Daryl J. Bem - Feeling the Future (J. Personality & Social Psych)

[saizai]

http://dbem.ws/FeelingFuture.pdf
Author's other pubs: http://dbem.ws/pubs.html

Quoting from the PDF:

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in press.

Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect

Daryl J. Bem
Cornell University

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “time-reversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10^-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

Read (first) and discuss.

Perhaps he should be proactively contacted by JREF to discuss a prize challenge? It's published (peer-reviewed, even) and the effects they claim certainly seem within the definition of the MDC for "paranormal".

(To be clear: I have no comment on the article yet, since I've not reviewed it thoroughly enough. But I figure y'all should have fun.)

 

[saizai]

Partial replication already attempted:

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

A replication of the procedures from Bem (2010, Study 8) and a failure to replicate the same results.

Jeff Galak
Carnegie Mellon University

Leif D. Nelson
University of California, Berkeley

We replicated the procedure of Experiment 8 from Bem (2010), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate the result. The paper includes a description of our procedure and analysis as well as a brief discussion for some reasons why we obtained a different result than in the original paper.

Note that
a) this replication was not peer-reviewed
b) they only attempted to replicate one of Bem's nine studies (#8)
c) the method they used was somewhat different (online vs in person), thus might have e.g. had less attentive subjects

Also, they have another version still running that you can participate in: http://consumerbehaviorlab.com/esp1_live/esp1_live.php

 

[AdMan]

I believe this is already being discussed here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=188366