Psychic Ability Claim Doesn't Hold Up In New Scientific Experiments

cold fjord writes with some stunning news from the world of science, excerpting: "A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious, but the research is important because it refutes a study published in a psychological journal last year that claimed to find evidence of extrasensory perception. That research, conducted by Daryl Bem of Cornell University, triggered outrage in the psychological community when the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology announced in 2010 that the paper had been accepted for publication." Here's a link to the academic paper.

Comments

in my minds eye

[pinfall]

I see a flurry of dumb comments being posted on /..

Re:in my minds eye

[hairyfeet]

All I know is my grandma had precog three times in her life. the first time she begged my mom not to go riding with these other kids as something bad would happen, she and the other kids blew her off and an hour later the car was nearly cut in half when a drunk slammed them into a semi. luckily nobody died but the injuries were severe and they spent a good 6 months in the hospital. 6 years later again she begs them not to go, 3 of them including my mom refuse to go and the car they were supposed to be in blew a tire going around a steep curve, 3 dead and 1 mangled including the driver decapitated and finally the last time it happened she called my cousin's mom and begged her not to let her son out which by that time everyone had heard what happened when she said "don't go" so naturally she told her son he wasn't going anywhere and why but Mike thought she was full of shit and snuck out with his buddies to go on a beer run. They were missing for 4 days before someone finally found the wreck, they had been using a seldom traveled on back road they weren't real familiar with and missed a curve. the driver was cut in half, the guy in the back seat was throw so hard against the ceiling he snapped his neck, the guy in the front passenger had his left arm sliced off below the elbow and had bled to death trying to crawl up the embankment and finally my cousin was thrown through the window and pinned under the front of the car where the pressure against his lower abdomen was so great his kidneys and lower intestines basically died for lack of blood, he lived 3 days before finally succumbing to organ failure.

So all I know is if one of the females in my family (it was always the females that got "those feelings" never the males) called and said "I have a bad feeling, you shouldn't go out" my ass is staying parked friend.

Re:in my minds eye

[snakeplissken]

There are over 6 billion people in the world sir, it would be amazing if there wasn't anyone who had had this experience. The fact that you know someone for whom this has happened demonstrates nothing, can you vouch that she has never ever said "don't go" any other time and nothing untoward taken place? Given that your grandmother thought she was psychic would she have noticed if she had "a feeling" and nothing happened?
How often did she have "feelings"? As a parent I've had "feelings" quite a few times but nothing ever happened, of course if i had a "feeling" every day then some of them would have correlated with incidents that occurred, who has a life without incident?

I don't mean to be disrespectful, but this is possibly the most common fallacy of belief regarding "precog". Lets face it, if it were real we would have noticed all the rich and successful people who got that way being precog, there would be government departments staffed by precogs predicting plane crashes, stock market crashes, crimes, weather, asteroids, etc. It's like aliens, who only ever visit when no-one else is watching :)

snake

Re:in my minds eye

[EllisDees]

Sure, but how many times did she have a bad feeling about something and then nothing at all happened and she forgot about it?

Re:in my minds eye

[JoeMerchant]

"Precog" is what most of your forebrain is doing most of the time, modeling, predicting, mostly guessing. Those of our ancestors who were best able to use their powers of prediction to successfully reproduce have been "genetically selected" against those who weren't as good.

If there were a mechanism that truly allowed us to know, or guess with better than statistical odds, the outcome of events in the distant (2 seconds or more) future, that would be an awesome advantage which should rapidly spread through any gene pool, unless the established social order burned them as witches or some-such all too believable tragedy.

Maybe, like life itself, precog is just a very very rare alignment of complex chemical or maybe quantum phenomena... given the billions of years of evolution that have passed without it becoming prominent on Earth, I think the odds of it emerging during my lifetime are.... remote.

Not surprising

[mseeger]

I have foreseen that outcome....

Re:Not surprising

[rgbatduke]

Ah, yes, but then you'd have to know how to rigorously test for uniform distributions to obtain and interpret p-values and the like, and seriously (speaking of probabilities) what are the odds that a psychologist who takes the hypothesis of precognition seriously knows either statistics or how to design double-blind experiments properly?

rgb (speaking ex cathedra as the author of dieharder, which does indeed know how to test for uniform distributions as well as test random number generators in general many, many ways...;-)

Re:Not surprising

[History's Coming To]

Look at the available evidence - if there was any psychic ability then the chances are that it would already be well documented. Even a slight statistical ability would have big impacts in warfare, commerce and many other areas of life. Whether a single study will overturn this is unlikely, so making a prediction that study-X won't show psychic ability is valid.

