Ne, ropARphoved-Fer Release 2991/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787ROQO20008004342 26, 197% Yroceedings of the TERE Page 2 the conditions necessary for “unambiyuous" resolution of fundamental quertions since only this method permits mantpulation and control of potentially confounding variablen by the eminently sensible method of varying, the eritical factors under etudy, and systematically observing their effeets upon other selected and measurable variables while holding these potentially confounding variables under tight control] via such techniques as randomization, constancy, counterbalancing, matching, etc, The manti- pulated variables are called independent’ variables (IVs), and the variables senultive to the effects of the IV is called the dependent variables (DVs). This has been expressed quite eloquently by Ebbinghaus (1964, p. 7; original: 1885) in. his incorporation of thla experimental method tnto his researches into human memory, a successful effort which weut far in illustrating in 1885 the power of thie method in sclentifically understanding human behavior--ineluding perceptions "we all know of what this method consists; an attempt is made to keep constant the masa of conditions which have proven “ themselves causally connected with a certain result; one of these conditions is isolated from the rest and varied in a way that can be numerically described; then the accompanying change on the side of the effect is ascertained by measurement or computation," The simplest experiments, therefore, are those employing but a single IV and a single DV, and, in the fundamental situation in which an effort is being made to demonstrate the sheer existence of a phenomenon (as in the present atudy, without tnquiring ferther into its, composition and contingeneies), the two basic valuea or levels or variates of the IV may be simply designated the "experimental" (i.e., the factor appears--operationally defined--in some amount) and "control" cendition (i.e., the factor appears as a zero amount). A helpful example might be a drug study in which we only wanted to know if thea drug makes running a maze difficultesor nots In thls situation, we would exparfe mentally compare the drug condition's effects to a condition otherwise identical in which, however, the drug is absent; This would constitute one of the most fundamental ewpixfeal control conditions used in experimental science in general, and experimental psychology in particular, although of course other empirical control conditions are possible, depending on what one is controlling for. We apaak, by the way, of “control condition", and not "controlled" condition, since we assume all conditions in the experiment are controlled in some way. ‘This ia apparently a source of much confunton in the parapsychological literature, where constant reference is made to “controlled laboratory conditions," “scientifically controlled conditions," and so on, thereby creating the illusion that basically well conceived contro], conditions are being, used, in the present example, Lf one is concerned that the procedure of injection caunes errors to be made on the waze, then we need a placebo control in which § {8 treated identically as in the drug condition, but saline rather than the drug is injected, In this case, we "control for" the injection procedure'a effects on the DV by holdings, this potentially confounding variable constant and can thereby evaluate it and prevent it from creating the erroneous impression that the drug, per se, produced the errora $ made on the maze, when in fact the drug injection procedure itself may have produced that effect on the DV. As we know, in the present study, the basic procedura deseribed was carried cul with all the subjects (six in number for section IIT studies through aubsection "Dp", Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7
Mer. RApproved. faryRelease 2991/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R0QQ200080043r71 26, 1976 Proceedings of the IEEE Page 3 two more in section "KE", and five more in section "fs we limit our critique to the more detailed accounts given in sections A-D rather than the very sketchy materlal in sections E and fF, although all these studies used essentially the came procedure and varies mainly on the basis of subject characteristics.). That is, all the Subjects were administered, as it were, the same basic treatment condition, “and were thus all pare of the same Ne lairvoyant" or “yemote viewing" group, consisting essentlally in the 5s making an effort to somchow envision a remote target. Actually, all we know of the instructions to the 5S, so critical in determining the operational definition of this condition, ta that the "remotesviewing subject wna asked to deacribe his impressions of the target site into a tape recorder and to make any drawings he thought appropriate (p.335),"" sinee the authors do not give ua the actuai instructions, In any case, for each S, there did indeed exist a a "remote targets" designated by a "target team’ or “demarcation team" situated at some geographical location nearby the SRI laboratory, although the theoretical rationale for this team'a existence and its role in the procedure is never really logically presented by the author save only for an historical precedent established working informally with Mr. Ingo Swann (p. 334) and perhaps the anecdotal “piloc experiment" (p,330) where one of the authors functioned in thia capacity as a "demarcation tcam" and, we