New Scientist: Is this evidence that we can see the future? (old, debunked study)

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Kimawolf

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Extraordinary claims don't come much more extraordinary than this: events that haven't yet happened can influence our behaviour.
Parapsychologists have made outlandish claims about precognition – knowledge of unpredictable future events – for years. But the fringe phenomenon is about to get a mainstream airing: a paper providing evidence for its existence has been accepted for publication by the leading social psychology journal.

What's more, sceptical psychologists who have pored over a preprint of the paper say they can't find any significant flaws. "My personal view is that this is ridiculous and can't be true," says Joachim Krueger of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, who has blogged about the work on the Psychology Today website. "Going after the methodology and the experimental design is the first line of attack. But frankly, I didn't see anything. Everything seemed to be in good order."

Critical mass

The paper, due to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology before the end of the year, is the culmination of eight years' work by Daryl Bem of Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. "I purposely waited until I thought there was a critical mass that wasn't a statistical fluke," he says.

It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.

In one experiment, students were shown a list of words and then asked to recall words from it, after which they were told to type words that were randomly selected from the same list. Spookily, the students were better at recalling words that they would later type.

In another study, Bem adapted research on "priming" – the effect of a subliminally presented word on a person's response to an image. For instance, if someone is momentarily flashed the word "ugly", it will take them longer to decide that a picture of a kitten is pleasant than if "beautiful" had been flashed. Running the experiment back-to-front, Bem found that the priming effect seemed to work backwards in time as well as forwards.

'Stroke of genius'

Exploring time-reversed versions of established psychological phenomena was "a stroke of genius", says the sceptical Krueger. Previous research in parapsychology has used idiosyncratic set-ups such as Ganzfeld experiments, in which volunteers listen to white noise and are presented with a uniform visual field to create a state allegedly conducive to effects including clairvoyance and telepathy. By contrast, Bem set out to provide tests that mainstream psychologists could readily evaluate.

The effects he recorded were small but statistically significant. In another test, for instance, volunteers were told that an erotic image was going to appear on a computer screen in one of two positions, and asked to guess in advance which position that would be. The image's eventual position was selected at random, but volunteers guessed correctly 53.1 per cent of the time.

That may sound unimpressive – truly random guesses would have been right 50 per cent of the time, after all. But well-established phenomena such as the ability of low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks are based on similarly small effects, notes Melissa Burkley of Oklahoma State University in Stillwater, who has also blogged about Bem's work at Psychology Today.

Respect for a maverick

So far, the paper has held up to scrutiny. "This paper went through a series of reviews from some of our most trusted reviewers," says Charles Judd of the University of Colorado at Boulder, who heads the section of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology editorial board that handled the paper.

Indeed, although Bem is a self-described "maverick" with a long-standing interest in paranormal phenomena, he is also a respected psychologist with a reputation for running careful experiments. He is best known for the theory of self-perception, which argues that people infer their attitudes from their own behaviour in much the same way as they assess the attitudes of others.

Bem says his paper was reviewed by four experts who proposed amendments, but still recommended publication. Still, the journal will publish a sceptical editorial commentary alongside the paper, says Judd.
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http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19712
More at link. But quite interesting I would say.
 
Wow. My first reaction is that this if this is accurately described, it's a really bad sign for experimental design in psychology in general, and for the priming effect in particular.

I'm also curious about his file drawer.
 
Cyan said:
Wow. My first reaction is that this if this is accurately described, it's a really bad sign for experimental design in psychology in general, and for the priming effect in particular.
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Why? explain like I'm five please.
 
Maybe the stupidity of this paper will force this entire field to actually review the fine print of the statistical theorems that they attempt to use.
 
ronito said:
Why? explain like I'm five please.
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Well, there's been concern in the field in the last few years over publication bias and lack of replication for some well-known psychology results, notably the priming effect.

