From the book:
In the December 6, 2010 issue of the Cornell Chronicle, the university’s news publication, the headline screamed: Study showing that humans have some psychic powers caps Daryl Bem’s career. That article begins with:
“‘It took eight years and nine experiments with more than 1,000 participants, but the results offer evidence that humans have some ability to anticipate the future. Of the various forms of ESP or psi, as we call it, precognition has always most intrigued me because it’s the most magical,” attested Daryl Bem, professor of psychology emeritus.
His study was published in 2011, in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Bem’s experiment was fairly simple. As he reported in “Feeling the Future,” an article published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, he conducted nine experiments that involved 1,000 Cornell students who viewed erotic photos and found statistically significant results confirming that many people can glimpse the future.
One of his experiments, for instance, provided students with a computer monitor showing a pair of curtains that were side by side. The participants were instructed to choose the curtain that hid an erotic photo. The idea was that such stimuli usually produces certain human responses and the question was whether the response could be obtained before the stimulus occurred. Essentially, the students were asked to “feel” the future – the curtain hiding a photo of explicit sexual activity.
The results? Across 100 sessions, participants correctly identified the future position of the erotic pictures 53.1 percent of the time, better than the 50 percent hit rate expected by chance. The results, of course, were attacked by skeptics who pointed out that experiments conducted in a lab setting tend to get positive results that are difficult to replicate.
In fact, in 2013, the skeptical group CSICOP celebrated the alleged lack of replication. In response, Dean Radin, author and researcher at the Institute of Noetic Sciences, pointed out that more than 80 replications of the Bem effect show a “highly significant overall effect.” Radin also noted that the CSICOP article was a “…fine example of how that org is more about propaganda than science.” A year later, The Daily Grail listed eight successful replications.
There will always be skeptics. That’s fine. What isn’t fine is when scientists whose research challenges existing paradigms are trashed just because their investigations and theories don’t conform to mainstream science.
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