Paranormal research and a free book! – Richard Wiseman

Feeling the future

Psychologist Daryl Bem and I first met in the mid-1990s when we taught on the Rhine Research Centre’s Summer School Program. I am a fan of his work (my book Rip It Up features Daryl’s research into self-perception theory) and when it comes to psychic stuff, he tends to be something of a believer, and I am more sceptical. In 2011, Daryl published a landmark paper (link here) describing nine experiments that supported the existence of psychic ability.

Replication, replication, replication

Researchers try to replicate controversial findings to discover if the effects are genuine. When Daryl published his paper, I teamed up with Chris French and Stuart Ritchie and we all tried to replicate one of the key studies. Alas, we failed to obtain Daryl’s positive results and argued that his original findings might have been due to errors such as selective reporting and fishing around in the data (link to the paper here). This debate about paranormal phenomena has taken place many times over the years, but this time something unusual happened.

Into the mainstream

Some writers pointed out that the criticisms aimed at Bem’s work also applies to much of mainstream psychology. If this is the case, many of these mainstream findings are equally unreliable. Right now, researchers are figuring out ways of spotting, and avoiding, these errors. Interestingly, those researching the paranormal have already paved the way.

Over the years, parapsychologists have written about the problems that can plague research into Extra-Sensory Perception (ESP). However, this work tends to be published in obscure academic journals. A few years ago, Julie Milton and I co-authored a small book that brought all this work together and contained a checklist to help researchers run better studies.

The book was originally published by University of Hertfordshire Press but is now difficult to obtain. However, we have decided to make it publicly available for free! The link is here. Feel free to download and share it. Our guess is that it will be of use to anyone interested in the paranormal, researching ESP, and working in the behavioural sciences.

Enjoy!