The simple explanation is that if it's true that the researcher followed the same methodology and experimental design as most psychology research, and got a robust result that (assumption) is obviously wrong, it's probably indicative of a problem in methodology and experimental design in psychology research.

I mean:
It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather than before it.
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if he inverted the experiments and got the same results, it seems like the original results can't be right either.

Hari Seldon said:
Maybe the stupidity of this paper will force this entire field to actually review the fine print of the statistical theorems that they attempt to use.
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Yes, misuse of statistics, not even necessarily intentional, is also a big problem in the field.
 
I don't think we can predict the future, but I don't doubt we have some sort of secret innate instinct of anticipation that effectively gives us a second or two of potential foresight.

If you know what I mean.
 
AkuMifune said:
I don't think we can predict the future, but I don't doubt we have some sort of secret innate instinct of anticipation that effectively gives us a second or two of potential foresight.

If you know what I mean.
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I can't speak to the tests done for the paper in the OP, but a lot of the tests that I've read about are done hours or days apart with similar results.
 
So...those occasional dreams I have years ago and suddenly remember having for the briefest of instances has some basis after all?
 
DoYouEvenLift? said:
I can't speak to the tests done for the paper in the OP, but a lot of the tests that I've read about are done hours or days apart with similar results.
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Weird. Skeptical, but the one thing I know for sure about life is that we don't know half of what we think we're sure about.
 
Wait, this article is from 2010. Let's see if someone's replicated the experiment yet...

Yep:
Last year a group of British researchers tried and failed to replicate Bem’s experiments. A team of researchers including Professor Chris French, Stuart Ritchie and Professor Richard Wiseman collaborated to accurately replicate Bem’s final experiment, and found no evidence for precognition. Their results were published in the online journal PLoS ONE.

Now a second group of scientists has also replicated Bem’s experiments, and once again found no evidence for ESP. In an article forthcoming in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, researchers Jeff Galak, Robyn LeBoeuf, Leif D. Nelson, and Joseph P. Simmons, the authors explained their procedure: “Across seven experiments (N = 3,289) we replicate the procedure of Experiments 8 and 9 from Bem (2011), which had originally demonstrated retroactive facilitation of recall. We failed to replicate that finding. We further conduct a meta-analysis of all replication attempts of these experiments and find that the average effect size (d = .04) is no different from zero.” In other words there was no evidence at all for ESP.
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I vaguely recall an experiment with a baseball pitch regarding something like this.
 
Cyan said:
Well, there's been concern in the field in the last few years over publication bias and lack of replication for some well-known psychology results, notably the priming effect.
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Now that I know this article is more than three years old, I think this study was actually cited in some of the articles I've read about these concerns. :jnc How oddly circular.
 
zero shift said:
IIRC isn't this a problem in many science fields in general?
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It is, but the statistical noise when dealing with human psychology is particularly significant.

More noise means more potential to find patterns that don't ultimately have any meaning.
 
Opiate said:
It is, but the statistical noise when dealing with human psychology is particularly significant.

More noise means more potential to find patterns that don't ultimately have any meaning.
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Not surprising. I majored in Psychology and there was a lot of sketchy things when looking over studies and "theories". Its almost as bad as economics.

"Intelligence" "studies" (yes both of those needed individual quotations) are some of the most laughable things I've seen.
Cyan said:
Yes, notably in medicine and in the social sciences. I want to try to find an article I read recently... here we go.

False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
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I recall hearing that even in hard sciences such as physics you find similar things happening (though not as common).

Thanks for the link, will read.
 
Cyan said:
Yes, notably in medicine and in the social sciences. I want to try to find an article I read recently... here we go.

False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant
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0Av8UJE.jpg
 
zero shift said:
I recall hearing that even in hard sciences such as physics you find similar things happening (though not as common).

Thanks for the link, will read.
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Yeah false positives are a risk no matter what science you do. I imagine psychologists could figure out exactly why they are a problem if they didn't end up with so many false positives.
 
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