If you want an analogy, imagine getting a big crowd of people together who believe in psychics, and who have handed over their name, address, CC details and other snippets of information - you could probably convince them that you're talking to their dead relatives, if you wanted to be a fraudulent shyster who likes making money from the grief and hope of the gullible.

Re:Not surprising

[NEDHead]

Actually, I believe there was a cable problem...

Re:Not surprising

[UnknownSoldier]

You mean like this experiment?

"I. Human-Machine Anomalies"
http://www.princeton.edu/~pear/experiments.html

Re:Not surprising

[fph il quozientatore]

In this case, in order to get random numbers that are more random, I suggest that you generate a large number of them, say 10,000, and then take their average.

Re:Not surprising

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly! If there were psychic powers, it would be a world where those with average intellects would control vast fortunes, where hard work and study didn't pay off, and where people mindlessly followed trivial events while ignoring important events.

Nothing like the real world.

Social Psychology?

[Hatta]

If ESP is ever proven real, the ones that will be most interested are the physicists.

Re:Social Psychology?

[Anonymous Coward]

ESP is already proven to those using it on a daily basis. Physicists shouldn't ever ignore aspects of reality, b/c what they aim to do is to describe reality. They haven't done imaging of electromagnetic fields around brains yet (which are the antennae for our consciousnesses which are located outside our bodies beyond time and space). The brain is a sequencer unit for the sole purpose of serializing perception. There's also a relationship between subatomic particles and their respective consciousness-lets, there's a transitional state between consciousness and matter called not-yet-matter. An Electromagnetic Unit is smaller than the smallest subatomic particle. It will all be proven with scientific studies one day when instruments have become even better. Physicists should use mathematics properly. Math is not a toy, it's a tool.

Re:Social Psychology?

[Hatta]

^This is how crazy you have to be to actually believe in ESP.

Re:Social Psychology?

[Tom]

You don't have to be crazy. Uncritical or uneducated is enough. Keep in mind that the amount of logical and mathematical education most of the /. audience have is not representative for the general population.

There are a couple proven psychological traps at work here, such as confirmation bias, our inability to correctly estimate non-trivial probabilities, and more.

So, convince me

[Anonymous Coward]

A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real. Skeptics may scoff at the finding as obvious

No, sceptics may consider the finding plausible but will question whether the evidence supports it.

RTFA: The peer review was not a double-blind study

[Qbertino]

The peer review was not a double-blind study.
Ergo: No scientific evidence, any finite conclusion is worthless.
You fail. Thank you very much.
End of discussion. ...
Then again, as far as I can read out of the article, the initial experiment wasn't a double blind test either.

However, the experiments setup looks interesting and - in a fully controlled environment - could statistically prove the existence of clairvoyance.

Bottom line:
We're just as smart as before.

Re:Interesting...

[bunratty]

"A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real." TFS says they failed to have a positive result, not that they proved a negative result. I think the scientists who conducted the study would also be smart enough not to claim that proved that humans don't have psychic abilities. The best that science can do is provide evidence that humans have such an ability, or fail provide evidence.

Not really Psychic

[wisnoskij]

"retroactive facilitation of recall’, which examines whether performance on a memory test can be influenced by a post-test exercise."

All they are testing is pre-cognition, aka time travel of the mind, and really the least likely psychic power to exist. The ability to do this would pretty much break science.

That's not really the interesting bit

[brokeninside]

A "negative" finding, as you put it, is really just failure to find a positive outcome. In other words, they were not able to replicate the original study even though apparently using the same methods. This doesn't prove that psychic phenomena does not exist. But it is a data point that suggests that there are no good scientific reasons to believe in psychic phenomena.

The real interesting bit of the article is this:

Wiseman has a registry of attempts to replicate Bem's work and has plans to analyze all of the data together, Ritchie said. One big problem facing the work is reluctance on the part of journals to publish studies with negative findings, especially those that are replications.

When Ritchie and his colleagues submitted their paper to the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the journal that had originally published Bem's work, they were told that the journal does not publish replications.

"There's a real problem with finding shocking findings and then not being interested in publishing replications," Ritchie said.

That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.

Re:That's not really the interesting bit

[rgbatduke]

That's the real controversy here. Many journals are biased against articles that describe attempts to replicate previously published results, even if the outcome is negative. This is a disincentive for scientists to engage in much of what would be very useful research.

