David Marks (psychologist) - Parapsychology and Skepticism

Parapsychology and Skepticism

With the late Denis Dutton Marks co-founded the New Zealand Skeptics in 1986. In his work on parapsychology Marks adopts a sceptical analysis of paranormal claims. For example, Marks said that the original claims of remote viewing experiments were based on flawed experimental procedures. Marks also said that Uri Geller was able to hoodwink scientists, journalists and the many members of the public with a series of simple but audacious sleights of hand. Marks' book, co-authored with the late Richard Kammann, The Psychology of the Psychic (Marks & Kammann 1980; 2nd edn. Marks 2000; Forewords to both editions by Martin Gardner) describes these case studies of paranormal claims together with a set of principles for explaining how people may believe so strongly in paranormal claims, such as psychological phenomena for the generation of paranormal beliefs is subjective validation, a process through which people find a correspondence between randomly paired events, including coincidences (Marks, 2000).