Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.

Abstract

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual's current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by "time-reversing" well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

The ironic effect of significant results on the credibility of multiple-study articles.

“…There are three basic approaches to the estimation of true effect sizes. In rare cases, researchers provide explicit a priori assumptions about effect sizes (Bem, 2011). In this situation, it seems most appropriate to use an author's stated assumptions about effect sizes to compute power with the sample sizes of each study.…”

“…In 2011, the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology published an article that provided empirical support for extrasensory perception (ESP; Bem, 2011). The publication of this controversial article created vigorous debates in psychology departments, the media, and science blogs.…”

“…They saw the publication of Bem's (2011) article as a sign that the scientific standards guiding publication decisions are flawed and that Bem's article served as a glaring example of these flaws (Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, & van der Maas, 2011). In a nutshell, Wagenmakers et al (2011) argued that the standard statistical model in psychology is biased against the null hypothesis; that is, only findings that are statistically significant are submitted and accepted for publication.…”

“…In response to this debate, the acting editor and the editor-in-chief felt compelled to write an editorial accompanying the article. The editors defended their decision to publish the article by noting that Bem's (2011) studies were performed according to standard scientific practices in the field of experimental psychology and that it would seem inappropriate to apply a different standard to studies of ESP (Judd & Gawronski, 2011).…”

How not to test for philosophical expertise

“…There is a similar logic in LeBel and Peters' (2011) critique of social psychological research methods in the wake of Bem's (2011) infamous demonstration of 'precognition'.…”