The humanist scholar Johannes Reuchlin (1455–1522) actively opposed religious obscurantism.
Obscurantism (/ɒbˈskjʊərənˌtɪzəm, əb-/ and /ˌɒbskjʊəˈræntɪzəm/)
is the practice of deliberately presenting information in an imprecise
and recondite manner, often designed to forestall further inquiry and
understanding. There are two historical and intellectual denotations of Obscurantism: (1) the deliberate restriction of knowledge—opposition to disseminating knowledge; and, (2) deliberate obscurity—an abstruse style (as in literature and art) characterized by deliberate vagueness.
In the 18th century, Enlightenment philosophers applied the term obscurantist
to any enemy of intellectual enlightenment and the liberal diffusion of
knowledge. In the 19th century, in distinguishing the varieties of
obscurantism found in metaphysics and theology from the "more subtle" obscurantism of the critical philosophy of Immanuel Kant, and of modern philosophical skepticism, Friedrich Nietzsche
said: "The essential element in the black art of obscurantism is not
that it wants to darken individual understanding, but that it wants to
blacken our picture of the world, and darken our idea of existence."
In the 19th century, the mathematicianWilliam Kingdon Clifford, an early proponent of Darwinism,
devoted some writings to uprooting obscurantism in England, after
hearing clerics—who privately agreed with him about evolution—publicly
denounce evolution as un-Christian.
Moreover, in the realm of organized religion, obscurantism is a
distinct strain of thought independent of theologic allegiance. The
distinction is that fundamentalism presupposes sincere religious belief,
whereas obscurantism is based upon minority manipulation of the popular
faith as political praxis; cf. Censorship.
Leo Strauss
Political philosophy
In the 20th century, the American conservative political philosopherLeo Strauss, for whom philosophy and politics intertwined, and his Neo-conservative adherents adopted the notion of government by the enlightened few as political strategy. He noted that intellectuals, dating from Plato, confronted the dilemma of either an informed populace "interfering" with government, or if it were possible for good politicians to be truthful and still govern to maintain a stable society—hence the Noble Lie necessary in securing public acquiescence. In The City and Man (1964), he discusses the myths in The Republic
that Plato proposes effective governing requires, among them, the
belief that the country (land) ruled by the State belongs to it (despite
some having been conquered from others), and that citizenship derives
from more than the accident of birth in the City-State. Thus, in the New Yorker magazine article Selective Intelligence, Seymour Hersh observes that Strauss endorsed the "Noble Lie" concept: the myths politicians use in maintaining a cohesive society.
Shadia Drury
criticized Strauss's acceptance of dissembling and deception of the
populace as "the peculiar justice of the wise", whereas Plato proposed
the Noble Lie as based upon moral good. In criticizing Natural Right and History
(1953), she said that "Strauss thinks that the superiority of the
ruling philosophers is an intellectual superiority and not a moral one
... [he] is the only interpreter who gives a sinister reading to Plato,
and then celebrates him."
Esoteric texts
Leo
Strauss also was criticized for proposing the notion of "esoteric"
meanings to ancient texts, obscure knowledge inaccessible to the
"ordinary" intellect. In Persecution and the Art of Writing
(1952), he proposes that some philosophers write esoterically to avert
persecution by the political or religious authorities, and, per his
knowledge of Maimonides, Al Farabi, and Plato,
proposed that an esoteric writing style is proper for the philosophic
text. Rather than explicitly presenting his thoughts, the philosopher's
esoteric writing compels the reader to think independently of the text,
and so learn. In the Phædrus,
Socrates notes that writing does not reply to questions, but invites
dialogue with the reader, thereby minimizing the problems of grasping
the written word. Strauss noted that one of writing's political dangers
is students' too-readily accepting dangerous ideas—as in the trial of Socrates, wherein the relationship with Alcibiades was used to prosecute him.
For Leo Strauss, philosophers' texts offered the reader lucid
"exoteric" (salutary) and obscure "esoteric" (true) teachings, which are
concealed to the reader of ordinary intellect; emphasizing that writers
often left contradictions and other errors to encourage the reader's
more scrupulous (re-)reading of the text. In observing and maintaining
the "exoteric – esoteric" dichotomy, Strauss was accused of obscurantism, and for writing esoterically.
In the Wired magazine article, "Why the Future Doesn't Need Us" (April 2000), the computer scientist Bill Joy, then a Sun Microsystems
chief scientist, in the sub-title proposed that: "Our most powerful
twenty-first-century technologies—robotics, genetic engineering, and
nanotech[nology]—are threatening to make humans an endangered species";
in the body, he posits that:
"The experiences of the atomic scientists clearly show the need
to take personal responsibility, the danger that things will move too
fast, and the way in which a process can take on a life of its own. We
can, as they did, create insurmountable problems in almost no time flat.
We must do more thinking up front if we are not to be similarly
surprised and shocked by the consequences of our inventions."
Joy's proposal for limiting the dissemination of "certain" knowledge,
in behalf of preserving society, was quickly likened to obscurantism. A
year later, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, in the Science and Technology Policy Yearbook 2001, published the article "A Response to Bill Joy and the Doom-and-Gloom Technofuturists", wherein the computer scientists John Seely Brown
and Paul Duguid countered his proposal as technological tunnel vision,
and the predicted technologically derived problems as infeasible, for
disregarding the influence of non-scientists upon such societal
problems.
In the essay "Why I Am Not a Conservative" (1960), the economist Friedrich von Hayek said that political conservatism
is ideologically unrealistic, because of the conservative person’s
inability to adapt to changing human realities and refusal to offer a
positive political program that benefits everyone in a society. In that
context, Hayek used the term obscurantism differently, to denote and describe the denial of the empirical truth of scientific theory, because of the disagreeable moral consequences that might arise from acceptance of fact.
Deliberate obscurity
The second sense of obscurantism denotes making knowledge abstruse, that is, difficult to grasp. In the 19th and 20th centuries obscurantism became a polemical term for accusing an author of deliberately writing obscurely, in order to hide his or her intellectual vacuousness. Philosophers who are neither empiricists nor positivists
often are considered obscurantists when describing the abstract
concepts of their disciplines. For philosophic reasons, such authors
might modify or reject verifiability, falsifiability, and logical
non-contradiction. From that perspective, obscure (clouded, vague,
abstruse) writing does not necessarily indicate that the writer has a
poor grasp of the subject, because unintelligible writing sometimes is
purposeful and philosophically considered.
In contemporary discussions of virtue ethics, Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics (The Ethics)
stands accused of ethical obscurantism, because of the technical,
philosophic language and writing style, and their purpose being the education of a cultured governing elite.
