The decision may delight believers in so-called paranormal events, but it is already mortifying scientists. Advance copies of the paper, to be published this year in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, have circulated widely among psychological researchers in recent weeks and have generated a mixture of amusement and scorn.
The paper describes nine unusual lab experiments performed over the past decade by its author, Daryl J. Bem, an emeritus professor at Cornell, testing the ability of college students to accurately sense random events, like whether a computer program will flash a photograph on the left or right side of its screen. The studies include more than 1,000 subjects.
Some scientists say the report deserves to be published, in the name of open inquiry; others insist that its acceptance only accentuates fundamental flaws in the evaluation and peer review of research in the social sciences.
"It's craziness, pure craziness. I can't believe a major journal is allowing this work in," Ray Hyman, an emeritus professor of psychology at the University Oregon and longtime critic of ESP research, said. "I think it's just an embarrassment for the entire field."
The editor of the journal, Charles Judd, a psychologist at the University of Colorado, said the paper went through the journal's regular review process. "Four reviewers made comments on the manuscript," he said, "and these are very trusted people."
All four decided that the paper met the journal's editorial standards, Dr. Judd added, even though "there was no mechanism by which we could understand the results."
But many experts say that is precisely the problem. Claims that defy almost every law of science are by definition extraordinary and thus require extraordinary evidence. Neglecting to take this into account - as conventional social science analyses do - makes many findings look far more significant than they really are, these experts say.
"Several top journals publish results only when these appear to support a hypothesis that is counterintuitive or attention-grabbing," Eric-Jan Wagenmakers, a psychologist at the University of Amsterdam, wrote by e-mail. "But such a hypothesis probably constitutes an extraordinary claim, and it should undergo more scrutiny before it is allowed to enter the field."
Dr. Wagenmakers is co-author of a rebuttal to the ESP paper that is scheduled to appear in the same issue of the journal.
In an interview, Dr. Bem, the author of the original paper and one of the most prominent research psychologists of his generation, said he intended each experiment to mimic a well-known classic study, "only time-reversed."
In one classic memory experiment, for example, participants study 48 words and then divide a subset of 24 of them into categories, like food or animal. The act of categorizing reinforces memory, and on subsequent tests people are more likely to remember the words they practiced than those they did not.
In his version, Dr. Bem gave 100 college students a memory test before they did the categorizing - and found they were significantly more likely to remember words that they practiced later. "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words," the paper concludes.
In another experiment, Dr. Bem had subjects choose which of two curtains on a computer screen hid a photograph; the other curtain hid nothing but a blank screen.
A software program randomly posted a picture behind one curtain or the other - but only after the participant made a choice. Still, the participants beat chance, by 53 percent to 50 percent, at least when the photos being posted were erotic ones. They did not do better than chance on negative or neutral photos.
"What I showed was that unselected subjects could sense the erotic photos," Dr. Bem said, "but my guess is that if you use more talented people, who are better at this, they could find any of the photos."
In recent weeks science bloggers, researchers and assorted skeptics have challenged Dr. Bem's methods and his statistics, with many critiques digging deep into the arcane but important fine points of crunching numbers. (Others question his intentions. "He's got a great sense of humor," said Dr. Hyman, of Oregon. "I wouldn't rule out that this is an elaborate joke.")
Dr. Bem has generally responded in kind, sometimes accusing critics of misunderstanding his paper, others times of building a strong bias into their own re-evaluations of his data.
In one sense, it is a historically familiar pattern. For more than a century, researchers have conducted hundreds of tests to detect ESP, telekinesis and other such things, and when such studies have surfaced, skeptics have been quick to shoot holes in them.
But in another way, Dr. Bem is far from typical. He is widely respected for his clear, original thinking in social psychology, and some people familiar with the case say his reputation may have played a role in the paper's acceptance.
Peer review is usually an anonymous process, with authors and reviewers unknown to one another. But all four reviewers of this paper were social psychologists, and all would have known whose work they were checking and would have been responsive to the way it was reasoned.