This is dead on the money -- I agree. I keep Richard Feynman's "Cargo Cult Science" address here: http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm permanently open in a browser tab just to remind me how important replication really is. There is a major effort at the highest levels of the government that sit in oversight of the granting agencies and that ultimately fund the journals themselves (indirectly) to change some of this, because it is this very reluctance (plus a tendency to publish "results" but hide the actual data and methodology from precisely the public access and scrutiny and critical replication that is essential to the scientific process) that leads to a huge amount of junk science being published every year, much of it (sadly) in social psychology, medicine, and climate science, where at least two of these have enormous costs associated with error.

ESP, fortunately isn't one of them. As you note, it (as a hypothesis) could be true, but there is so far no good reason to believe in it. Such evidence as there is is anecdotal and fails to stand up in a reproducible way to skeptical critical tests seeking to verify the anecdotes. However, we can go farther than this -- ESP may exist, but it is in some sense a rare phenomenon if it does. If it were universal and common, we could hardly have failed to discover this by now. The many experiments that have been done seeking to confirm the phenomenon (and failing) have the effect of gradually lowering the plausible boundary of its existence, just as the many (failed) experiments seeking e.g. magnetic monopoles don't disprove their existence but they do establish plausible limits on how common they are (at least in the forms being tested).

ESP, unlike monopoles, suffers from a serious flaw as a scientific hypothesis. I can understand how a monopole might exist, and can further see how their existence has considerable explanatory power and esthetic appeal -- electrodynamics would become more symmetric, charge quantization would be "explained", if there was at least one monopole in the Universe. They consistently fit in with our existing knowledge. ESP, on the other hand, does not. There is not one single theory (that I know of) that offers a consistent explanation of how ESP could function in terms of known physical law. Indeed, things like precognition overtly violate so very many physical laws -- for starters, the second law of thermodynamics -- that verifying it might well require the complete rewriting of all the laws of physics. This is actually a serious problem. It is like "coming back from the dead" or other forms of supernaturalism and magic -- sensible people reject such hypotheses as the default belief (often in the face of various offerings of anecdotal "evidence") because, to paraphrase somebody (Thomas Paine?) it is far more easy to believe that a human is a liar or mistaken than to believe that the stars themselves have gone out of their courses. If true precognition were reproducibly demonstrated, analyzing the requisite dynamical flow of information involved would very much make the stars go out of their courses, with future complex phenomena causing entropic shifts in current chemistry. We do not, as a general rule, ever observe entropy-shifting effects preceding their causes.

rgb

The journal does not publish replications

[Alain Williams]

This is the really interesting (and shocking) bit of the story. One has to wonder how much real understanding of the scientific method the editors of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology really have. If they don't understand the value of independent replication - then what are they publishing ? Interesting anecdotes ?

Re:The journal does not publish replications

[arse maker]

Journals not publishing null results or replications is a widespread problem that many reserches lament.

I've thought for a while that there should be a journal just for replication or null results to be published im. Even if the goverment has to fund it.

So I can't ever have Jedi powers?

[loufoque]

Damn. Thanks for ruining my day.

Of course.

[Anonymous Coward]

All the real psychics never admit to being psychic. They win in vegas or the lottery or the stock market and keep their mouths shut.

Because they can also see being cut up into little slices and studied by someone if the world ever really gets proof they are psychic.

Not exactly flawed...

[AliasMarlowe]

That a single study showing positive results for ESP was flawed in some way, is a natural starting position.

Ah, but Bem's 2011 paper was not flawed at all. He successfully and convincingly demonstrated his lack of understanding of statistical techniques and his ineptitude in application of said techniques. He also illustrated the failings of the peer review process in minor fields. His incompetent attempt at "validation" of ESP was the most persuasive evidence of all, in fact.

This overwhelming ignorance of statistics is prevalent throughout the social "sciences" and is almost as widespread in medical fields. Bem is not the first to misunderstand and misuse t-tests or to fail to distinguish exploratory and confirmatory analysis. Those in fundamentally innumerate fields should not play with numbers (especially using packaged statistical software) except under supervision of a qualified adult. They are emphatically not qualified to certify themselves as competent in statistics or any other area outside their specialization.

Re:RTFA: The peer review was not a double-blind st

[Mr. Slippery]

The peer review was not a double-blind study.
Ergo: No scientific evidence, any finite conclusion is worthless.

I'm not sure what you mean by a "finite" conclusion, but if you think that only double-blind studies count as scientific evidence, then I suppose you don't think astronomy or particle physics or paleontology are scientific fields?

A double-blind study, when possible, is a great way -- perhaps the best way -- to investigate certain questions. That does not make it the only form of scientific evidence.