G. W. F. Hegel's philosophy, and the philosophies of those he influenced, especially Karl Marx, have been accused of obscurantism. Analytic and positivistic philosophers, such as A. J. Ayer, Bertrand Russell, and the critical-rationalistKarl Popper, accused Hegel and Hegelianism
of being obscure. About Hegel's philosophy, Schopenhauer wrote that it
is: "... a colossal piece of mystification, which will yet provide
posterity with an inexhaustible theme for laughter at our times, that it
is a pseudo-philosophy paralyzing all mental powers, stifling all real
thinking, and, by the most outrageous misuse of language, putting in its
place the hollowest, most senseless, thoughtless, and, as is confirmed
by its success, most stupefying verbiage. ..."
Nevertheless, biographer Terry Pinkard notes "Hegel has refused to go away, even in analytic philosophy, itself."
Hegel was aware of his obscurantism, and perceived it as part of
philosophical thinking: to accept and transcend the limitations of
quotidian (everyday) thought and its concepts. In the essay "Who Thinks
Abstractly?", he said that it is not the philosopher who thinks
abstractly, but the layman, who uses concepts as givens
that are immutable, without context. It is the philosopher who thinks
concretely, because he transcends the limits of quotidian concepts,
in order to understand their broader context. This makes philosophical
thought and language appear obscure, esoteric, and mysterious to the
layman.
In his early works, Karl Marx criticized German and French philosophy, especially German Idealism, for its traditions of German irrationalism and ideologically motivated obscurantism. Later thinkers whom he influenced, such as the philosopher György Lukács and social theorist Jürgen Habermas, followed with similar arguments of their own. However, philosophers such as Karl Popper and Friedrich Hayek in turn criticized Marx and Marxist philosophy as obscurantist (however, see above for Hayek's particular interpretation of the term).
Heidegger
Martin Heidegger, and those influenced by him, such as Jacques Derrida and Emmanuel Levinas, have been labeled obscurantists by critics from analytic philosophy and the Frankfurt School of critical theory. Of Heidegger, Bertrand Russell
wrote, "his philosophy is extremely obscure. One cannot help suspecting
that language is here running riot. An interesting point in his
speculations is the insistence that nothingness is something positive.
As with much else in Existentialism, this is a psychological observation
made to pass for logic."
That is Russell's complete entry on Heidegger, and it expresses the
sentiments of many 20th-century analytic philosophers concerning
Heidegger.
Derrida
In
their obituaries, "Jacques Derrida, Abstruse Theorist, Dies at 74" (10
October 2004) and "Obituary of Jacques Derrida, French intellectual" (21
October 2004), The New York Times newspaper and The Economist magazine,[26] described Derrida as a deliberately obscure philosopher.
In Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity (1989), Richard Rorty proposed that in The Post Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond (1978), Jacques Derrida purposefully used undefinable words (e.g. Différance),
and used defined words in contexts so diverse that they render the
words unintelligible, hence, the reader is unable to establish a context
for his literary self. In that way, the philosopher Derrida escapes
metaphysical accounts of his work. Since the work ostensibly contains no
metaphysics, Derrida has, consequently, escaped metaphysics.
Derrida's philosophic work is especially controversial among American and British academics, as when the University of Cambridge
awarded him an honorary doctorate, despite opposition from among the
Cambridge philosophy faculty and analytical philosophers worldwide. In
opposing the decision, philosophers including Barry Smith, W. V. O. Quine, David Armstrong, Ruth Barcan Marcus, René Thom, and twelve others, published a letter of protestation in The Times
of London, arguing that "his works employ a written style that defies
comprehension ... [thus] Academic status based on what seems to us to be
little more than semi-intelligible attacks upon the values of reason,
truth, and scholarship is not, we submit, sufficient grounds for the
awarding of an honorary degree in a distinguished university."
In the New York Review of Books article "An Exchange on Deconstruction" (February 1984), John Searle comments on Deconstruction:
"... anyone who reads deconstructive texts with an open mind is likely
to be struck by the same phenomena that initially surprised me: the low
level of philosophical argumentation, the deliberate obscurantism of the
prose, the wildly exaggerated claims, and the constant striving to give
the appearance of profundity, by making claims that seem paradoxical,
but under analysis often turn out to be silly or trivial."
Lacan
Jacques Lacan was an intellectual
who defended obscurantism to a degree. To his students' complaint about
the deliberate obscurity of his lectures, he replied: "The less you
understand, the better you listen." In the 1973 seminar Encore, he said that his Écrits (Writings)
were not to be understood, but would effect a meaning in the reader,
like that induced by mystical texts. The obscurity is not in his writing
style, but in the repeated allusions to Hegel, derived from Alexandre Kojève's lectures on Hegel, and similar theoretic divergences.
Sokal Affair
The Sokal Affair (1996) was a publishing hoax that the professor of physics Alan Sokal perpetrated on the editors and readers of Social Text, an academic journal of post-moderncultural studies that was not then a peer-reviewed publication. In 1996, as an experiment testing editorial
integrity (fact-checking, verification, peer review, etc.), Sokal
submitted "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity", a pseudoscientific article proposing that physical reality is a social construct, in order to learn if Social Text
would "publish an article liberally salted with nonsense if: (a) it
sounded good, and, (b) it flattered the editors' ideological
preconceptions". Sokal's fake article was published in the Spring/Summer 1996 issue of Social Text, which was dedicated to the Science Wars about the conceptual validity of scientific objectivity and the nature of scientific theory, among scientific realists and postmodern critics in American universities.
Sokal's raison de guerre ("war reason") for publication of
a false article was that postmodernist critics questioned the
objectivity of science, by criticising the scientific method and the nature of knowledge, usually in the disciplines of cultural studies, cultural anthropology, feminist studies, comparative literature, media studies, and science and technology studies.
Whereas the scientific realists countered that objective scientific
knowledge exists, riposting that postmodernist critics almost knew
nothing of the science they criticized. In the event, editorial
deference to "Academic Authority" (the Author-Professor) prompted the editors of Social Text not to fact-check Sokal's manuscript by submitting it to peer review by a scientist.
Later, concerning the lack of editorial integrity shown by the publication of his fake article in Social Text magazine, Sokal addressed the matter in the May 1996 edition of the Lingua Franca
journal, in the article "A Physicist Experiments With Cultural
Studies", in which he (Sokal) announced that his transformative
hermeneutics article was a parody, submitted "to test the prevailing intellectual standards", and concluded that, as an academic publication, Social Text ignored the requisite intellectual rigor of verification and "felt comfortable publishing an article on quantum physics without bothering to consult anyone knowledgeable in the subject".
