Winning over the Scientific Mainstream (2009)

[Editor's Note: Back when J. B. Rhine was alive, he would occasionally publish editorials in the JP. Starting with the current issue, I am resurrecting this practice. The editorials will not appear in every issue, but neither will they be isolated events. I envision them as thought-provoking opinion pieces addressing fundamental issues facing contemporary parapsychology. Because I would like our editorial page to reflect a wide range of perspectives, most of the editorials will be guest editorials written by other prominent members of the parapsychological community. However, the first contribution should clearly be mine, hence the following.] One of the most important goals of parapsychology over the years has been to convince the mainstream scientific community of the reality of psi, at least as a communications anomaly. I think it is useful to reflect periodically on what progress we have made in meeting this goal. My answer is, not much. In the old days, we attempted to make our case through foolproof (and magician-proof) crucial experiments. This approach never succeeded, although the alternative explanations critics proposed were sometimes at least as implausible as psi itself (cf. Hansel, 1989). The whole rationale behind this approach is flawed, as even some critics have recognized (e.g., Hyman, 1981). Nowadays, the replicability of good-quality, if not perfect, experiments has taken over as the criterion of success. In the literature, at least, the battle has focused on the results of meta-analyses of groups of psi experiments of a common type. Success (and replicability) is claimed if the collective result of these experiments is statistically significant and the effect sizes of individual studies do not correlate with measures of methodological quality (Radin, 1997). Such an outcome has been claimed by parapsychologists in several instances. The most important of these is probably the ganzfeld, because it has been debated with critics in a very prominent mainstream psychology journal, Psychological Bulletin (e.g., Bem & Honorton, 1994; Hyman, 1994). In a review of the ganzfeld debate, I concluded that the ganzfeld literature met the meta-analytic criterion for replicability (Palmer, 2003). However, I also noted that the large heterogeneity (variability) of the results illustrates that replicability is by no means universal, and that what replicability there has been is restricted to parapsychologists who are favorably disposed to the psi hypothesis. This latter point is particularly pertinent to the issue of mainstream acceptance of psi. In my view, even open-minded mainstream scientists (I am thinking especially of psychologists) will not jump on board until a critical mass of mainstream scientists who have not been identified with parapsychology in the past obtain positive results in experiments they conduct. The more prestige these mainstreamers have in their own fields, the better. I don't think they need to be skeptics; benevolent neutrality is sufficient. Don't ask me to attach a number to this critical mass, but we clearly are nowhere near it at the present time. The best recent example of such a mainstream contributor to our research literature is the prominent social psychologist from Cornell, Daryl Bem, who has repeatedly been successful in demonstrating psi in the context of the so-called mere-exposure effect. As Bem has pointed out himself, his studies should carry additional weight with mainstream scientists because the methodological paradigm is one they use in their own field and is easy to implement. (Technically, Bem must be considered a parapsychologist more than an outsider, because he conducted these experiments after he had already taken a pro-psi position in his ganzfeld paper, and his psi research has not yet been published in a mainstream journal. However, he is close enough to an outsider that his research and general advocacy should carry some weight in the mainstream community. …