Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9 20 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research molysis data of the present experiment for normality, found that their his- tograms looked relatively bell-shaped and that nonparametric Mann- Whitney U tests calculated for the 32 subjects yielded results virtually identical to those of the ¢ tests reported above (scoring rates were indepen- dently significant for 9 of the 32 individuals). She concluded that the ¢ tests were valid (assuming the scores were independent). DISCUSSION As expected, within- and between-subjects variability in this formal ex- periment was greatly reduced by the changes in experimental protocol that resulted from observations made in the pilot and intermediate phase ex- periments. This reduction in the experiment’s ‘‘noise’’ level permitted the observation here of psi effects that could not be detected in the pilot study. Significant differences in rate of hemolysis between experimental (i.e., mentally ‘‘protected’’) and control blood samples were found in an extra- chance number of subjects. It may be possible to discover important differences between subjects who exhibited significant positive scoring and those who exhibited signifi- cant negative scoring or chance scoring through detailed psychological analyses that would consider both short-term (‘‘state’’?) and more persis- tent (‘‘trait’’) characteristics of the subjects. State analyses could focus upon the types of mental strategies used by the subjects in their attempts to influence the target cells. Some subjects, for example, employed a di- rect strategy of visualizing the blood cells in a very realistic manner, whereas other subjects employed a more indirect strategy of visualizing objects that were similar to the blood cells and possessed characteristics similar to those that protected cells might possess. Are more direct strate- gies more effective than indirect strategies based upon associations and symbolic representations? Trait analyses could be accomplished by asking all participants of the formal study to return to the laboratory for various personality assessments. Such assessments would, of course, be carried out by laboratory personnel who are blind to the subjects’ hemolysis re- sults. Initial assessments might involve psychological instruments such as the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator and the Participant Information Form, which have already been shown to correlate with other types of psi perfor- mance (e.g., Berger, Schechter, & Honorton, 1985; Honorton, Barker, Varvoglis, Berger, & Schechter, 1985). Possible interactions between state and trait factors could also be examined. In the present study, several factors may have interfered with the emer- gence of even stronger psi effects. These factors were: (a) the presence of relatively large individual differences in the characteristics of the subjects, (b) the long durations of the psi ‘‘effort’’ periods and of the experimental sessions as a whole, and (c) the absence of real-time feedback to the sub- jects concerning the state of the target system. Factor (a) could be mini- Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9
Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9 Distant Mental Influence of Hemolysis Rate 21 mized in future studies by more stringent selection of participants in terms of prior histories of successful bio-PK performance and of personality characteristics known to be correlated with psi performance. Factors (b) and (c) were necessitated by the ‘‘tube number’’ component of the present design (i.e., the assessment of two versus eight tubes in each 15-minute protect or control period). Lengthy ‘‘effort’’ periods were required to ac- commodate the measurement of eight tubes, and the requirement of keeping the subject ‘‘blind’’ to the number of tubes prevented the admin- istration of feedback because that would have allowed the subject to keep track of the number of tubes measured. Future experiments unconcerned with a tube-number factor could include briefer psi-influence periods and could also provide feedback. It should be noted, however, that there exists a growing body of evidence that suggests that real-time sensory feedback to the subjects is not a necessary condition for the occurrence of strong psi effects (e.g., Berger, 1988; Braud, 1978b). The major purpose of the present study was to determine whether a significant psi effect involving hemolysis could be observed using a large number of unselected subjects and an improved experimental protocol. The extrachance number of independently significant subject perfor- mances provides an affirmative answer to this question. One of two sec- ondary goals of the study was to explore the issue of whether an IDS interpretation or an RA interpretation provides a better explanation of the results. (The other secondary goal was to study the ‘“‘own’’ versus ‘‘an- other’s’’ blood cells factor.) According to an RA interpretation, the sub- jects (or the experimenter) actually retard hemolysis rate in a causal or quasi-causal manner, yielding values that would not have occurred in the absence of influence attempts. According to an IDS interpretation, the experimental personnel take advantage of already existing fluctuations of hemolysis rate among different blood samples, ‘‘sorting’’ those values by the scheduling and timing of their trials so as to produce an effect that simulates a causal effect. It is important to remember that an IDS effect is still a psi effect, but an informational rather than a causal one. There were several opportunities for intuitive data sorting in the present experiment. The person (M.S.) who provided the random schedule for blood source, tube condition, and tube number used a fixed rule that in- volved converting published weather information into an entry point for a table of random numbers. However, arbitrary decisions were still possible in assigning odd or even digits to the various sources, conditions, and tube numbers, and such decisions by M.S. provided possible entry points for IDS that could influence both between- and within-subject effects. A second possible source of sorting involved subject scheduling for the ini- tial blood-drawing sessions. Which subjects happened to arrive at the laboratory on a given Monday evening for blood drawing would determine their places or positions in the test schedule, and hence the particular blood samples that would be assigned to them, this could provide addi- tional IDS entry points. Subject-scheduling IDS effects could be mediated Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9
Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9 22 Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research by the experimenter (W.G.B.), by the laboratory personnel who suggested and scheduled potential subjects, and/or by the subjects themselves. A third possible source of sorting involved the experimenter’s hemolysis measurements. By consciously or unconsciously altering the timing of his actions, he could determine the start point of the measured hemolysis curve, and this in turn could influence the hemolysis rate measure. The experimenter was aware of this possibility, and therefore he exercised great caution in maintaining the consistency and stereotypy of his labora- tory technique in an attempt to obviate this factor. Only automated proce- dures could eliminate this factor, and even then, the elimination may or may not be absolute, depending upon the completeness of the automation. It is important to note that deliberate timing changes could influence only the tube number effect in the present experiment, because this was the only independent variable for which the experimenter was not blind. Be- cause he was unaware of the blood source or of the scheduling of the protect versus control periods, any timing changes that could influence those two effects would necessarily have to be psi-mediated. It should be added that subjects may have influenced hemolysis rate indirectly by ex- erting a true, causal remote action influence upon the experimenter’s timing behavior, so that what appears to be IDS by the experimenter could in reality be RA by the subject. As the reader will begin to appreciate, a truly definitive test of the IDS model, or even a definitive identification of IDS and RA components, is an exceedingly complex and difficult task. The issue of whether the results of this experiment are described more closely by an IDS model or by an RA model was not resolved unequivo- cally by the mathematical analyses carried out at SRI International. Our own statistical analysis of the tube number factor did not indicate the pres- ence of the significant difference between the 2-tube and 8-tube conditions that the IDS model would have predicted. The absence of a performance difference between the two tube conditions is more consistent with an RA (psychokinesis) interpretation than it is with an IDS (informational) inter- pretation of the obtained results. In the blood experiments reported here, the hemolysis process occurred in vitro and was produced by osmotic stress. Caution should be exercised in the generalization of the results of this study to in vivo hemolysis. In the body, red blood cell lysis can occur through osmotic stress, but is more often contributed by other factors (Hillman & Finch, 1974; Ponder, 1971). The rationale for selecting blood cells was that perhaps material that had once been part of the body might be more susceptible to distant mental influence than would be the case for more ‘‘alien’’ biological materials. At the very least, the use of such ‘‘familiar’’ material would be expected to increase the participants’ motivational levels and hence increase the likelihood of positive results. Red blood cells were chosen as ‘‘targets’’ for these initial bio-PK investigations because their rate of hemolysis could be measured by means of the equipment and facilities available to us. However, this choice was not without its difficulties because the bio- Approved For Release 2000/08/08 : CIA-RDP96-00789R002200620001-9