Moreover, as a public intellectual,
Sokal said his hoax was an action protesting against the contemporary
tendency towards obscurantism—abstruse, esoteric, and vague writing in
the social sciences:
In short, my concern over the spread of subjectivist
thinking is both intellectual and political. Intellectually, the
problem with such doctrines is that they are false (when not simply
meaningless). There is a real world; its properties are not merely
social constructions; facts and evidence do matter. What sane person
would contend otherwise? And yet, much contemporary academic theorizing
consists precisely of attempts to blur these obvious truths—the utter
absurdity of it all being concealed through obscure and pretentious
language.
Moreover, independent of the hoax, as a pseudoscientific opus,
the article "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative
Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity" is described as an exemplar "pastiche of left-wingcant,
fawning references, grandiose quotations, and outright nonsense,
centered on the claim that physical reality is merely a social
construct."
Artist conception of spontaneous psychokinesis from 1911 French magazine La Vie Mysterieuse.
Psychokinesis (from Greek ψυχή "mind" and κίνησις "movement"), or telekinesis (from τηλε- "far off" and κίνηση "movement"), is an alleged psychic ability allowing a person to influence a physical system without physical interaction.
Psychokinesis experiments have historically been criticized for lack of proper controls and repeatability. There is no convincing evidence that psychokinesis is a real phenomenon, and the topic is generally regarded as pseudoscience.
Etymology
The word 'psychokinesis' was coined in 1914 by American author Henry Holt in his book On the Cosmic Relations. The term is a linguistic blend or portmanteau of the Greek language words ψυχή ("psyche") – meaning mind, soul, spirit, or breath – and κίνησις ("kinesis") – meaning motion, movement.
The American parapsychologistJ. B. Rhine coined the term extra-sensory perception to describe receiving information paranormally from an external source.
Following this, he used the term psychokinesis in 1934 to describe
mentally influencing external objects or events without the use of
physical energy.
His initial example of psychokinesis was experiments that were
conducted to determine whether a person could influence the outcome of
falling dice.
The word telekinesis, a portmanteau of the Greek τῆλε ("tēle") – meaning distance – and κίνησις ("kinesis") – meaning motion – was first used in 1890 by Russian psychical researcher Alexander N. Aksakof.
In parapsychology, fictional universes and New Age beliefs, psychokinesis refers to the mental influence of physical systems and objects without the use of any physical energy,
while telekinesis refers to the movement and/or levitation of physical
objects by purely mental force without any physical intervention.
Reception
Evaluation
There
is a broad scientific consensus that PK research, and parapsychology
more generally, have not produced a reliable, repeatable demonstration.
A panel commissioned in 1988 by the United States National Research Council
to study paranormal claims concluded that "despite a 130-year record of
scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no
scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as
extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or ‘mind over matter’
exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence
simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist."
In 1984, the United States National Academy of Sciences, at the request of the US Army Research Institute,
formed a scientific panel to assess the best evidence for
psychokinesis. Part of its purpose was to investigate military
applications of PK, for example to remotely jam or disrupt enemy
weaponry. The panel heard from a variety of military staff who believed
in PK and made visits to the PEAR laboratory
and two other laboratories that had claimed positive results from
micro-PK experiments. The panel criticized macro-PK experiments for
being open to deception by conjurors, and said that virtually all
micro-PK experiments "depart from good scientific practice in a variety
of ways". Their conclusion, published in a 1987 report, was that there
was no scientific evidence for the existence of psychokinesis. Carl Sagan
included telekinesis in a long list of "offerings of pseudoscience and
superstition" which "it would be foolish to accept (...) without solid
scientific data". Nobel Prize laureate Richard Feynman advocated a similar position.
Felix Planer, a professor of electrical engineering,
has written that if psychokinesis were real then it would be easy to
demonstrate by getting subjects to depress a scale on a sensitive
balance, raise the temperature of a waterbath which could be measured
with an accuracy of a hundredth of a degree centigrade,
or affect an element in an electrical circuit such as a resistor, which
could be monitored to better than a millionth of an ampere.
Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to
monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they "do not hold
out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of PK"
because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent. Planer has written that
parapsychologists have to fall back on studies that involve only
statistics that are unrepeatable, owing their results to poor
experimental methods, recording mistakes and faulty statistical
mathematics.
According to Planer, "All research in medicine and other sciences
would become illusionary, if the existence of PK had to be taken
seriously; for no experiment could be relied upon to furnish objective
results, since all measurements would become falsified to a greater or
lesser degree, according to his PK ability, by the experimenter's
wishes." Planer concluded that the concept of psychokinesis is absurd
and has no scientific basis.
PK hypotheses have also been considered in a number of contexts outside parapsychological experiments. C. E. M. Hansel
has written that a general objection against the claim for the
existence of psychokinesis is that, if it were a real process, its
effects would be expected to manifest in situations in everyday life;
but no such effects have been observed.
Science writers Martin Gardner and Terence Hines and the philosopher Theodore Schick
have written that if psychokinesis were possible, one would expect
casino incomes to be affected, but the earnings are exactly as the laws
of chance predict.
Psychologist Nicholas Humphrey argues that many experiments in psychology, biology or physics
assume that the intentions of the subjects or experimenter do not
physically distort the apparatus. Humphrey counts them as implicit
replications of PK experiments in which PK fails to appear.
Physics
The ideas of psychokinesis and telekinesis violate several well-established laws of physics, including the inverse square law, the second law of thermodynamics, and the conservation of momentum. Because of this, scientists have demanded a high standard of evidence for PK, in line with Marcello Truzzi's dictum "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof". The Occam's razor
law of parsimony in scientific explanations of phenomena suggests that
the explanation of PK in terms of ordinary ways — by trickery, special
effects or by poor experimental design — is preferable to accepting that
the laws of physics should be rewritten.
Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge
has written that "psychokinesis, or PK, violates the principle that
mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did, no experimenter could
trust his readings of measuring instruments.) It also violates the
principles of conservation of energy and momentum. The claim that
quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of mental power influencing
randomizers — an alleged case of micro-PK — is ludicrous since that
theory respects the said conservation principles, and it deals
exclusively with physical things."
Physicist John Taylor,
who has investigated parapsychological claims, has written that an
unknown fifth force causing psychokinesis would have to transmit a great
deal of energy. The energy would have to overcome the electromagnetic forces
binding the atoms together, because the atoms would need to respond
more strongly to the fifth force than to electric forces. Such an
additional force between atoms should therefore exist all the time and
not during only alleged paranormal occurrences. Taylor wrote there is no
scientific trace of such a force in physics, down to many orders of
magnitude; thus, if a scientific viewpoint is to be preserved, the idea
of any fifth force must be discarded. Taylor concluded that there is no
possible physical mechanism for psychokinesis, and it is in complete
contradiction to established science.