infer, grew quite excited and impressed with a subject's daseriptions of some nitos he visited, where the subject supposedly had no particular prior information about the site in question, This situation, we shall detail later, results in considerable ambiguity in the designation of the "target" (is it. the "targoteperceivad=by-the=tcam", oy is it the physical stimulus of the target, and so on?), The whole procedure, carried out under what the authors deseribe as "ripidly controlled scientific conditions (p.334)",-and including the subsequent judging procedure we shall discuss in some detail later, could have been called an “expert- mental" condition comparabie to the "drug present" condition in the example above if there had been a control condition with which to compare it (comparable to the "placebo' or "no‘drug" conditions in our example), that is, a condition tn which all of the preceding procedures were exactly followed but Sin the absence of what wan previously operationally and objectively defined as the "remote -viewing" c condition (note the importance of objective specification of the condittons under which the "remote=vilewL oy; is to occur, because without that there can be no objective controlled variation of the condition since one would never know quite when the experimental condition exiated in the first places), As the matter stands, since only one condition was run in thia study, we really have neither experimental nor control conditfons (because the termn ave defined relative to cach other); and since that is the case, we renlly have no LV; and since we have no IV, we actually do not even have one experiment (let alone the 50 or so Claimed by the authors in this single publication=-p, 330). The DV, of course, also deserves careful scrutiny, since hypothesized LV effects are evaluated in terma of changes in DV measures, In this study, the actual "numbar" obtained as the basic raw datum was the individual ranking or "match" number of a subject's tape recorded description (supposedly of a “target"), with some aspect (perhaps) of a nearby geographical location. ‘The number could assume any value from "1" to "9", where "1" referred to the judge's estimate of a "best" match, through "9" which was assigned to a match ££ it was a "worst" match for a given target, . Nine tar- gets and nine descriptions were obtained for each 5S. This was apparently an ordinal scale of measurement, We must assume, in the absence {nlso) of a specific report of the instructions to the judge, that the judge knew exactly what his task was in deter» mining the degree of correspondence between the Ss! deseriptiona and the judge'a own unspeci fied pexceptions \ when physically present. at the so-called target, | Approved | For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7
. Mi. robApprovedckor Release 2991/03/26  CIA-RDP96-00787R0Q9200080049-7 20, 1470 Proceedings of the LEEE , Paga 4 We should, therefore, consider the precise meaning of a "hit" under these circumstances, Evidently, a "hit" for the Es occurred when the geographical locus they called the "target" is judged to correspond to the S's description obtained whiie the "demarcation team" was visiting a particular site. This was also, therefors, a situation where the S's corresponding desciption was assigned a rank of "1", Since 9 targets were "experimented" with a given S, we have 9 separate judgmenta of rank carried out by a single given judge. The sum__of ranks for the given 5 of all the descriptions for the theoretically associated targets was then compared to a probability distribution for that statistic, a situation we claim is really improperly serving as a substitution for a test based on soma statistic (which could be the sum of ranies) obtained £rom the comparison of the matches for this hypothetieal "remote viewing" data to the matches obtained under similar judging conditions where there was no remote viewing possible (other control conditions will be described below). “However, there are numerous peculiarities about this judging procesa possibly unresolvable on the basis of the authors! secanty-and ambiguous deseription of thia critically important aspect of their study. Let us consider a few of thease problens, 2. What was the judge judging? The judgo for a given S's performance for a given target (what the authors refer to incredibly as an “Yexperiment") was successively driven to cach geographical location previously visited by the peripatetic la. Since, as we previously noted, we do not know precisely what aspects of the geographical location constituted a "target" in the original "experiment" when the demarcation team, was present, and since it is cven more ambiguous now what the judge was viewlny, as well as what he was supposed to be looking at while he reviewed the S'6 packages of 9 descriptions, we scem in this procedure, therefore, to actually be dealing with two (and perhaps three) recognizably distinct categories of "targets"; one te constituted by tha perceptions of the demarcation team; a second by the perceptions by the judges, and a third by direct physical aspects of some geographical location (photographs ara used in the report and labelled "target" to further complicate target delincations* e.g., Figure 4). It ts difficult to evaluate how potentially dissimilar these various “cargets" were in the absence of clarifying and detailed accountsof the specific instructions to the teams and to the judge. After all, the judge or demarcation team may have fixated