Myth #3 Extrasensory Perception (ESP) Is a Well-Established Scientific Phenomenon Having trouble with your love life? How about money problems? Call Miss Cleo's Psychic Hotline for Free! The operators of Miss Cleo's Psychic Hot Line charged callers an astonishing Sl billion before a 2002 settlement widi the Federal Trade Commission (ETC) required that they cancel SSOO million in customer bills and pay a SS million fine (Miss Cleo's psychic powers apparently failed to warn her of the FTC's impending legal action). Nearly 6 million viewers of late-night television commercials featuring the purported Jamaican soothsayer were moved to speak with her or one of her "trained psychics" by the promise of receiving 3 free minutes of revelations about their future. Callers had no reason to suspect that Miss Cleo had American parents, that she was born in Los Angeles, and that her real name was Youree Dell Harris. Nor did they realize that their calls were being charged at the rate of S4.99 a minute from the outset, and that the goal of the "psychic" on the other end of die line was to keep them talking as long as possible, thereby running up their phone bills. Some readers skeptical of psychic abilities might assume that callers, who ended up paying an average of S60 for each call, were simply suckers. Yet this judgment doesn't consider the fact that belief in psychic abilities and extrasensory perception (ESP) is finnly entrenched in modern society. The millions of callers to "Miss Cleo" were but a tiny fraction of the Americans who believe that ESP is a finnly established scientific fact Coined in 1870 by Sir Richard Burton, the term ESP has come to mean knowledge or perception without the use of any of the senses. According to the most recent Gallup poll on this topic (Moore, 2005), of the 1.002 U .S. adults surveyed believe in ESP, 31 in the existence of "teleparhy/communication between minds without using traditional senses," and in "clairvoyance/the power of the mind to know the past and predict the future." Among 92 introductory psychology students, said they believed that the existence of ESP was well documented (Taylor & Kowalski, 2003). The types of experiences assessed by these surveys are also known as paranormal, or psi-related experiences. Many parapsychologists (psychologists who study the paranormal) also describe psychokinesis the ability to influence physical objects or processes by the power of thought—as a paranormal ability. Nevertheless. psychokinesis is typically excluded from ESP, which includes the three capacities of (1) telepathy (mind reading), (2) clairvoyance (knowing the existence of hidden or far away objects or people), and (3) precognition (predicting the future using paranormal means). Believers in ESP aren't limited to the general public. More than half of natural scientists polled (Wagner & Monnet, 1979) reported that they believ the ESF i: an established fact or a likely possibility. Starting in 1972, the U -S. government shelled out S20 million of taxpayer money to fund a program known
an established fact or a likely possibility. Starting in 1972, the U .S. government shelled out $20 million of taxpayer money to fund a program known as "Stargate" to study the ability of "remote viewers" to acquire militarily useful information from distant, inaccessible places (using clairvoyance), such as a nuclear facility in the then Soviet Union. Government agents gave remote viewers the geographical coordinates (longitude, latitude) of a specific person, place, or document, and these viewers then wrote down, drew, or described whatever they could glean mentally about the target. The government discontinued the Stargate program in 1995, apparently because it yielded no useful military information. Amidst the debate over whether the government was wasting taxpayer money on this project, a blue- ribbon subcommittee of the U.S. National Research Council reviewed the world literature on ESP and concluded that the case for psychic powers was feeble (Alcock, 1990; Druckman & Swets, 1988; Hyman, 1989). Still, the mere fact that such a program was established in the first place highlights the widespread acceptance of ESP among educated people. If the scientific support for ESP is so weak—and we'll soon provide evidence for this verdict—why do so many people believe in it? From childhood, most of us are bombarded by favorable and unskeptical media accounts of paranormal experiences. Such television shows as the X-Files, Medium, Fringe, and America's Psychic Challenge and, before that, Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits, have portrayed ESP as part of the fabric of everyday life. Movie plots encourage belief in a wide range of paranormal powers, including clairvoyance (such as Minority Report, The Dead Zone, Stir of Echoes, The Butcher's Wife, The Sixth Sense), telepathy (such as Scanners, Dreamscape, The Sender, and Ghostbusters), and psychokinesis (such as Carrie and X-Men). Many popular self-help books (Hewitt, 1996; Manning, 1999) declare that we all harbor latent psychic