In 1979, Evan Harris Walker and Richard Mattuck published a parapsychology paper proposing a quantum explanation for psychokinesis. Physicist Victor J. Stenger
wrote that their explanation contained assumptions not supported by any
scientific evidence. According to Stenger their paper is "filled with
impressive looking equations and calculations that give the appearance
of placing psychokinesis on a firm scientific footing... Yet look what
they have done. They have found the value of one unknown number
(wavefunction steps) that gives one measured number (the supposed speed
of PK-induced motion). This is numerology, not science."
Physicist Sean M. Carroll has written that spoons, like all matter, are made up of atoms and that any movement of a spoon with the mind would involve the manipulation of those atoms through the four forces of nature: the strong nuclear force, the weak nuclear force, electromagnetism, and gravitation. Psychokinesis would have to be either some form of one of these four
forces, or a new force that has a billionth the strength of gravity, for
otherwise it would have been captured in experiments already done. This
leaves no physical force that could possibly account for psychokinesis.
Physicist Robert L. Park
has found it suspicious that a phenomenon should only ever appear at
the limits of detectability of questionable statistical techniques. He
cites this feature as one of Irving Langmuir's indicators of pathological science.
Park pointed out that if mind really could influence matter, it would
be easy for parapsychologists to measure such a phenomenon by using the
alleged psychokinetic power to deflect a microbalance,
which would not require any dubious statistics. "[T]he reason, of
course, is that the microbalance stubbornly refuses to budge." He has
suggested that the reason statistical studies are so popular in
parapsychology is that they introduce opportunities for uncertainty and
error, which are used to support the experimenter's biases.
Explanations in terms of bias
Cognitive bias
research has suggested that people are susceptible to illusions of PK.
These include both the illusion that they themselves have the power, and
that the events they witness are real demonstrations of PK. For example, the illusion of control is an illusory correlation
between intention and external events, and believers in the paranormal
have been shown to be more susceptible to this illusion than others. Psychologist Thomas Gilovich
explains this as a biased interpretation of personal experience. For
example, someone in a dice game wishing for a high score can interpret
high numbers as "success" and low numbers as "not enough concentration." Bias towards belief in PK may be an example of the human tendency to see patterns where none exist, called the clustering illusion, which believers are also more susceptible to.
A 1952 study tested for experimenter's bias with respect to psychokinesis. Richard Kaufman of Yale University
gave subjects the task of trying to influence eight dice and allowed
them to record their own scores. They were secretly filmed, so their
records could be checked for errors. Believers in psychokinesis made
errors that favored its existence, while disbelievers made opposite
errors. A similar pattern of errors was found in J. B. Rhine's dice experiments, which were considered the strongest evidence for PK at that time.
In 1995, Wiseman and Morris showed subjects an unedited videotape
of a magician's performance in which a fork bent and eventually broke.
Believers in the paranormal were significantly more likely to
misinterpret the tape as a demonstration of PK, and were more likely to
misremember crucial details of the presentation. This suggests that confirmation bias affects people's interpretation of PK demonstrations. Psychologist Robert Sternberg cites confirmation bias as an explanation of why belief in psychic phenomena persists, despite the lack of evidence:
Some of the worst examples of confirmation bias are in
research on parapsychology (...) Arguably, there is a whole field here
with no powerful confirming data at all. But people want to believe, and
so they find ways to believe.
Psychologist Daniel Wegner has argued that an introspection illusion contributes to belief in psychokinesis.
He observes that in everyday experience, intention (such as wanting to
turn on a light) is followed by action (such as flicking a light switch)
in a reliable way, but the underlying neural mechanisms are outside
awareness. Hence, though subjects may feel that they directly introspect
their own free will, the experience of control is actually inferred from relations between the thought and the action. This theory of apparent mental causation acknowledges the influence of David Hume's view of the mind.
This process for detecting when one is responsible for an action is not
totally reliable, and when it goes wrong there can be an illusion of control.
This can happen when an external event follows, and is congruent with, a
thought in someone's mind, without an actual causal link. As evidence, Wegner cites a series of experiments on magical thinking in which subjects were induced to think they had influenced external events. In one experiment, subjects watched a basketball player taking a series of free throws. When they were instructed to visualize him making his shots, they felt that they had contributed to his success.
Other experiments designed to create an illusion of psychokinesis have
demonstrated that this depends, to some extent, on the subject's prior
belief in psychokinesis.
A 2006 meta-analysis of 380 studies found a small positive effect that can be explained by publication bias.
Magic and special effects
An advertising poster depicting magician Harry Kellar performing the "Levitation of Princess Karnac" illusion, 1894, U.S. Library of Congress.
Magicians have successfully simulated some of the specialized abilities of psychokinesis, such as object movement, spoon bending, levitation and teleportation. According to Robert Todd Carroll, there are many impressive magic tricks available to amateurs and professionals to simulate psychokinetic powers.
Metal objects such as keys or cutlery can be bent using a number of
different techniques, even if the performer has not had access to the
items beforehand.
According to Richard Wiseman
there are a number of ways for faking psychokinetic metal bending
(PKMB). These include switching straight objects for pre-bent
duplicates, the concealed application of force, and secretly inducing
metallic fractures. Research has also suggested that (PKMB) effects can be created by verbal suggestion. On this subject the magician Ben Harris wrote:
If you are doing a really convincing job, then you should
be able to put a bent key on the table and comment, ‘Look, it is still
bending’, and have your spectators really believe that it is. This may
sound the height of boldness; however, the effect is astounding – and
combined with suggestion, it does work.
Between 1979 and 1981, the McDonnell Laboratory for Psychical Research at Washington University reported a series of experiments they named Project Alpha,
in which two teenaged male subjects had demonstrated PK phenomena
(including metal-bending and causing images to appear on film) under
less than stringent laboratory conditions. James Randi eventually revealed that the subjects were two of his associates, amateur conjurers Steve Shaw
and Michael Edwards. The pair had created the effects by standard
trickery, but the researchers, being unfamiliar with magic techniques,
interpreted them as proof of PK.
A 2014 study that utilized a magic trick to investigate
paranormal belief on eyewitness testimony revealed that believers in
psychokinesis were more likely to report a key continued to bend than
non-believers.
