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October 31, 2010

Scientific evidence for psychic powers?

Jerry Coyne in Why Evolution is True:

ScreenHunter_01 Oct. 31 16.10 A respected peer-reviewed journal in psychology, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, is about to publish a paper that presents scientific evidence for precognition.  The paper, by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, is called “Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect,” and you can download a preprint on his webpage.  I’ve scanned the paper only briefly, and am posting about it in hopes that some of you will read it carefully and provide analyses, either here or elsewhere.

The paper purports to show that a choice that you make in a computer test can be influenced by stimuli you receive after you’ve already made the choice.  This implies you have some way, consciously or unconsciously, of detecting things that haven’t yet happened.  In an article in Psychology Today, “Have scientists finally discovered evidence for psychic phenomena?“, psychologist Melissa Burkley at Oklahoma State University summarizes two of Bem’s studies:

However, Bem’s studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology – studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times – and simply reversed their chronological order.

More here.

Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 11:11 AM | Permalink

Comments

If this effect were more widespread, there'd be no buyers remorse...

Posted by: mcd | Oct 31, 2010 6:00:51 PM

I would comment, but I see that I already did so tomorrow.

Posted by: J.Hawkins | Oct 31, 2010 10:09:59 PM

Fact, of the testimonial kind: Some of us have a knack for grooving with the randomizing.

Posted by: Jan B. | Nov 1, 2010 12:22:07 AM


"But before we have explanation, we must have replication. Now that this result is in the open, it’s up to other scientists to see if similar studies give similar results. Only then should we start worrying about the possibility of unknown “powers.”" Analysis of the study is almost an irrelevancy unless there is replication. Let's see the replication.

J. Hawkins: I have post-cognition. I know what I did yesterday.

Posted by: Norman Costa | Nov 1, 2010 9:46:47 AM

There is abundant evidence for small effects of precognition and telepathy. Some of it is junk science, to be sure, but the work of Robert Jahn http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/jahn.html and Jessica Utts http://www.ics.uci.edu/~jutts/azpsi.html is meticulously rigorous. They are not alone. Elizabeth Mayer was a psychology prof at Berkeley who chronicles her 180-degree about face on the reality of psychic phenomena in a well-documented and highly readable book.
http://www.amazon.com/Extraordinary-Knowing-Science-Skepticism-Inexplicable/dp/0553382233/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1288619981&sr=8-3

The only thing new in the Bem article is that the APA is finally making a cautious opening to a reality they have denied for decades.

Posted by: Josh Mitteldorf | Nov 1, 2010 10:06:35 AM

Everybody involved in this fiasco should be condemned to remedial classes in experimental statistics and error. If anything, this paper best serves as a cautionary warning to people who take other psychology papers too seriously. Most of these people do not know what they are doing.

Posted by: X | Nov 1, 2010 11:33:03 AM

Psychology - one notch up from astrology.

Posted by: J.Hawkins | Nov 1, 2010 11:44:35 AM

Coyne: "...posting about it in hopes that some of you will read it carefully and provide analyses..."

X: "Everybody involved in this fiasco should be condemned to remedial classes in experimental statistics and error."

Hmm. Guess not.

Posted by: steambadger | Nov 1, 2010 3:14:11 PM

Here's a nice analysis linked to from one of the comments.

Posted by: billy | Nov 1, 2010 6:33:39 PM

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