Approved For Releas@ 2000/08 INF oRVAcRBP 98 AO82R000100130002-1 12 strongly than low anxiety subjects. This hypothesis was confirmed 94% of the time in Spence’s own laboratory at the University of Iowa but only 63% of the time in labo- ratories at other universities. In fact, Kimble and his as- sociates at Duke and North Carolina obtained results in the opposite direction in two out of three experiments, In searching for a post hoc explanation, Spence noted that “a deliberate attempt was made in the Iowa studies to provide conditions in the laboratory that might elicit some degree of emotionality. Thus, the experimenter was instructed to be impersonal and quite formal ... and did not try to put [subjects] at ease or allay any expressed fears.” Moreover, he pointed out, his subjects sat in a dental chair whereas Kimble’s subjects sat in a secretar- ial chair. Spence even considered “the possibility that cultural backgrounds of southern and northern students may lead to a difference in the manner in which they re- spond to the different items in the [Manifest Anxiety] scale.” If this was the state of affairs in an area of research as well established as classical conditioning, then the sug- gestion that the social climate of the psi laboratory might affect the outcome of ganzfeld experiments in ways not yet completely understood should not be dismissed as a devious attempt to provide an “escape clause” in case of replication failure. The best the original researcher can do is provide as complete a description of the experimental conditions as possible in an attempt to anticipate what some of the relevant moderating variables might be. The detailed de- scription of the autoganzfeld procedures provided by Honorton et al. (1990) comes as close as current knowl- edge permits in providing the “operational criteria for creating a wartn social ambiance.” Theoretical Considerations Up to this point, we have confined our discussion to strictly empirical matters. We are sympathetic to the view that one should establish the existence of a phenomenon, anomalous or not, before attempting to explain it. So let us suppose for the moment that it’s true. Let us suppose that we have a genuine anomaly of information transfer before us. How can it be understood or explained? The Psychology of Psi In attempting to: understand psi, parapsychologists have typically begun with the working assumption that, whatever its underlying mechanisms, it should behave like other, more familiar psychological phenomena. In particular, they typically assume that target information behaves like an external sensory stimulus that is encoded, processed, and experienced in familiar information-pro- cessing ways. Similarly, individual psi performances should covary with experimental and subject variables in psychologically sensible ways. These assumptions are em- bodied in the model of psi that motivated the ganzfeld studies in the first place. The ganzfeld procedure. As noted in the introduction, the ganzfeld procedure was designed to test a model in which psi-mediated information is conceptualized as a weak signal that is normally masked by internal somatic and external sensory “noise.” Accordingly, any technique that raises the signal-to-noise ratio should enhance a per- son’s ability to detect the psi-mediated information. This Approved For Release 2000/08/10 noise-reduction model of psi organizes a large and diverse body of experimental results, particularly those demon- atrating the psi-conducive properties of altered states of consciousness like meditation, hypnosis, dreaming, and, of course, the ganzfeld itself (Rao & Palmer, 1987). Alternative theories propose that the ganzfeld (and al- tered states) may be psi-conducive because it lowers resis- tance to accepting alien imagery, diminishes rational or contextual constraints on the encoding or reporting of in- formation, stimulates more divergent thinking, or even just serves as a placebo-like ritual that participants per- ceive as being psi conducive (Stanford, 1987). At this point, there are no data that would permit us to choose among these alternatives, and the noise-reduction model remains the most widely accepted. The target. There are also a number of plausible hy- potheses that attempt to account for the superiority of dy- namic targets over static targets: Dynamic targets contain more information, involve more sensory modalities, evoke more of the receiver’s internal schemata, are more life- ‘like, have a narrative structure, are more emotionally evocative, and are “richer” in other, unspecified ways. Several psi researchers have attempted to go beyond the simple dynamic/static dichotomy to more refined or the- ory-based definitions of a good target. Although these ef- forts have involved examining both psychological and physical properties of targets, there is not much progress to report yet (Delanoy, 1990). The receiver. Some of the subject characteristics asso- ciated with good psi performance also appear to have psy- chologically straightforward explanations. For example, garden-variety motivational explanations seem sufficient to account for the relatively consistent finding that those who believe in psi perform significantly better than those who do not. (Less straightforward, however, would be an explanation for the frequent finding that nonbelievers ac- tually perform significantly worse than chance (Broughton, 1991, p. 109).) The superior psi performance of creative or artistically gifted individuals—iike the Juilliard students—may re- flect individual differences that parallel some of the hy- pothesized effects of the ganzfeld, mentioned above: Ar- tistically gifted individuals may be more receptive to alien imagery, be better able to transcend rational or contextual constraints on the encoding or reporting of information, or be more divergent in their thinking. It has also been sug- gested that both artistic and psi abilities might be rooted in superior right-brain functioning. The observed relationship between extraversion and psi performance has been of theoretical interest for many years. Eysenck (1966) reasoned that extraverts should perform well in psi tasks because they are easily bored and respond favorably to novel stimuli. In a setting like the ganzfeld, extraverts may become “stimulus starved” and thus be highly sensitive to any stimulation, including weak incoming psi information. In contrast, introverts would be more inclined to entertain themselves with their own thoughts and thus continue to mask psi information despite the diminished sensory input. Eysenck also specu- lated that psi might be a primitive form of perception an- tedating cortical developments in the course of evolution, and, hence, cortical arousal might suppress psi function- ing. Because extraverts have a lower level of cortical arousal than introverts, they should perform better in psi tasks. (The evolutionary biology of psi is also discussed by Broughton (1991, pp. 347-352).) : CIA-RDP96-00792R000100130002-1