talents and tout simple techniques to liberate these powers and achieve ESP success. The Internet features innumerable pitches for courses that promise to develop and enhance our psychic abilities. For example, an advertisement for the Silva Ultra Mind Seminar (2005) tells participants that they'll be paired up with other people, taught to harness their ESP following meditation, and given the skills to guess astonishing facts about each other by means of paranormal powers. Belief in the paranormal is bolstered by strong needs to believe in something greater than ourselves, a reality that lies beyond what the "senses can sense" (Gilovich, 1991). But perhaps even more influential in spreading belief in ESP is the fact that our personal experiences occasionally seem so extraordinary that they defy ordinary explanation. In one study (Greeley, 1987), 67% of 1,500 American adults claimed to have had personal experience with clairvoyance, precognition, or psychokinesis. The emotional impact of dramatic and unexpected coincidences is certainly one reason why so many people believe in ESP. Say you have a dream about your friend, Jessica, from whom you haven't heard in years, and Jessica calls the next moming. You might assume the coincidence is so incredible that it must be ESP. Yet people tend to underestimate how often such events could occur by chance alone. If you find yourself in a group of 25 people, what are the odds thatule of them share the same birthday? Most people are shocked to learn that the answer is over 50%. If we increased the size of the group to 35, the odd .0f "least people sharing the same birthday rises to about 85% (Gilovich, 1991). We tend to underestimate how probable most coincidences are, and we may en- actriouæ false "psychic" significance to these events (Marks & Kammann, 1980).
As we noted in the Introduction (p. I l), selective perception and memory lead us to remember events that confirm our beliefs and ignore or forget events that don't (Presley, 1997). Accordingly, people who believe in ESP may be more likely to remember and attach special significance to occurrences that fall into the category of the paranormal, even though they're due merely to chance. Because the timing of Jessica's call grabbed your attention, it stood out in your memory. So if we asked you a few weeks later if you believed in ESP, her call could spring to mind as evidence for ESP. In light of the seeming reality of ESP experiences, scientists have given them serious consideration since the late 19th century. Joseph Banks Rhine (1933) and his wife Louisa jump-started the scientific study of ESP in the United States. They established a major program of research on ESP at Duke University in the 1930s based on subjects' trying to guess one of five standard symbols (star, triangle, squiggly line, plus sign, square) on cards—named "Zener cards" after one of Rhine's colleagues. Yet other scientists couldn't replicate positive findings from Rhine and his colleagues' Zener card studies. Nor could they replicate later research involving the ability of people to transmit visual images to a dreaming person (Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan, 1973). Skeptics dismissed rates of ESP responding that exceeded chance as due to the unintentional "leakage" of subde sensory cues, such as seeing the vague imprint of a Zener card symbol through a sealed envelope. Studies using the Ganzfeld technique have received by far the most attention from the scientific community. The mental information detected by ESP, if it indeed exists, is presumably an exceedingly weak signal. So this information is typically obscured by many irrelevant stimuli. According to the logic of the Ganzfeld method, we need to create a uniform sensory field, the Ganzfeld (from the German word meaning "whole field"), to decrease the proportion of noise relative to signal and allow the faint ESP signal to emerge (Lilienfeld, 1999). To establish this uniform sensory field. ESP experimenters cover the eyes of relaxed subjects with ping-pong ball halves, and direct a floodlight containing a red beam toward their eyes. Meanwhile, these researchers pump white noise into subjects' ears through headphones to minimize extraneous sounds in the room. A person in another room then attempts to mentally transmit pictures to subjects, who later rate the extent to which each of four pictures matches the mental imagery they experienced during the session. In 1994, Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton published a remarkable article on the Ganzfeld method in one of psychology's most prestigious journals, Psychological Bulletin. To analyze data collected previously by other investigators on this method, they used a statistical technique called allows researchers to combine the results of many studies and treat them as though they were one large study. Bem and Honorton's meta-analysis 0911 studies revealed that participants obtained overall target "hit" rates of approximately 35%, thereby exceeding chance (25%: that's I in 4 targets) performance.