Prize money for proof of psychokinesis
Internationally there are individual skeptics of the paranormal and skeptics' organizations who offer cash prize money for demonstration of the existence of an extraordinary psychic power, such as psychokinesis. Prizes have been offered specifically for PK demonstrations: for example, businessman Gerald Fleming's offer of £250,000 to Uri Geller if he can bend a spoon under controlled conditions. The James Randi Educational Foundation offered the One Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge to any accepted candidate who managed to produce a paranormal event in a controlled, mutually agreed upon experiment.
Belief
In
September 2006, a survey about belief in various religious and
paranormal topics conducted by phone and mail-in questionnaire polled
1,721 Americans on their belief in telekinesis. Of these participants,
28% of male participants and 31% of female participants selected "agree"
or "strongly agree" with the statement, "It is possible to influence the world through the mind alone."
Subsets of psychokinesis
Parapsychologists
divide psychokinetic phenomena into two categories: macro-psychokinesis
- large-scale psychokinetic effects that can be seen with the naked
eye, and micro-psychokinesis - small-scale psychokinetic effects that
require the use of statistics to be detected. Some phenomena – such as apports, levitation, materialization, psychic healing, pyrokinesis, retrocausality, telekinesis, and thoughtography – are considered to be examples of psychokinesis.
In 2016, Caroline Watt stated "Overall, the majority of academic parapsychologists do not find the evidence compelling in favour of macro-PK".
Notable claimants of psychokinetic ability
Eusapia Palladino "levitates" a table while researcher Alexander Aksakof (right) monitors for fraud, Milan, 1892.
There have been claimants of psychokinetic ability throughout
history. Angelique Cottin (ca. 1846) known as the "Electric Girl" of
France was an alleged generator of PK activity. Cottin and her family
claimed that she produced electric emanations that allowed her to move
pieces of furniture and scissors across a room. Frank Podmore
wrote there were many observations which were "suggestive of fraud"
such as the contact of the girl's garments to produce any of the alleged
phenomena and the observations from several witnesses that noticed
there was a double movement on the part of Cottin, a movement in the
direction of the object thrown and afterwards away from it, but the
movements so rapid they were not usually detected.
Spiritualist mediums have also claimed psychokinetic abilities. Eusapia Palladino,
an Italian medium, could allegedly cause objects to move during
séances. However, she was caught levitating a table with her foot by the
magician Joseph Rinn and using tricks to move objects by the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg. Other alleged PK mediums that were exposed as frauds, include Anna Rasmussen and Maria Silbert.
The Polish medium Stanisława Tomczyk
active in the early 20th century claimed to be able to perform various
acts of telekinesis, such as levitating objects, by way of an entity she
called "Little Stasia".
A photograph of her taken in 1909, which shows a pair of scissors
"floating" in between her hands, is often found in books and other
publications as an example of telekinesis. Scientists suspected Tomczyk performed her feats by the use of a fine thread
or hair, running between her hands to lift and suspend the objects in
the air. This was confirmed when psychical researchers who tested
Tomczyk occasionally observed the thread.
Many of India's "godmen"
have claimed macro-PK abilities and demonstrated apparently miraculous
phenomena in public, although as more controls are put in place to
prevent trickery, fewer phenomena are produced.
Magician William Marriott reveals the trick of the medium Stanisława Tomczyk's levitation of a glass tumbler. Pearson's Magazine, June 1910
Annemarie Schaberl, a 19-year-old secretary, was said to have telekinetic powers by the parapsychologist Hans Bender in the Rosenheim Poltergeist case in the 1960s. Magicians and scientists who investigated the case suspected the phenomena were produced by trickery.
Swami Rama, a yogi skilled in controlling his heart functions, was studied at the Menninger Foundation
in the spring and fall of 1970 and was alleged by some observers at the
foundation to have telekinetically moved a knitting needle twice from a
distance of five feet.
Although Swami Rama wore a face-mask and gown to prevent allegations
that he moved the needle with his breath or body movements, and air
vents in the room had been covered, at least one physician observer who
was present at the time was not convinced and expressed the opinion that
air movement was somehow the cause.
Psychics
The Russian psychic Nina Kulagina came to wide public attention following the publication of Sheila Ostrander and Lynn Schroeder's best seller, Psychic Discoveries Behind The Iron Curtain.
The alleged Soviet psychic of the late 1960s and early 1970s was filmed
apparently performing telekinesis while seated in numerous
black-and-white short films. She was also mentioned in the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency report from 1978.
Magicians and skeptics have argued that Kulagina's feats could easily
be performed by one practiced in sleight of hand, through means such as
cleverly concealed or disguised threads, small pieces of magnetic metal,
or mirrors.
James Hydrick, an American martial arts
expert and psychic, was famous for his alleged psychokinetic ability to
turn the pages of books and make pencils spin around while placed on
the edge of a desk. It was later revealed by magicians that he achieved
his feats by air currents. The psychologist Richard Wiseman has written Hydrick learnt to move objects by blowing in a "highly deceptive" and skillful way. Hydrick confessed to Dan Korem
that all of his feats were tricks "My whole idea behind this in the
first place was to see how dumb America was. How dumb the world is." The British psychic Matthew Manning
was the subject of laboratory research in the United States and
England involving PK in the late 1970s and today claims healing powers. Magicians John Booth and Henry Gordon have suspected Manning used trickery to perform his feats.
In 1971, an American psychic named Felicia Parise allegedly moved
a pill bottle across a kitchen counter by psychokinesis. Her feats were
endorsed by the parapsychologist Charles Honorton. Science writer Martin Gardner wrote Parise had "bamboozled" Honorton by moving the bottle by an invisible thread stretched between her hands.
Boris Ermolaev, a Russian psychic, was known for levitating small
objects. His methods were exposed on the World of Discovery documentary
Secrets of the Russian Psychics (1992). Ermolaev would sit on a
chair and allegedly move the objects between his knees but due to the
lighting conditions a fine thread fixed between his knees suspending the
objects was observed by the camera crew.
The Russian psychic Alla Vinogradova was said to be able to move
objects without touching them on transparent acrylic plastic or a
plexiglass sheet. The parapsychologist Stanley Krippner
had observed Vinogradova rub an aluminum tube before moving it
allegedly by psychokinesis. Krippner suggested no psychokinesis was
involved; the effect was produced by an electrostatic charge. Vinogradova was featured in the Nova documentary Secrets of the Psychics (1993) which followed the debunking work of James Randi.
Vinogradova demonstrated her alleged psychokinetic abilities on camera
for Randi and other investigators. Before the experiments she was
observed combing her hair and rubbing the surface of the acrylic
plastic. Massimo Polidoro
has replicated the feats of Vinogradova by using an acrylic plastic
surface and showing how easy it is to move any kind of object on top of
it due to the charges of static electricity. The effect is easily
achieved if the surface is electrically charged by rubbing a towel or a
hand on it. The physicist John Taylor
has written "It is very likely that electrostatics is all that is
needed to explain Alla Vinogradova's apparently paranormal feats."