Approved For Relgasa20QeG Sha rGleri@RAAG109792R000100130002-1 13 But there are more mundane possibilities. Extraverts might perform better than introverts simply because they are more relaxed and comfortable in the social setting of the typical psi experiment (e.g., the “warm social am- biance” of the autoganzfeld studies). This interpretation is strengthened by the observation that introverts outper- formed extraverts in a study in which subjects had no con- tact with an experimenter but worked alone at home with materials they received in the mail (Schmidt & Schlitz, 1989). In order to help decide among these interpreta- tions, ganzfeld experimenters have begun to use the ex- traversion scale of the NEO personality inventory (Costa & McCrae, 1983), which assesses six different facets of the extraversion-introversion factor. The sender, In contrast to all this information about the receiver in psi experiments, virtually nothing is known about the characteristics of a good sender or about the ef- fects of the sender’s relationship to the receiver. As we have seen, the initial suggestion from the meta-analysis of the original ganzfeld database that psi performance might be enhanced when the sender and receiver are friends was not replicated at a statistically significant level in the au- toganzfeld studies. A number of parapsychologists have entertained the more radical hypothesis that the sender may not even be a necessary element in the psi process. In the terminology of parapsychology, the sender-receiver procedure tests for the existence of telepathy, anomalous communication be- tween two individuals; but if the receiver is somehow picking up the information from the target itself, it would be termed clairvoyance, and the presence of the sender would be irrelevant (except for possible psychological reasons like expectation effects). At the time of his death, Honorton was planning a se- ries of autoganzfeld studies that would systematically compare sender with no-sender conditions while keeping both the receiver and the experimenter blind to the condi- tion of the ongoing session. In preparation, he conducted a meta-analytic review of ganzfeld studies that used no sender. He found 12 studies with a median of 33.5 ses- sions conducted by 7 investigators. The overall effect size (x) was .56, which corresponds to a four-alternative hit rate of 29%. But this effect size does not reach statistical significance (Stouffer z = 1.31, p = .095). So far, then, there is no firm evidence for psi in the ganzfeld in the ab- sence of a sender. (There are, however, non-ganzfeld studies in the literature that do report significant evi- dence for clairvoyance, including a classic card-guessing experiment by Rhine (Rhine & Pratt, 1954).) The Physics of Psi The psychological level of theorizing discussed above does not, of course, address the conundrum that makes psi phenomena anomalous in the first place: their presumed incompatibility with our current conceptual model of physical reality. Parapsychologists differ widely from one another in their taste for theorizing at this level, but sev- eral whose training lies in physics or engineering have proposed physical (or biophysical) theories of psi phenom- ena. (An extensive review of theoretical parapsychology is provided by Stokes (1987).) Only some of these would force a radical revision in our conception of physical real- ity. Those who follow contemporary debates in modern physics, however, will be aware that several phenomena Approved For Release 2000/08/10 predicted by quantum theory and confirmed by experi- ment are themselves incompatible with our current con- ceptual model of physical reality. Of these, it is the 1982 empirical confirmation of Bell’s theorem that has created the most excitement and controversy among philosophers and the few physicists who are willing to speculate on such matters (Cushing & McMullin, 1989; Herbert, 1987). ‘In brief, Bell’s theorem states that any model of reality _that is compatible with quantum mechanics must be non- local. This implies, among other things, that any model of reality compatible with quantum mechanics must allow for the possibility that information about an event at one location can be instantaneously available at some other arbitrarily distant location, unattenuated and without the mediation of any kind of tranemitting signal (Herbert, 1987). Several possible models of reality that incorporate non- locality have been proposed by both philosophers and physicists. Some of these clearly rule out psi-like informa- tion transfer; others permit it; and some actually require it. Thus, at a grander level of theorizing, some parapsy- chologists believe that one of the more radical models of reality compatible with both quantum mechanics and psi will eventually come to be accepted. If and when that oc- curs, psi phenomena would cease to be anomalous. But we have learned that all such talk provokes most of our colleagues in psychology and in physics to roll their eyes and gnash their teeth. So let’s just leave it at that. More generally, we have learned that our colleagues’ tolerance for any kind of theorizing about psi is strongly determined by the degree to which they have been con- vinced by the data that psi has been demonstrated. We have further learned that their diverse reactions to the data themselves are strongly determined by their a priori beliefs about and attitudes toward a number of quite gen- eral issues, some scientific, some not. In fact, several statisticians believe that the traditional hypothesis test- ing methods used in the behavioral sciences should be dis- carded in favor of Bayesian analyses, which take into ac- count a person’s a priori beliefs about the phenomenon under investigation (e.g., Bayarri & Berger, 1991; Daw- son, 1991). But in the final analysis, we suspect that both one’s Bayesian a prioris and one’s reactions to the data are ul- timately determined by whether one was more severely punished in childhood for Type I or Type II errors. 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