Science and Psi...do they mix?

Late last night (or perhaps early this morning) I tweeted a link to a recent blog post on Psychology Today. The article title, by Dr. Melissa Burkley, was what caught my eye.

"Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!"

Dr. Burkley presents a commentary on a series of studies conducted by Dr. Bem of Cornell University (the article has yet to be published, my guess is that Burkley got a hold of a review copy, a common practice). Burkley summarizes that across nine experiments, Bem examines what is commonly known as 'psi' phenomena. According to the blog, the study is much more elaborate than me playing with my Zener Card smartphone app. The novelty of Bem's approach is what made me raise my eyebrows. "..Bem's studies are unique in that they represent standard scientific methods and rely on well-established principles in psychology. Essentially, he took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology...and simply reverse their chronological order," the blog states.

To catch some of you up to speed, let's go over some of the basic terms. The Parapsychological Association defines psi phenomena as an adjective to identify paranormal processes and paranormal causation. To break this definition down even further, the term 'paranormal' just refers to experience that lie just outside the range of scientific explanation. Famed parapsychologists the world over claim to examine psi phenomena in laboratory settings, and there is even a journal in which studies are published for peer review (The Journal of Parapsychology). In fact, a trip through the archives of the Journal reveal several articles by Dr. Bem.

So in taking a break from both reading the latest Brad Steiger book and reading articles for an upcoming literature review on the efficacy of metacontingency in the field of behavior analysis, I decided to find an advanced copy of Dr. Bem's 61-page study and take a gander at it for myself. Could more famous last-words be blogged?

CLICK HERE to read it for yourself.

Bem took four standard psychological effects: approach/avoidance, affectiving priming, habitutation, and facilitation of recall, and broke them into a total of nine reversal experiments. Some of the sweeping results that caught my eye were that 8 of the 9 experiments reported occurences of what was later deemed 'psi' phenmonena 'statistically above chance'. With chance being 50percent, most of these 'above chance' measurements were between 51-52percent.

Also, in the precognition detection trials, previous research indicating that self-reported extroverts scored higher in psi phenomena experiments was 'supported' by the data in the current study. I also found myself a bit lost with the overly statistical presentation of the data (then again, I'm not yet versed in statistics as applied to psychology).

One thing that did strike me as interesting is that Bem takes well-researched principles and examines them in relation to parapsychology. One example was how Bem tested a reversal of the priming effect. The priming effect is a perceptual memory effect where exposure to one item (or stimulus) will 'prime' one's influence to the following stimulus. Below is an example of the priming effect:

Today I went to th grocery store and buogt a atermelon.

As a child, we are exposed to words. We sound them out, learn the grammar rules of the language we are taught, and eventually get to the point where we can recognize words, or even parts of words, simply by seeing them. So when spelling mistakes or letter omissions are present, we 'fill in the gaps.' So if you read 'Today I went to the store and bought a watermelon,' it is because previous exposure to these words have primed you to identify similar words in the same way. This relates heavily in the 'paranormal' and parapsychology fields, for much of the research into paranormal experiences has been labeled as instances of paradeoila, which is a sensory extention of the priming effect (an older, but still interesting article by Michael Shermer can be found here).

What Bem did in his study is examine the priming effect in reverse. Priming studies will expose a subject to a stimulus and ask the subject to label the stimulus (label options are often limited in both options and time for selection). Over the course of the study, the interresponse time between exposure to the stimulus and labeling of the stimulus (which is usually an adjective) decreases, theoretically because the subject has been 'primed'. This priming is futher tested by flashing images almost too fast to 'comprehend', yet the subjects can still respond with the same labels. Bem took the latter part of this process and reversed it, by flashing the label first, then the stimulus (a picture). Reportedly, subjects would categorize the photo and 'know' what word was coming next.

However, many of these psychological principles work the way they do because the order in which things happen. A stimulus occasions behavior, while the consequence reinforces or punishes it. This basic relationship, while not the one looked at in this study, shows that one follows the other for a reason. Perhaps, by reversing the order of the current psychological principles, Bem negated them. And with each experiment averaging 100-150 subjects, a statistical significance of 51percent, this has been averaged out, which obscures individual data. When testing something as sensitive and 'rare' as psi phenomena, wouldn't individual data be of paramount interest?

While this paper certainly poses more questions than answers, Bem seems to believe that it does suggest an efficacy in his methodology and the ability to scientifically test psi phenomena in a laboratory setting. Of this I'm not entirely sure, but I do know one thing...further study is warranted.

Psychology Today Blog Article