Study Finds Evidence for Precognition?

maccored

http://www.livescience.com/strangenews/etc/101111-wait-what-study-finds-evidence-for-precognition.html

The idea of studying whether people can see the future is usually dismissed outright by all but the fringiest of parapsychologists. But an upcoming paper to be published in a well-respected journal finds small but statistically significant evidence that people's behavior can be influenced by things that haven't happened yet.



The work will be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.


New Scientist reports that the study is the culmination of eight years of work by Cornell University psychologist Daryl Bem. More than 1000 student volunteers participated in experiments that reversed well-known psychological phenomena.



For example, many studies have found that people are slower to decide a picture is pleasant if they've seen a negative word right before looking at the picture. So someone reading the word "ugly" before seeing a picture of a lovely sunset will be slower to call the picture pretty than someone who just read the word "beautiful."



This phenomenon is called "priming."
Bem reversed that experiment, presenting the picture, then the response, and finally the priming word. And what do you know? He found something that looked very much like retroactive priming, in which people who would eventually be shown negative words were slower to say positive things about the pictures.


The size of the seeming precognition effects is small, only slightly greater than chance, but fellow psychologists are saying the methods hold up to scrutiny.


Of course, that doesn't mean they accept that precognition exists.



"I remain unconvinced," wrote Joachim Krueger, a social psychologist at Brown University, in a Psychology Today blog about the study.
Despite widespread belief, paranormal occurrences are usually easy to debunk. Take the time traveler allegedly caught on video (probably just a woman with an ear trumpet).



Or the perennial mystery of the goat-sucking chupacabra (attributable to dead coyotes with mange).


Peer-reviewed studies on the paranormal are more rare, but this is far from the last word on parapsychology. Bem's work will have to be replicated by other researchers many times before the results are accepted. (Replication attempts and replies to the yet-unpublished paper are already rolling in.) And even parapsychologists have no explanation for how something in the future could affect the past.



For now, you can check out the research yourself on Bem's webpage.

I think the title is a tad bit misleading and the whole story is a bit overblown. they are right though in saying 'Peer-reviewed studies on the paranormal are more rare' - so if you come across any kind of paranormal studies, make sure to let us know at http://journalparanormalresearch.com .


The whole 'retroactive priming' thing is interesting though

maccored

i sent him a mail about listing his research on the journalparanormalresearch.com site - EDIT .. just received the PDF. the full paper will be up on the site soon. It's a slightly different version than the one to be published next year

Dave!

Interesting, but we'll have to see if it can be replicated before anyone gets excited! A recent attempt to replicate part of it failed:

http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1699970

"Why do we not see any evidence of precognition?" Galak and Nelson wrote in their research paper. "There are obviously a multitude of possibilities for why we failed to obtain a result similar to Bem, ranging from the mundane (e.g., our sample was more heterogeneous than Bem's) to the exotic (e.g., the quantum mechanics that allow for the detection of future events are also contingent on the specific physical features of the original experiment rooms.)

"For the purposes of this paper we really only care about one possibility: Do we fail to detect precognition because precognition does not exist? In answer to this question we emphatically say, 'We don't know. On the one hand, we fail to replicate the effect, but on the other hand, our single failure to replicate is hardly sufficient to seriously undermine an entire paper.'"

maccored

Bem sent me the PDF of the research - I'll put it on the journalparanormalresearch site soon

Dave!

There's been a fair bit of interest in this since it was published. This article (with the clever title "I knew you were going to say that" ) summarises some of the scientific scrutiny and attention that it has aroused:

In the current issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a respected publication of the American Psychological Association (APA), veteran psychologist and sometime psi researcher Daryl Bem has published an ambitious paper describing nine experiments which he claims demonstrate precognition, the ability to know the future – or perhaps, a phenomenon in which the future somehow appears to affect the present.

The paper has received a fair amount of attention in the short time since it has become public knowledge, and there is no shortage of discussion around the blogosphere and among other interested outlets, from Psychology Today to Wired magazine. Not the least of reasons why the paper is garnering such attention – the potential for shattering contemporary scientific knowledge notwithstanding – is the simple fact that a prestigious journal is publishing a paper about parapsychology at all, much less one in support of paranormal claims. Parapsychology hasn’t been in the news in any serious manner in quite a while – that is to say, outside of television screens and pop culture scenes, which both fuel and feed a gluttonous appetite for such fare, from dime-a-dozen talk-to-the-dead mediums to programs exploiting children by supposedly exploring their psychic abilities. (See: “Psychic Kids” on A&E for the most recent evidence that just when things seem to hit their lowest on the offensive and manipulative trash scale, someone finds a denominator a giant leap straight downward.)

Another good reason for the attention is that Bem has published his raw experimental data, allowing other researchers to readily attempt to replicate his results. See, for example, Richard Wiseman’s comments; Wiseman, among others, is already attempting such experiments:

http://richardwiseman.wordpress.com/2010/11/18/bems-esp-research/

Wiseman was also among the first to point out a potential flaw in the experimental protocol, in which judging of results was not entirely double-blinded, and experimenters were allowed to make potentially subjective judgments of and adjustments to the accuracy of subjects’ hits or misses. Daryl Bem responds preliminarily to Wiseman’s comments, on the same blog page cited above.

