Feeling the Future

Just about everybody has had an intuition or a hunch or a “gut feeling” about a future event. But can we really feel the future? Some scientists are attempting to find out.

I’ve decided to describe Daryl Bem’s Experiment 2 from his (2011) publication, Feeling the Future (see reference below). Dr. Bem, a respected research psychologist, magician, and debunker of ESP (psi) demonstrations, seems to me an ideal person to conduct research on hunches. Also, the procedure of the experiment is relatively simple, and the results are statistically quite unlikely to be due to chance.

 

PARTICIPANTS: 150 Cornell undergraduates. 107 women, 43 men.

 

METHOD:

Procedure:

There were three steps in this experiment, all fully automated on a computer in order to reduce unintended influence by human experimenters.

1. The participant saw two side-by-side neutral pictures on a computer screen and indicated which picture he/she preferred. (The pictures are described in the Materials section below.)

2. AFTER the participant indicated which picture was preferred, the computer randomly selected one of those two pictures as the “target.”

3a. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the target picture as preferred, the computer flashed a positive picture three times for 33 milliseconds each time.

3b. IF the participant had, in step 1, already selected the nontarget picture as preferred, the computer flashed a negative picture three times for 33 ms each time.

(When pictures or other stimuli are presented for such tiny time periods, the stimuli are called subliminal. The participant is generally not consciously aware of subliminal stimuli.)

Materials: All of the pictures used in this experiment were taken from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). (See reference below.)These pictures have been rated by various groups of people as to their emotional “pull.”

Some pictures are rated as neutral, for example, a chair against a blank wall. Some are rated as negative, for example, a spider or an angry human face. Some are positive, for example, children laughing or puppies snuggling.

 

In summary, participants indicated a preference for one of two pictures. If the preferred picture was then randomly selected as “target,” participants were subliminally rewarded with a positive picture. But if that preferred picture was the (randomly selected) “nontarget,” participants were subliminally punished with a negative picture.

 

HYPOTHESIS:

The idea is that if participants can somehow “feel” the future, can somehow access the emotional pull of the future subliminal picture, then, over many trials, they will tend to prefer the positive target picture and avoid choosing the negative nontarget picture.

If participants cannot feel the future, then, over many trials, they will indicate a preference for the target picture 50% of the time.

 

RESULTS:

If you’re not familiar with parapsychological (psi) research, you may be disappointed by the results of this study.

As with many psi experiments of this type, the results support psi, but the effects are very small. In this study, participants showed a “hit rate” (preferring target pictures) of 51.7%, not much above the chance rate of 50%. This might suggest that feelings about the future are rather weak and somewhat hit-or-miss. Certainly, for an individual person, these “hunches” are only occasionally better than chance. Nevertheless, these results are statistically significant. In other words, the feelings about the future are weak, but very likely “real” – not due to chance.

But wait. Are you feeling doubts rise up like a wall? Wondering about the experimental design- was it truly solid? Wondering if the particular statistical analyses used were appropriate? Wondering if these results can be reproduced in other laboratories by other experimenters?

You’re not alone. If you google criticisms about Bem’s Feeling the Future, you’ll see many people have weighed in with critiques, and supportive comments as well.

My personal position, after reading Bem’s paper and several of the critical articles, is that the experiments are solid designs with careful controls for extraneous variables. But yes, it would be useful to use a variety of statistical approaches with the data.  And the most crucial question remains: can these results be replicated?

Experiments have been, and are being, conducted all over the world in attempts to replicate Bem’s findings. We’ll take up these results in a future blog. Any hunches about the outcomes?

(Featured image from designstacks.net)

 

REFERENCES

Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect: Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100: 407-425. (caps.ucsf.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2011/02/bem2011.pdf)

Lang, P.J., Bradley, M.M., & Cuthbert, B.N. (2008) International Affective Picture System (IAPS): Affective ratings of pictures and instruction manual. Technical Report A-8 University of Florida, Gainesville, FL.