Metal bending
Uri Geller was famous for his spoon bending demonstrations.
Psychics have also claimed the psychokinetic ability to bend metal. Uri Geller was famous for his spoon bending demonstrations, allegedly by PK. Geller has been caught many times using sleight of hand and according to science writer Terence Hines, all his effects have been recreated using conjuring tricks.
The French psychic Jean-Pierre Girard has claimed he can bend
metal bars by PK. Girard was tested in the 1970s but failed to produce
any paranormal effects in scientifically controlled conditions. He was tested on January 19, 1977 during a two-hour experiment in a Paris
laboratory. The experiment was directed by the physicist Yves Farge
with a magician also present. All of the experiments were negative as
Girard failed to make any of the objects move paranormally. He failed
two tests in Grenoble in June 1977 with the magician James Randi.
He was also tested on September 24, 1977 at a laboratory at the Nuclear
Research Centre. Girard failed to bend any bars or change the structure
of the metals. Other experiments into spoon bending were also negative
and witnesses described his feats as fraudulent. Girard later admitted
that he would sometimes cheat to avoid disappointing the public but
insisted he still had genuine psychic power. Magicians and scientists have written that he produced all his alleged psychokinetic feats through fraudulent means.
Stephen North, a British psychic in the late 1970s, was known for his alleged psychokinetic ability to bend spoons and teleport objects in and out of sealed containers. The British physicist John Hasted
tested North in a series of experiments which he claimed had
demonstrated psychokinesis, though his experiments were criticized for
lack of scientific controls. North was tested in Grenoble on 19 December 1977 in scientific conditions and the results were negative. According to James Randi, during a test at Birkbeck College
North was observed to have bent a metal sample with his bare hands.
Randi wrote "I find it unfortunate that [Hasted] never had an epiphany
in which he was able to recognize just how thoughtless, cruel, and
predatory were the acts perpetrated on him by fakers who took advantage
of his naivety and trust."
"PK Parties" were a cultural fad in the 1980s, begun by Jack Houck,
where groups of people were guided through rituals and chants to awaken
metal-bending powers. They were encouraged to shout at the items of
cutlery they had brought and to jump and scream to create an atmosphere
of pandemonium (or what scientific investigators called heightened suggestibility).
Critics were excluded and participants were told to avoid looking at
their hands. Thousands of people attended these emotionally charged
parties, and many became convinced that they had bent silverware by
paranormal means.
PK parties have been described as a campaign by paranormal
believers to convince people of the existence of psychokinesis, on the
basis of nonscientific data from personal experience and testimony. The United States National Academy of Sciences
has criticized PK parties on the grounds that conditions are not
reliable for obtaining scientific results and "are just those which
psychologists and others have described as creating states of heightened
suggestibility."
Ronnie Marcus, an Israeli psychic and claimant of psychokinetic
metal bending, was tested in 1994 in scientifically controlled
conditions and failed to produce any paranormal phenomena. According to magicians, his alleged psychokinetic feats were sleight of hand
tricks. Marcus bent a letter opener by the concealed application of
force and a frame-by-frame analysis of video showed that he bent a spoon
from pressure from his thumb by ordinary, physical means.
In popular culture
Psychokinesis and telekinesis have commonly been used as superpowers in comic books, movies, television, computer games, literature, and other forms of popular culture.
Parapsychology research is largely conducted by private institutions in several countries and funded through private donations,
and the subject rarely appears in mainstream science journals. Most
papers about parapsychology are published in a small number of niche
journals.
Parapsychology has been criticised for continuing investigation despite
being unable to provide convincing evidence for the existence of any
psychic phenomena after more than a century of research.
Terminology
The term parapsychology was coined in 1889 by philosopher Max Dessoir as the German "parapsychologie." It was adopted by J. B. Rhine in the 1930s as a replacement for the term psychical research in order to indicate a significant shift toward experimental methodology and academic discipline. The term originates from the Greek: παράpara meaning "alongside", and psychology.
In parapsychology, psi is the unknown factor in extrasensory perception and psychokinesis experiences that is not explained by known physical or biological mechanisms. The term is derived from the Greek ψ psi, 23rd letter of the Greek alphabet and the initial letter of the Greek ψυχή psyche, "mind, soul". The term was coined by biologistBerthold P. Wiesner, and first used by psychologist Robert Thouless in a 1942 article published in the British Journal of Psychology.
The Parapsychological Association divides psi into two main categories: psi-gamma for extrasensory perception and psi-kappa for psychokinesis. In popular culture, "psi" has become more and more synonymous with special psychic, mental, and "psionic" abilities and powers.
In 1853, the chemist Robert Hare conducted experiments with mediums and reported positive results. Other researchers such as Frank Podmore highlighted flaws in his experiments, such as lack of controls to prevent trickery. Agenor de Gasparin conducted early experiments into table-tipping. Over a period of five months in 1853 he declared the experiments a success being the result of an "ectenic force".
Critics noted that the conditions were insufficient to prevent
trickery. For example, the knees of the sitters may have been employed
to move the table and no experimenter was watching above and below the
table simultaneously.
The German astrophysicist Johann Karl Friedrich Zöllner tested the medium Henry Slade in 1877. According to Zöllner some of the experiments were a success.[19]
However, flaws in the experiments were discovered and critics have
suggested that Slade was a fraud who performed trickery in the
experiments.
Early clairvoyance experiments were reported in 1884 by Charles Richet.
Playing cards were enclosed in envelopes and a subject put under
hypnosis attempted to identify them. The subject was reported to have
been successful in a series of 133 trials but the results dropped to
chance level when performed before a group of scientists in Cambridge.
J. M. Peirce and E. C. Pickering reported a similar experiment in which they tested 36 subjects over 23,384 trials which did not obtain above chance scores.
In 1911, Stanford University became the first academic institution in the United States to study extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK) in a laboratory setting. The effort was headed by psychologist John Edgar Coover, and was supported by funds donated by Thomas Welton Stanford,
brother of the university's founder. After conducting approximately
10,000 experiments, Coover concluded "statistical treatments of the data
fail to reveal any cause beyond chance."
