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

Posted by timothy on from the pre-imagining-the-counterevidence dept.

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.

9 of 315 comments (clear)

  1. Not surprising by mseeger · · Score: 5, Funny

    I have foreseen that outcome....

    1. Re:Not surprising by NEDHead · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  2. Social Psychology? by Hatta · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

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    Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
    1. Re:Social Psychology? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      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.

  3. So, convince me by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Interesting... by bunratty · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "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.

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    What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
  5. That's not really the interesting bit by brokeninside · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  6. The journal does not publish replications by Alain+Williams · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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 ?

  7. Re:in my minds eye by snakeplissken · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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