Perhaps more important, none were topflight statisticians. "The problem was that this paper was treated like any other," said an editor at the journal, Laura King, a psychologist at the University of Missouri. "And it wasn't."
Many statisticians say that conventional social-science techniques for analyzing data make an assumption that is disingenuous and ultimately self-deceiving: that researchers know nothing about the probability of the so-called null hypothesis.
In this case, the null hypothesis would be that ESP does not exist. Refusing to give that hypothesis weight makes no sense, these experts say; if ESP exists, why aren't people getting rich by reliably predicting the movement of the stock market or the outcome of football games?
Instead, these statisticians prefer a technique called Bayesian analysis, which seeks to determine whether the outcome of a particular experiment "changes the odds that a hypothesis is true," in the words of Jeffrey N. Rouder, a psychologist at the University of Missouri who, with Richard D. Morey of the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, has also submitted a critique of Dr. Bem's paper to the journal.
Physics and biology, among other disciplines, overwhelmingly suggest that Dr. Bem's experiments have not changed those odds, Dr. Rouder said.
So far, at least three efforts to replicate the experiments have failed. But more are in the works, Dr. Bem said, adding, "I have received hundreds of requests for the materials" to conduct studies.
Reader Comments
I must admit to having a guilty giggle when reading articles like this and seeing the reaction machines foam at the mouth. Although I feel there may be some personal truth to them, in what they say. Maybe some of these deliberately quoted clappers literally can't conceive of such things as possible, because they don't have the capacity to. The strong emotional reactions they experience may be acting as buffers to allowing them the capacity to conceive it at a conceptual level. If we can't understand our own strong emotional reactions and the reasons for them, then we don't give ourselves much chance of being able to understand and perceive with any clarity the experience that provoked the reaction. Like these guys, busy reacting away, without being able to even understand why they are reacting that way in the first place. While their busy reacting, and preparing a counter argument for the same issue (which is unusually quick all thing considered), they aren't learning anything from their part in the emotion or psychology of this whole experience. If a man is blind to himself first, then he is blind to everything else after.
Many people certainly *do* have sensing abilities beyond what official culture tells us is allowed. Those who know it, know it and don't have any obligation to share themselves with the rest of the world, or to subject themselves to frothing-at-the-mouth sell-outs like Penn & Teller or egomaniacs like James Randi to be bullied and ridiculed and manipulated into failing in public.
Those who know more than they should also tend to keep their heads down. They know they'll be attacked, and like juggling or being able to produce clever rhymes, they don't necessarily know their abilities wouldn't seize up on them when an angry spotlight is upon them. And even if they win "a million dollar prize", the next step will be social destruction as the world descends upon them or they are cut apart by science for the "Good of Mankind" and attacked openly by those who refuse to accept any evidence even if a bunch of crazy stage magicians do. Maybe they remember their bible studies; the part where Christ was nailed to a piece of wood for being magical.
Those in fierce denial have different priorities than those who just want to get on with their lives and not subject themselves to a bunch of bullies with reality issues.
Such opinion of scientific establishment should remain so.
There is no problem with Dr. Bems conclusion: "The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words," It works as he says, (afaik)
Hope that the corporate establishment won't see ESP as a risk for 1-2 years /itf/. The stock market company i have dealt with did a semi-transparent bonus-game to filter out such individuals: a day-trader won. These trades by people who attempt to use it consciously or half.c.ly are easily filtered out - i think - because there is no signs on the market to support/validate the gifted ones trade action.
Gifted people are clever enough to keep their head down. The ignorant ones go along with the majority of population is being fed & accept eating junk-food, so they are going dry regarding brain- fitness (mainly BBB).
Dr. Bem's topic requires a different level of being or in modern words 'other state of consciousness' to work correctly anyway.
Watch how they writhe and foam at the mouth! "It... it... can't be possible because I cannot conceive it to be possible!" A hypothesis that is "counterintuitive"? Sometimes you gotta wonder if these men of letters actually understand the words they use.