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Psi Phenomena
Anecdotal
Evidence
In the public mind, the evidence for psi consists primarily of personal experiences and
anecdotes. Virtually all such evidence is scientifically unacceptable because it suffers fatally
from the same problems that threaten experimental evidence—nonreplicability, inadequate
controls, and the file-drawer problem.
The replication problem is insurmountable because most such evidence consists of one-
time occurrences that cannot be repeated. A woman announces a premonition that she will win
the lottery that day—and she does. You dream about an unlikely event that actually occurs a
few days later. A “psychic” correctly predicts the assassination of a public figure. And because
such incidents occur under unexpected and ambiguously specified conditions, the problem of
inadequate controls is also decisive. There is usually no way of ruling out such alternative
interpretations as coincidence (chance), faulty memories, and deliberate deception.
The file-drawer problem is also pervasive. The lottery winner who announced ahead of
time that she would win is prominently featured in the news. But the thousands of others with
similar premonitions who did not win are never heard from; they remain in the file drawers. It
is true that the probability of this woman’s winning the lottery was very low. But the critical
criterion in evaluating this case is not the probability that she would win but the probability that
any one of the thousands who thought they would win would do so. That probability is much
higher. Moreover, this woman has her own personal file drawer which contains all those past
instances in which she had similar premonitions and then lost.
The same reasoning applies to precognitive dreams. We tend to forget our dreams
unless and until an event happens to remind us of them. We thus have no way of evaluating
how often we might have dreamt of similar unlikely events that did not occur. We fill our
database with positive instances and unknowingly exclude the negative instances.
The fullest file drawers probably belong to the so-called “psychics” who make annual
predictions in the tabloid newspapers. Everybody remembers their occasional “direct hits,” but
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Psi Phenomena
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nobody remembers the predictions that fail.
In fact, these psychics are almost always wrong
(Frazier, 1987; Tyler, 1977).
Skepticism About
Psi
If some of the experimental evidence for psi is as impressive as it seems, why hasn’t it
become part of established science? Why the continuing skepticism?
Extraordinary Claims Most scientists believe that extraordinary claims require
extraordinary proof. A study reporting that students who work harder get higher grades will be
believed even if the study was seriously flawed because the data are consistent with our
understanding of how the world works. But the claim that two people in a ganzfeld study
communicate telepathically is more extraordinary; it violates our a priori beliefs about reality.
We thus rightly demand a higher measure of proof from parapsychologists because their
claims, if true,.would require us to radically revise our model of the world—something we
should not undertake lightly. In this way, science is justifiably conservative. Many
open- minded nonparapsychologists are genuinely impressed by the ganzfeld studies, for
example, but they reasonably can and do ask to see more evidence before committing
themselves to the reality of psi.
Extraordinariness is a matter of degree. Telepathy seems less extraordinary to most of
us th<m precognition because we are already familiar with the invisible transmission of
information through space. We may not all understand how television pictures get to our living
rooms, but we know that they do so. Why should telepathy seem that much more mysterious?
Precognition on the other hand seems more extraordinary because we have no familiar
phenomena in which information flows backward in time.
Extraordinariness also depends upon our current model of reality. As our
understanding of the world changes, a phenomenon that seemed extraordinary at an earlier time
may no longer seem so—even if the quality of the evidence has not changed. Any child who
has visited a museum of natural history has seen fragments of a meteorite. But before the
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asymmetries in the human brain (see Chapter 2) have spawned a host of pop-psychology
books; and media reports containing unsubstantiated claims about left-brained and right-brained
persons. Irresponsible reports about states of consciousness—including hypnosis and psi
appear daily in the media. It is thus pertinent to note that when the college professors in the
survey cited above were asked to name the sources for their beliefs about ESP, they most
frequently cited reports in newspapers and magazines.
And finally, research in cognitive and social psychology has sensitized psychologists to
the biases and shortcomings in our abilities to draw valid inferences from our everyday
experiences (see Chapter 19). This makes them particularly skeptical of anecdotal reports of psi
where, as we saw above, our judgments are subject to many kinds of errors.
For these several reasons, then, much of the skepticism of psychologists toward psi is
well-founded. But some of it is not. As we noted earlier, some scientists declare psi to be an
impossibility and reject the legitimacy of parapsychological inquiry—a priori judgments we
believe to be out of place in science. Only 4% of the college professors in the survey declared
psi to be an impossibility—but 34% of the psychologists did so. Two hundred years ago, these
same skeptics would have been equally certain that God does not hurl stones at us from
heaven.
Rosenthal, R. (1986). Meta-analytic procedures and the nature of replication: the ganzfeld
debate. Journal ofParapsychology, 50, 315-337.
Saunders, D. R. (1985). On Hyman’s factor analyses. Journal of Parapsychology, 49, 86-88.
Spence, K. W. (1964). Anxiety (Drive) level and performance in eyelid conditioning.
Psychological Bulletin, 61, 129-139.
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Stokes, D. M. (1987). Theoretical parapsychology. In S. Krippner (Ed.), Advances in
parapsychological research. Vol. 5 (pp. 77-189). Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
The Steering Committee of the Physicians’ Health Study Research Group. (1988). Preliminary
report: Findings from the aspirin component of the ongoing Physicians’ Health Study.
New England Journal ofMedicine, 318, 262-264.
Tyler, H. (1977). The unsinkable Jeane Dixon. The Humanist, 37, 6-9
Utts, J. (1986). The ganzfeld debate: a statistician’s perspective. Journal ofParapsychology,
SO, 393-402.
Wagner, M. W., & Monnet, M. (1979). Attitudes of college professors toward extra-sensory
perception. Zetetic Scholar, 5, 7-17.
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