In 1930, Duke University
became the second major U.S. academic institution to engage in the
critical study of ESP and psychokinesis in the laboratory. Under the
guidance of psychologist William McDougall, and with the help of others in the department—including psychologists Karl Zener, Joseph B. Rhine, and Louisa E. Rhine—laboratory
ESP experiments using volunteer subjects from the undergraduate student
body began. As opposed to the approaches of psychical research, which
generally sought qualitative evidence for paranormal phenomena, the experiments at Duke University proffered a quantitative, statistical approach using cards
and dice. As a consequence of the ESP experiments at Duke, standard
laboratory procedures for the testing of ESP developed and came to be
adopted by interested researchers throughout the world.
George Estabrooks
conducted an ESP experiment using cards in 1927. Harvard students were
used as the subjects. Estabrooks acted as the sender with the guesser in
an adjoining room. In total 2,300 trials were conducted. When the
subjects were sent to a distant room with insulation the scores dropped
to chance level. Attempts to repeat the experiment also failed.
The publication of J. B. Rhine's book, New Frontiers of the Mind
(1937) brought the laboratory's findings to the general public. In his
book, Rhine popularized the word "parapsychology", which psychologist Max Dessoir
had coined over 40 years earlier, to describe the research conducted at
Duke. Rhine also founded an autonomous Parapsychology Laboratory within
Duke and started the Journal of Parapsychology, which he co-edited with McDougall.
Early parapsychological research employed the use of Zener cards in experiments designed to test for the existence of telepathic communication, or clairvoyant or precognitive perception.
Rhine, along with associate Karl Zener, had developed a statistical
system of testing for ESP that involved subjects guessing what symbol,
out of five possible symbols, would appear when going through a special deck of cards
designed for this purpose. A percentage of correct guesses (or hits)
significantly above 20% was perceived as higher than chance and
indicative of psychic ability. Rhine stated in his first book, Extrasensory Perception (1934), that after 90,000 trials, he felt ESP is "an actual and demonstrable occurrence".
Irish medium and parapsychologist, Eileen J. Garrett,
was tested by Rhine at Duke University in 1933 with Zener cards.
Certain symbols that were placed on the cards and sealed in an envelope,
and she was asked to guess their contents. She performed poorly and
later criticized the tests by claiming the cards lacked a psychic energy called "energy stimulus" and that she could not perform clairvoyance to order. The parapsychologist Samuel Soal
and his colleagues tested Garrett in May, 1937. Most of the experiments
were carried out in the Psychological Laboratory at the University College London. A total of over 12,000 guesses were recorded but Garrett failed to produce above chance level.
In his report Soal wrote "In the case of Mrs. Eileen Garrett we fail to
find the slightest confirmation of J. B. Rhine's remarkable claims
relating to her alleged powers of extra-sensory perception. Not only did
she fail when I took charge of the experiments, but she failed equally
when four other carefully trained experimenters took my place."
The parapsychology experiments at Duke evoked much criticism from
academics and others who challenged the concepts and evidence of ESP. A
number of psychological departments attempted to repeat Rhine's
experiments with failure. W. S. Cox (1936) from Princeton University
with 132 subjects produced 25,064 trials in a playing card ESP
experiment. Cox concluded "There is no evidence of extrasensory
perception either in the 'average man' or of the group investigated or
in any particular individual of that group. The discrepancy between
these results and those obtained by Rhine is due either to
uncontrollable factors in experimental procedure or to the difference in
the subjects." Four other psychological departments failed to replicate Rhine's results. After thousands of card runs, James Charles Crumbaugh failed to duplicate the results of Rhine.
In 1938, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow
wrote that much of the evidence for extrasensory perception collected
by Rhine and other parapsychologists was anecdotal, biased, dubious and
the result of "faulty observation and familiar human frailties". Rhine's experiments were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage
or cheating could account for all his results such as the subject being
able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to
see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.
IllusionistMilbourne Christopher
wrote years later that he felt "there are at least a dozen ways a
subject who wished to cheat under the conditions Rhine described could
deceive the investigator". When Rhine took precautions in response to
criticisms of his methods, he was unable to find any high-scoring
subjects. Another criticism, made by chemist Irving Langmuir, among others, was one of selective reporting.
Langmuir stated that Rhine did not report scores of subjects that he
suspected were intentionally guessing wrong, and that this, he felt,
biased the statistical results higher than they should have been.
Rhine and his colleagues attempted to address these criticisms through new experiments described in the book Extrasensory Perception After Sixty Years (1940). Rhine described three experiments the Pearce-Pratt experiment, the Pratt-Woodruff experiment and the Ownbey-Zirkle series which he believed demonstrated ESP. However, C. E. M. Hansel
wrote "it is now known that each experiment contained serious flaws
that escaped notice in the examination made by the authors of Extra-Sensory Perception After Sixty Years". Joseph Gaither Pratt
was the co-experimenter in the Pearce-Pratt and Pratt-Woodruff
experiments at the Duke campus. Hansel visited the campus where the
experiments took place and discovered the results could have originated
through the use of a trick so could not regarded as supplying evidence
for ESP.
His research used dice, with subjects 'willing' them to
fall a certain way. Not only can dice be drilled, shaved, falsely
numbered and manipulated, but even straight dice often show bias in the
long run. Casinos for this reason retire dice often, but at Duke,
subjects continued to try for the same effect on the same dice over long
experimental runs. Not surprisingly, PK appeared at Duke and nowhere
else.
Mr. Zirkle and Miss Ownbey
The Ownbey-Zirkle ESP experiment at Duke was criticized by parapsychologists and skeptics. Ownbey would attempt to send ESP symbols to Zirkle who would guess what
they were. The pair were placed in adjacent rooms unable to see each
other and an electric fan was used to prevent the pair communicating by
sensory cues. Ownbey tapped a telegraph key to Zirkle to inform him when
she was trying to send him a symbol. The door separating the two rooms
was open during the experiment, and after each guess Zirkle would call
out his guess to Ownbey who recorded his choice. Critics pointed out the
experiment was flawed as Ownbey acted as both the sender and the
experimenter, nobody was controlling the experiment so Ownbey could have
cheated by communicating with Zirkle or made recording mistakes.
The Turner-Ownbey long distance telepathy
experiment was discovered to contain flaws. May Frances Turner
positioned herself in the Duke Parapsychology Laboratory whilst Sara
Ownbey claimed to receive transmissions 250 miles away. For the
experiment Turner would think of a symbol and write it down whilst
Ownbey would write her guesses.
The scores were highly successful and both records were supposed to be
sent to J. B. Rhine, however, Ownbey sent them to Turner. Critics
pointed out this invalidated the results as she could have simply
written her own record to agree with the other. When the experiment was
repeated and the records were sent to Rhine the scores dropped to
average.