studies revealed that participants obtained overall target "hiÜ' rates of approximately 35%, thereby exceeding chance (25%: that's I in 4 targets) performance. Nevertheless, it wasn't long before Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman (1999) analyzed 30 recent Ganzfeld studies not reviewed by Bem and Honorton, and reported that the size of Ganzfeld effects corresponded to essentially chance performance. Lance Storm and Suitbert Ertel (2001) responded to Milton and Wiseman (1999) with another meta-analysis of 79 Ganzfeld studies, dating from 1974 to 1996, and contended that their analysis supported the claim that the Ganzfeld procedure detected ESP. In the parting shot in this scientific ping-pong game (appropriate for Ganzfeld research, we might add) of arguments and counterarguments, Milton and Wiseman (2001) countered that the studies that Storm and Ertel included in their analysis suffered from serious methodological shortcomings, and had shown nothing of the kind. It' s clear that the question of whether the Ganzfeld technique will prove to be the replicable method long sought by parapsychologists is far from conclusively resolved (Lilienfeld, 1999). Still, the fact that psychologists have tried unsuccessfully for over 150 years to demonstrate the existence of ESP is hardly encouraging (Gilovich, 1991). Many scientists argue that the scientific "bar" necessary to accept the existence of ESP should be set very high. After all, the very existence of ESP would run counter to most established physical laws related to space, time, and matter. A program of well-controlled research that yields consistent support for ESP across independent laboratories will be needed to persuade the scientific community that paranormal abilities are real. Although we shouldn't dismiss these abilities as impossible or unworthy of further scientific consideration, we recommend holding off on making any major life decisions based on that call to the psychic hot line.
an established fact or a likely possibility. Starting in 1972, the U .S. government shelled out $20 million of taxpayer money to fund a program known as "Stargate" to study the ability of "remote viewers" to acquire militarily useful information from distant, inaccessible places (using clairvoyance), such as a nuclear facility in the then Soviet Union. Government agents gave remote viewers the geographical coordinates (longitude, latitude) of a specific person, place, or document, and these viewers then wrote down, drew, or described whatever they could glean mentally about the target. The government discontinued the Stargate program in 1995, apparently because it yielded no useful military information. Amidst the debate over whether the government was wasting taxpayer money on this project, a blue- ribbon subcommittee of the U.S. National Research Council reviewed the world literature on ESP and concluded that the case for psychic powers was feeble (Alcock, 1990; Druckman & Swets, 1988; Hyman, 1989). Still, the mere fact that such a program was established in the first place highlights the widespread acceptance of ESP among educated people. If the scientific support for ESP is so weak—and we'll soon provide evidence for this verdict—why do so many people believe in it? From childhood, most of us are bombarded by favorable and unskeptical media accounts of paranormal experiences. Such television shows as the X-Files, Medium, Fringe, and America's Psychic Challenge and, before that, Twilight Zone and the Outer Limits, have portrayed ESP as part of the fabric of everyday life. Movie plots encourage belief in a wide range of paranormal powers, including clairvoyance (such as Minority Report, The Dead Zone, Stir of Echoes, The Butcher's Wife, The Sixth Sense), telepathy (such as Scanners, Dreamscape, The Sender, and Ghostbusters), and psychokinesis (such as Carrie and X-Men). Many popular self-help books (Hewitt, 1996; Manning, 1999) declare that we all harbor latent psychic talents and tout simple techniques to liberate these powers and achieve ESP success. The Internet features innumerable pitches for courses that promise to develop and enhance our psychic abilities. For example, an advertisement for the Silva Ultra Mind Seminar (2005) tells participants that they'll be paired up with other people, taught to harness their ESP following meditation, and given the skills to guess astonishing facts about each other by means of paranormal powers. Belief in the paranormal is bolstered by strong needs to believe in something greater than ourselves, a reality that lies beyond what the "senses can sense" (Gilovich, 1991). But perhaps even more influential in spreading belief in ESP is the fact that our personal experiences occasionally seem so extraordinary that they defy ordinary explanation. In one study (Greeley, 1987), 67% of 1,500 American adults claimed to have had personal experience with clairvoyance, precognition, or psychokinesis. The emotional impact of dramatic and unexpected coincidences is certainly one reason why so many people believe in ESP. Say you have a dream about your friend, Jessica, from whom you haven't heard in years, and Jessica calls the next moming. You might assume the coincidence is so incredible that it must be ESP. Yet people tend to underestimate how often such events could occur by chance alone. If you find yourself in a group of 25 people, what are the odds thatule of them share the same birthday? Most people are shocked to learn that the answer is over 50%. If we increased the size of the group to 35, the odd .0f "least people sharing the same birthday rises to about 85% (Gilovich, 1991). We tend to underestimate how probable most coincidences are, and we may en- actriouæ false "psychic" significance to these events (Marks & Kammann, 1980).
