Psychology Professor Ian McGregor sheds light on human belief in Friday the 13th, fate, heaven and hell, and Bigfoot?

Psychology Professor Ian McGregor describes the similarity between believing in Bigfoot and believing in The One.

Columnist Micah Toub in The Globe on Mail on May 12 wrote:

This somewhat unsettling information was delivered to me not by the Weekly World News, but by Ian McGregor, a York University psychology researcher [Faculty of Health]. With assistance from his grad student Chelsea Ferriday, McGregor has been studying what those in his field call “compensatory conviction”. I had been curious to find out about the usefulness of pinning one’s romantic hopes and dreams on things like astrology, synchronicity and fate. As it turns out, there is some.

In his lab, McGregor has his guests perform activities and answer questions that are meant to put them in an anxious mood. He then asks them to rate their level of confidence that they’ve found, as he puts it, “their soul mate or the person they are meant to be with.”

When they were rattled, subjects consistently rated their current relationship higher on the magic scale, using their partner as a balm to ease anxiety about other matters.

“If you’re feeling uncertain about a particular domain in your life – economics or academics or family, for instance – you’ll find another domain to find certainty,” McGregor explained. “Relationships can become an attractive domain for irrational conviction.”

Similarly uncertain subjects, McGregor told me, also calm themselves by exaggerating beliefs in supernatural phenomena, like heaven and hell. And yeah, Bigfoot.

. . .

In hindsight, it seems somewhat silly, but according to McGregor, a certain amount of silliness can be a good thing. He actually called it an “optimal margin of illusion,” which will also be the title of my first album. “People have a lot of illusions to protect them from anxiety,” McGregor told me. “But sometimes, positive illusions can actually come true. Sometimes people eventually develop better relationships because of them.” In other words, if your belief in astrology makes you optimistic about your current love interest, that superstitious optimism might be the thing that turns the two of you into a scientific fact.

For those who place themselves firmly on the skeptical side when it comes to the universal energy flow’s influence on love, McGregor pointed out that this doesn’t mean you’re immune to illusion. “People can delude themselves about how great their partner is and how great they are,” he said, adding that these people who put too much faith in the awesomeness of their own will can become equally out of touch with reality.

He went even further: “The personal confidence illusions can spin into narcissism, where the person is living in their own mind, leaving a wake of rubble behind them as they flex their grandiose muscles.”

Seriously Professor? Bigfoot? Love it when serious people like Professor McGregor associate Bigfoot with superstition.

There's nothing paranormal about Bigfoot; we have real evidence and hair samples of unknown primates, in NORTH AMERICA! However, since a Bigfoot specimen (i.e. "corpse") hasn't been recovered, we have nothing to compare these hair sample data to. Science have been wrong before. Just like when scientists studying in Madagascar were shocked to find new bones of a fish they believed to have been extinct for millions of years. The natives laughed at them and said 'We eat them all the time!' when the scientists asked how they came to have these impossible bones.

And remember the "tribe of hairy women" that turned out to be Gorillas?

As a reference, the growing list of professional scientists that have invested considerable time and resources examining Bigfoot data as part of their profession are as follows: 

Dr. Bernard Heuvelmans (zoologist, France)
Dr. W. Henner Fahrenbach (research scientist, Oregon Regional Primate Center)
Dr. Grover Krantz (physical anthropologist - retired, Washington State University)
Dr. John Napier (primatologist, University of London)
Dr. Frank E. Poirier (paleoanthropologist/primatologist, Ohio State University)
Dr. Jeff Meldrum (anatomist, Idaho State University)
Dr. John Bindernagel (wildlife biologist, former wildlife advisor for United Nations)
Dr. D. W. Grieve (anatomist, Royal Free Hospital School of Medicine, London)
Dr. John Bodley (anthropologist, Washington State University)
Dr. Dmitri D. Donskoy (biomechanics, Russia)
Dr. Robert Pyle (ecologist,Yale University alumnus)
Dr. J. Richard Greenwell (mammalogist, International Wildlife Museum, Tucson)
Dr. William Montagna (primatologist, Regional Primate Research Center)
Valentin B. Sapunov (biologist, Leningrad State Univeristy, Russia)
Vladimir Markotic (physical anthropologist, University of Calgary)
Jeff Glickman (computer scientist, North American Science Institute)
Dmitri Bayanov (hominologist, Darwin Museum, Russia)
Jim Hewkin (wildlife biologist, formerly with Oregon Dept. of Fish and Wildlife)
Dr. Marie-Jeanne Koffman, aka Dr. Zh. I Kofman (scientist, Russia)
Dr. R. Lynn Kirlin (professor, University of Wyoming)
Dr. William Saxe Wihr (department of anthropology, Portland Community College)
Dr. LeRoy Fish (wildlife ecologist, retired)