For Daryl Bem, this research marks another step in a long history of attempting to design and conduct research that might establish psi in the laboratory, at these kind of low but allegedly statistically detectable levels, rather than by way of the flashy super powers of metal benders and talk-to-the-dead mediums. You can readily learn more about Bem’s history concerning, for example, the ganzfeld experiments, beginning in the 1970s, at sources like The Skeptic’s Dictionary; for example, see: http://www.skepdic.com/ganzfeld.html

Also at that site, amid other pertinent entries, see more about Bem and the “psi-conducive state”: http://www.skepdic.com/psi-conducive.html

And the Skeptic’s Dictionary entry on “precognition” now includes an aggressively skeptical update concerning Bem’s new paper, where the discussion in the readers’ comments section makes for useful reading (almost a paranormal event in itself):

http://www.skepdic.com/precog.html

Around the blogosphere, there are some handy summaries of Bem’s current paper for casual bystanders:

At Wired: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/11/feeling-the-future-is-precognition-possible/

At Psychology Today: 
http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the-social-thinker/201010/have-scientists-finally-discovered-evidence-psychic-phenomena?page=2

And I happened upon a commentary I enjoyed on a blog called “Notes from Two Scientific Psychologists,” Andrew Wilson and Sabrina Golonka [see: http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/p/about-us.html]. Appropriately skeptical about Bem’s claims, these bloggers make the point that the analytical responses to Bem’s paper represent “the level of methodological scrutiny every paper should receive, and not just the ones you think are crazy: the ones you like and rely on for your own work should get a good working over like this too …”

However, be forewarned that the blog entry at Psychology Today (link cited above) is a little, uh … “trippy” (to use a phrase invoked therein) – the moment you start seeing quantum mechanics referenced as an explanation for psi, your best choice is to move on and find something actually substantive. The blog post there does raise an important issue, however, namely that of small effect sizes, albeit that it attempts to then summarily discount the issue and grasp at protective excuses for Bem:

… small effect sizes are not that uncommon in psychology (and other sciences). For example, on average, the Bem studies showed an effect size of .20 (out of a possible range of 0-1). Although that is fairly small, it is as large as or larger than some well-established effects, including the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, calcium intake and bone mass, second hand smoke and lung cancer, and condom use and HIV prevention (Bushman & Anderson, 2001). And as Cohen has pointed out, such small effect sizes are most likely to occur in the early stages of exploring a topic, when scientists are just starting to discover why the effect occurs and when it is most likely to occur.

But this weak defense actually points to the most important questions that need to be asked about Bem’s claims (after, of course, we accumulate enough failed replications …). First, small effect sizes are also likely to occur in paranormal claims, which then invariably vanish once protocols are tightened, experiments refined, and replications attempted. This is why, more than 150 years after the birth of parapsychology as an alleged science, psi remains a chimera. Even in so-called “soft” sciences – psychology and social sciences as opposed to “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics – there are thousands of paradigmatic experiments, experiments that an undergraduate student in Psych 101 can execute and successfully replicate well establish results. Yet so far the number of such readily repeatable experiments with consistently reproducible results established in the field of parapsychology have, at latest count, reached the astonishing total of – wait for it! – zero.

But let’s also consider Psychology Today’s well-asked and poorly answered nod to effect size. Our new friends (well, new to me at least) at Two Scientific Psychologists put it succinctly, pointing out that:

… there's simply no effort to propose a mechanism that might support such an outrageous claim (and no, 'quantum mechanics' is not a mechanism). Bem explicitly states that coming up with a mechanism isn't his job and he's just 'reporting the data'. But this is precisely the problem with psychology right now - not enough theory - and the links below that talk about the analysis problems with this paper (and all statistical testing in the social sciences) make good points about the fact that statistical testing in the absence of a clear theory which includes mechanisms is effectively a fishing trip.

In other words, there might be small effects in support of “the link between aspirin and heart attack prevention, calcium intake and bone mass, second hand smoke and lung cancer, and condom use and HIV prevention” … but there are also proposed and plausible mechanisms.

Which brings us to the reason – the very good reason – why at the moment, we should be highly skeptical of Bem’s claims, and why “small effect” also effectively describes the degree to which I am disturbed about the implications of his latest work. As Skeptic’s Dictionary points out in its response to a reader’s comments [HERE: http://www.skepdic.com/comments/precognitioncom.html]:

I might add that without a plausible mechanism for how things that haven't happened yet can cause things to happen now, it will be very difficult to design an experiment that could falsify the precognition hypothesis.

More importantly, these tiny effects are used as a basis to claim evidence for the paranormal largely based on the so-called “psi assumption,” i.e., “any statistically significant deviation from chance performance would be taken as evidence of psi.” [See: http://www.skepdic.com/psiassumption.html]. And further:

The assumption that any statistical deviation from chance is evidence for telepathy is highly controversial, and often compared to the God of the gaps [see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_of_the_gaps] argument. Strictly speaking, a deviation from chance is only evidence that either this was a rare, statistically unlikely occurrence that happened by chance, or something was causing a deviation from chance. Flaws in the experimental design are a common cause of this, and so the assumption that it must be telepathy is fallacious. This does not rule out, however, that it could be telepathy.

And so, as we wait for the sun to settle on failed replications, and watch as parapsychology eventually moves on to its next ephemeral and oh-so-temporary claim of the day, I will leave you with Professor Ray Hyman’s remarks, taken from a 1995 paper addressing problems, failures, and accomplishments of modern parapsychological research:

[A]cceptable evidence for the presence of anomalous cognition must be based on a positive theory that tells us when psi should and should not be present. Until we have such a theory, the claim that anomalous cognition has been demonstrated is empty.

Goodnight, Dr. Bem, wherever you are. I have a prediction about the outcome of attempts to replicate your work – and I don’t need to be psychic.

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/1154-i-knew-you-were-going-to-say-that.html

Dave!

Posted this in the Skeptics' forum, but it might interest ye too

FYI - another attempt to scientifically test for paranormal abilities (a replication attempt of Daryl Bem's Psi research) fails:

Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi

Across seven experiments (N = 3,289) we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = .04) is no different from zero. We discuss some reasons for differences between the results in this paper and those presented in Bem (2011).