Magic, Science, and Psi

A magic show! Undergrads and grad students alike eagerly crammed the auditorium to see one of our psychology professors, Daryl Bem, present an hour of tricks, illusions, and sleight-of-hand. Bem, who had joined the Psychology faculty at Stanford in 1971, was a respected research scientist. And he proved to be a great showman. By the final curtain, I was ready to believe in magic.

But Dr. Bem was not only a professional magician. He also debunked demonstrations of ESP (ExtraSensory Perception- today called “psi.”) For example, he appeared in an Introductory Psychology video series in which he revealed how a magician “sets up” card and mind-reading tricks. (See the Annenberg Learning website for the series produced by Dr. Phillip Zimbardo called “Discovering Psychology, updated edition, Unit Two).

During my career as a psychologist, I didn’t bother following psi research. Like many of my colleagues, I assumed the scientific “evidence” demonstrating the existence of psi was probably flawed, marred by inadequate design and over-enthusiastic interpretation of data. Not that I had actually seen any of the studies. After all, they were generally not published in the mainstream psychology journals I read.

But in 2011, a headline in the New York Times grabbed my attention: “Top Journal Plans to Publish a Paper on ESP . . .” The journal was the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP), perhaps the most respected journal in its field regarding rigor of peer review and importance of research topics.

The author of the paper was Daryl Bem, and his laboratory studies to be published in JPSP claimed to support the idea that future events could causally influence current emotions and behaviors even when these future events were random and unknown to anyone. In other words, the studies were touted to support presentiment (emotions based on the future) and precognition (cognition based on the future).

In the NYT article, some critics of Bem’s work thought his paper might be “an elaborate joke,” or “an embarrassment to the field,” or “should undergo special scrutiny,” or that the study used improper statistics. (The New York Times, 1/6/2011)

But to my mind, this was Professor Bem, a renowned and respected scientist who had, in the latter part of his career, turned his attention to psi research. And who better to conduct these studies than the great debunker himself? Who better to know how to design an experiment that controlled for (eliminated) extraneous factors—factors that could offer an alternative explanation for apparent psi results?

I’m going to offer a somewhat simplified description of one of Bem’s studies in my next blog. But for now, if you wish, you can read his entire article at JPSP’s online publication of “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect,” 100, 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

(Featured image from amazingkidsparties.com.au)