Daryl Bem (http://dbem.ws) is in the news again for doing what he does really well . . . academic experimental studies that prove what others don’t want to be true.
His latest paper, Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect, to be published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, seems to once again verify some psychic, etrasensory, precognitive, telepathic, or psi phenomena. You can read an pre-release of the paper here.
The controversy with this paper that discusses a series of experiments involving thousands of university students is that it seems to confirm some psychic ability . . . particularly when experimental subjects were asked to predict which of two screens would show a pornographic or sexual image. With regular images, the predictions were right no better than chance but when asked to predict an image with sexual content, the students scored better than chance.
Of course, there are a number of possible explanations for this . . . precognition, emotional intensification cues, emotive telepathy, and the like . . . but the explanation most often fielded by Bem’s critics is faulty statistics or experimental error and some have been downright nasty about it . . . in part as Bem’s been doing psi related research for decades and it pisses some folks off to no end when a highly respected academic authority “wastes” his time on such “nonsense” . . . particularly when his work seems to point towards something genuinely going on . . . if his work invalidated psi phenomena then he’d very likely be getting pats on the back by some of the same folks who so emotionally attack his science now.
Unfortunately for his critics, Bem’s not just some random nut job . . . although he has been portrayed as such by some critics who fail to see past his results and his target. He’s been producing high quality work for decades . . . his communicative inoculation theory is still taught at universities and used quite effectively in the field.
If you’d like to read a couple critiques of Bem’s current controversial paper, see here and here. I can’t vouche for how long the paper pdf or the critiques will be publically available so you might want to snarf ’em early just in case they shift to other archives or the like.
For more on the current controversy . . . see . . . here, here, here, and here.
By the way, for another take on psychic phenomena, check out my psychic hypnosis program at http://www.briandavidphillips.com/products/psychic.html. Nope, it’s probably not what you think.
All the best,
Brian