As we noted in the Introduction (p. I l), selective perception and memory lead us to remember events that confirm our beliefs and ignore or forget events that don't (Presley, 1997). Accordingly, people who believe in ESP may be more likely to remember and attach special significance to occurrences that fall into the category of the paranormal, even though they're due merely to chance. Because the timing of Jessica's call grabbed your attention, it stood out in your memory. So if we asked you a few weeks later if you believed in ESP, her call could spring to mind as evidence for ESP. In light of the seeming reality of ESP experiences, scientists have given them serious consideration since the late 19th century. Joseph Banks Rhine (1933) and his wife Louisa jump-started the scientific study of ESP in the United States. They established a major program of research on ESP at Duke University in the 1930s based on subjects' trying to guess one of five standard symbols (star, triangle, squiggly line, plus sign, square) on cards—named "Zener cards" after one of Rhine's colleagues. Yet other scientists couldn't replicate positive findings from Rhine and his colleagues' Zener card studies. Nor could they replicate later research involving the ability of people to transmit visual images to a dreaming person (Ullman, Krippner, & Vaughan, 1973). Skeptics dismissed rates of ESP responding that exceeded chance as due to the unintentional "leakage" of subde sensory cues, such as seeing the vague imprint of a Zener card symbol through a sealed envelope. Studies using the Ganzfeld technique have received by far the most attention from the scientific community. The mental information detected by ESP, if it indeed exists, is presumably an exceedingly weak signal. So this information is typically obscured by many irrelevant stimuli. According to the logic of the Ganzfeld method, we need to create a uniform sensory field, the Ganzfeld (from the German word meaning "whole field"), to decrease the proportion of noise relative to signal and allow the faint ESP signal to emerge (Lilienfeld, 1999). To establish this uniform sensory field. ESP experimenters cover the eyes of relaxed subjects with ping-pong ball halves, and direct a floodlight containing a red beam toward their eyes. Meanwhile, these researchers pump white noise into subjects' ears through headphones to minimize extraneous sounds in the room. A person in another room then attempts to mentally transmit pictures to subjects, who later rate the extent to which each of four pictures matches the mental imagery they experienced during the session. In 1994, Daryl Bem and Charles Honorton published a remarkable article on the Ganzfeld method in one of psychology's most prestigious journals, Psychological Bulletin. To analyze data collected previously by other investigators on this method, they used a statistical technique called allows researchers to combine the results of many studies and treat them as though they were one large study. Bem and Honorton's meta-analysis 0911 studies revealed that participants obtained overall target "hit" rates of approximately 35%, thereby exceeding chance (25%: that's I in 4 targets) performance.
studies revealed that participants obtained overall target "hiÜ' rates of approximately 35%, thereby exceeding chance (25%: that's I in 4 targets) performance. Nevertheless, it wasn't long before Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman (1999) analyzed 30 recent Ganzfeld studies not reviewed by Bem and Honorton, and reported that the size of Ganzfeld effects corresponded to essentially chance performance. Lance Storm and Suitbert Ertel (2001) responded to Milton and Wiseman (1999) with another meta-analysis of 79 Ganzfeld studies, dating from 1974 to 1996, and contended that their analysis supported the claim that the Ganzfeld procedure detected ESP. In the parting shot in this scientific ping-pong game (appropriate for Ganzfeld research, we might add) of arguments and counterarguments, Milton and Wiseman (2001) countered that the studies that Storm and Ertel included in their analysis suffered from serious methodological shortcomings, and had shown nothing of the kind. It' s clear that the question of whether the Ganzfeld technique will prove to be the replicable method long sought by parapsychologists is far from conclusively resolved (Lilienfeld, 1999). Still, the fact that psychologists have tried unsuccessfully for over 150 years to demonstrate the existence of ESP is hardly encouraging (Gilovich, 1991). Many scientists argue that the scientific "bar" necessary to accept the existence of ESP should be set very high. After all, the very existence of ESP would run counter to most established physical laws related to space, time, and matter. A program of well-controlled research that yields consistent support for ESP across independent laboratories will be needed to persuade the scientific community that paranormal abilities are real. Although we shouldn't dismiss these abilities as impossible or unworthy of further scientific consideration, we recommend holding off on making any major life decisions based on that call to the psychic hot line.
No comments:
Post a Comment