How convenient would it be to take a peek into next week? One could check the Lotto numbers to guarantee a jackpot win, or more philanthropically prepare for disastrous events such as 9/11 or the Haitian earthquake. This purported ability is known as precognition, and is defined as the ability to obtain information about future events through extrasensory mechanisms not currently understood within the conventional scientific framework.
Often relegated to science fiction, precognition has been studied — albeit controversially — in labs since the 1920s, using everything from basic card games to sophisticated equipment to measure physical arousal, like galvanic skin response sensors.
Most recently, sparks have been flying in the scientific community as a result of the upcoming publication of Dr. Daryl Bem’s new precognition article. It is controversial both because Bem is a highly respected and successful social psychologist from Cornell University, and because it is being published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — one of the American Psychological Association’s flagship journals.
Bem’s article, titled “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” [PDF] lays out nine new computer-controlled experiments that he claims can, under controlled conditions, reliably demonstrate the effect of precognition.
By employing experimental designs that draw on common psychological effects, such as approach behaviors (people are drawn to rewarding types of stimuli versus non-rewarding stimuli) among other psychological effects like avoidance and habituation, Bem designed experiments that could detect precognition through the deception of his participants.
For instance, Bem’s first experiment forced participants to find a picture, which was randomly selected as either rewarding or non-rewarding, by determining whether it was hiding behind one of two curtains on a computer screen. From the participants’ perspective, they thought the experiment was testing for clairvoyance (gaining information about the world through extrasensory perceptions), but the computer program did not randomly determine where the picture was located until after the participants had already made their selection.
By hypothesizing that it would be evolutionarily advantageous to be able to anticipate the location of rewarding stimuli — in this case, explicitly erotic pictures — versus non-rewarding stimuli, like a picture of a park, Bem thought that participants would be more successful at identifying the future location of rewarding pictures versus the future location of non-rewarding pictures.
If precognition does not exist, hit-rates for both types of pictures is expected to be 50 per cent: participants have a 1 in 2 chance of guessing the correct answer. Following 100 participants each doing 36 trials, the results of the study revealed that hit-rates for rewarding pictures were significantly different from chance, at 53 per cent, whereas the hit-rate for non-rewarding pictures was not significant from chance (49.8 per cent), suggesting that there is some preliminary evidence for precognition. In addition, out of the nine unique experiments that Bem ran, eight of them were independently significant, providing corroborating evidence that precognition can be observed under different circumstances.
As there are no known mechanisms to explain precognition, and the current scientific framework is very powerful at explaining the world — which is exhibited by the sophisticated technologies that have been derived from it — the correct scientific response to such controversial findings is skepticism. If the effect is valid, it should be replicable by other scientists. Bem anticipated this criticism, and openly offered the computer programs he developed to skeptics, in hopes that they too could independently replicate his findings.
As Bem’s paper has yet to be published (it is slated for a 2011 release), there has been little time for replications to take place. Thus far, three attempts have been officially registered for a future meta-analysis that will pool all results. In December 2011, Richard Wiseman, a psychologist and skeptic, will conduct the analysis to determine whether Bem’s findings are indeed independently replicable.
Until then, the verdict is out on precognition. I’m not making any predictions!