the horizon, focused on passing vehicles, noticed a sign, and go on, Consequently, the reporting of the target simply as a “target location", or "remote location" (e.g., "Marina, Redwood City") as the authors do, belics the fact that wa are dealing here with both their clairvoyance belicl and in the perceptual theory that the way things appear to a viewer and the way they are physically constituted may not be at all identical (c.g., the sensation “¥ed" of a perceived atop sign, and the atomic structure of the paint pigmoancs on its metal surface). ‘the possible con nequence of this lack of precise definition of the target ta that the judge has considerable latitude in fitting S's description to the scene as he. perceives Lt, possibly even looking, for certain aspects of the scene before him that seem to ba present in some of S's descriptions, “the preceeding consideration bears directly upon the integrity of the measurement used for the authors' basic datum, namely, the problem that we do not know specifically what constitutes the "standard" (the target" in some sense) against which our "comparison stimuli" (S's descriptions) are measured by the judge, resulting in what must be an impressively unrealiable measure (DV). Furthermore, this potentially highly unreliable 2, How veltable is the Judge's "Matching" Measure? A direct conaequence of . Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7
Me. ncoPpreved For Rel ase 299 1/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R0QQ200080043-7, 26, 1976 Proceedings of the IEEE Page 5 measure, therefore, becomes potentiallyeven more unvealtable when one recalls thet only one judge was used for cach subject's data, and he performed only one judging (a sorias of nine evaluations) for a given target, The report tells us nothing of any efforta to "train" che judge in this procedure, or otherwise to determine some initial relfability coeffictont for this kind of task for a naive judge. This question or doubt about the status of our measuring instrument, our "sensor" aa it were, is especially preplexing in light of the highly refined and instrumentally sophisticated dependant variables the authors surely use in all their other research in the physical sciences; why they have avoided use of such techniques in this Boscalled “remotes viewing" research, and furthermore not used the appropriate control procedures exparie. mental psychologists and psychophysicists have laboriously developed starting with Wunde's work in Leipzig in 1879, remains rather enigmatic, to say the least, | oe Were the Judements Independent? After the first "target" site was visited, we know the judge was taken, according to some unspecified procedure (the authors say "in turn," but “in turn" of what--demarcation team visits, random sequence juste for ‘the purposes of judging, or simply (and necessaxvily) "one after the other?'") to another taryee, Was he then given the same nine deseriptions in precisely the same way? If so, how was the procedure handled? Were precautions taken to prevent cuca associated with previous correct ‘hits! from subsequently influencing later matches, since, obviously, information that a previous description had been correctly matched (a "hikt) reduces by one those descriptions in the pool that he draws from to Maacch," thereby significantly increasing the probability of making subsequent hits. This could easily occur if an informed I drove the judge to the different sites for the judging, and then, having noticed what we would assume to be an acetdental "hit" by the judge, indicated as much through perhaps an unconscious cue to the fudge. The point is, not that we think the authors really overlooked such an obvious source of pias, but rather that we need special reassurance specifically that a native driver with explicit driving instructions was used to merely drive the judge to the different locations--and that is all? After all, he cannot ene the judge about previous accomplishments, i£ ha knows nothing of the rescarch. Of course, the fudge may have driven himself to the site, which would largely climinate this source of confounding, in the measurement series, but we do not know what happened here since these pertinent details are omitted from the report. ‘fo summarize our concerxns with the dependent variable co this point, we may aay, {irat, it appears to need considerable specification, a detatied operational definithor necond, ite reliability should be ascertained, and doubt that dt is inherently very unreltable removed; third, itt should be used for determining experimental condition ("Glairvoyance') hit rates in che matching task, as well as for appropriate control “conditions; ("No clairvoyance," "no clairvoyance and no demarcation team," and go on) hit rates, ‘so that an appropriate statistic based on the net differences in "hit rates! could be tested for the degree to which this difference measure is statistically signficanc, Since this idea of an appropriate controlcondition seems to be so alien to tha parapsychological so-called "experimental" literature, but is everywhere eise in experimental science recognized to bea of the essence of the logic of experimentation in the first place, let us consider in some detail what the minimal requirements would be in order to actually run an experiment on this "remote viewing" hypothesis, rather than merely report curious observations of possibly purely coincidental events, Approved For Release 2001/03/26 : CIA-RDP96-00787R000200080043-7