjective interpretation, allows the individual to assign a meaning and value to the events within their own mind. This interpretation may skew the reality of the event, causing it to become, in the individuals mind, somehow associated with their particular set of personal beliefs.

            A hypothetical example could be that a family from Eastern Europe immigrates to the United States. In their cultural folklore each house had a spirit living within it that would guard the structure but would also play mischievous pranks on the occupants. In their new home the family finds that doors that are closed would open by themselves and that they would hear water running in the bathroom at night. They would then attribute these “paranormal occurrences” to the guardian spirit of the house playing tricks on them.

            Looking beyond the cultural folklore of a mischievous sprite; it would be surmised by many investigators that the family had moved into a new home and was unfamiliar with its specific peculiarities. With little work it could be easily found that the doors that opened by themselves would be due to nothing more “supernatural” than a faulty lockset and an out-of-square door frame while the running water in the bathroom at night was only a leaky toilet valve that went unnoticed while the family was not at home during the day.

            It is here, when superstition or personal beliefs cloud a situation that we are investigating, that we can apply critical thinking and, with assistance from Ockham’s razor, we can “cut through” much of the subjective material to reveal the facts of the matter at hand and effectively expose the reality of the matter without embellishing the data with subjective personal opinion or belief.