A famous ESP experiment at the Duke University was performed by
Lucien Warner and Mildred Raible. The subject was locked in a room with a
switch controlling a signal light elsewhere, which she could signal to
guess the card. Ten runs with ESP packs of cards were used and she
achieved 93 hits (43 more than chance). Weaknesses with the experiment
were later discovered. The duration of the light signal could be varied
so that the subject could call for specific symbols and certain symbols
in the experiment came up far more often than others which indicated
either poor shuffling or card manipulation. The experiment was not
repeated.
The administration of Duke grew less sympathetic to
parapsychology, and after Rhine's retirement in 1965 parapsychological
links with the university were broken. Rhine later established the
Foundation for Research on the Nature of Man (FRNM) and the Institute
for Parapsychology as a successor to the Duke laboratory. In 1995, the centenary of Rhine's birth, the FRNM was renamed the Rhine Research Center.
Today, the Rhine Research Center is a parapsychology research unit,
stating that it "aims to improve the human condition by creating a
scientific understanding of those abilities and sensitivities that
appear to transcend the ordinary limits of space and time".
Establishment of the Parapsychological Association
The Parapsychological Association (PA) was created in Durham, North Carolina,
on June 19, 1957. Its formation was proposed by J. B. Rhine at a
workshop on parapsychology which was held at the Parapsychology
Laboratory of Duke University. Rhine proposed that the group form itself
into the nucleus of an international professional society in
parapsychology. The aim of the organization, as stated in its
Constitution, became "to advance parapsychology as a science, to
disseminate knowledge of the field, and to integrate the findings with
those of other branches of science".
In 1969, under the direction of anthropologistMargaret Mead, the Parapsychological Association became affiliated with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the largest general scientific society in the world.[60] In 1979, physicist John A. Wheeler said that parapsychology is pseudoscientific, and that the affiliation of the PA to the AAAS needed to be reconsidered.
His challenge to parapsychology's AAAS affiliation was unsuccessful. Today, the PA consists of about three hundred full, associate, and affiliated members worldwide.
Stargate Project
Beginning in the early 1950s, the CIA started extensive research into behavioral engineering. Various experiments were undertaken in the process of this research, including some using various hallucinogenic substances. The findings from these experiments led to the formation of the Stargate Project, which handled ESP research for the U.S. federal government.
The Stargate Project was terminated in 1995 with the conclusion
that it was never useful in any intelligence operation. The information
was vague and included a lot of irrelevant and erroneous data. There was
also reason to suspect that the research managers had adjusted their
project reports to fit the known background cues.
1970s and 1980s
The
affiliation of the Parapsychological Association (PA) with the American
Association for the Advancement of Science, along with a general
openness to psychic and occult
phenomena in the 1970s, led to a decade of increased parapsychological
research. During this period, other related organizations were also
formed, including the Academy of Parapsychology and Medicine (1970), the
Institute of Parascience (1971), the Academy of Religion and Psychical
Research, the Institute of Noetic Sciences (1973), the International Kirlian Research Association (1975), and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (1979). Parapsychological work was also conducted at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) during this time.
The surge in paranormal research continued into the 1980s: the
Parapsychological Association reported members working in more than 30
countries. For example, research was carried out and regular conferences
held in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union although the word parapsychology was discarded in favour of the term psychotronics. The main promoter of psychotronics was Czech scientist Zdeněk Rejdák, who described it as a physical science, organizing conferences and presiding over the International Association for Psychotronic Research.
In 1985 a Chair of Parapsychology was established within the Department of Psychology at the University of Edinburgh and was given to Robert Morris,
an experimental parapsychologist from the United States. Morris and his
research associates and PhD students pursued research on topics related
to parapsychology.
Since the 1980s, contemporary parapsychological research has waned considerably in the United States.
Early research was considered inconclusive, and parapsychologists were
faced with strong opposition from their academic colleagues. Some effects thought to be paranormal, for example the effects of Kirlian photography (thought by some to represent a human aura), disappeared under more stringent controls, leaving those avenues of research at dead-ends. The bulk of parapsychology research in the US is now confined to private institutions funded by private sources. After 28 years of research, Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR), which studied psychokinesis, closed in 2007.
Over the last two decades some new sources of funding for
parapsychology in Europe have seen a "substantial increase in European
parapsychological research so that the center of gravity for the field
has swung from the United States to Europe". Of all nations the United Kingdom has the largest number of active parapsychologists.
In the UK, researchers work in conventional psychology departments, and
also do studies in mainstream psychology to "boost their credibility
and show that their methods are sound". It is thought that this approach
could account for the relative strength of parapsychology in Britain.
Research and professional organizations include the Parapsychological Association; the Society for Psychical Research, publisher of the Journal of Society for Psychical Research; the American Society for Psychical Research, publisher of the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research (last published in 2004); the Rhine Research Center and Institute for Parapsychology, publisher of the Journal of Parapsychology; the Parapsychology Foundation, which published the International Journal of Parapsychology (between 1959 and 1968 and 2000–2001) and the Australian Institute of Parapsychological Research, publisher of the Australian Journal of Parapsychology. The European Journal of Parapsychology ceased publishing in 2010.
Parapsychological research has also included other sub-disciplines of psychology. These related fields include transpersonal psychology, which studies transcendent or spiritual aspects of the human mind, and anomalistic psychology, which examines paranormal beliefs and subjective anomalous experiences in traditional psychological terms.
Research
Scope
Parapsychologists study a number of ostensible paranormal phenomena, including but not limited to:
Telepathy: Transfer of information on thoughts or feelings between individuals by means other than the five classical senses.
Precognition: Perception of information about future places or events before they occur.
Clairvoyance: Obtaining information about places or events at remote locations, by means unknown to current science.
Psychokinesis: The ability of the mind to influence matter, time, space, or energy by means unknown to current science.
Reincarnation: The rebirth of a soul or other non-physical aspect of human consciousness in a new physical body after death.
Apparitional experiences:
Phenomena often attributed to ghosts and encountered in places a
deceased individual is thought to have frequented, or in association
with the person's former belongings.
The definitions for the terms above may not reflect their mainstream usage, nor the opinions of all parapsychologists and their critics.
The Ganzfeld (German for "whole field") is a technique used to test individuals for telepathy. The technique—a form of moderate sensory deprivation—was developed to quickly quiet mental "noise" by providing mild, unpatterned stimuli to the visual and auditory senses. The visual sense is usually isolated by creating a soft red glow which is diffused through half ping-pong balls placed over the recipient's eyes. The auditory sense is usually blocked by playing white noise,
static, or similar sounds to the recipient. The subject is also seated
in a reclined, comfortable position to minimize the sense of touch.
In the typical Ganzfeld experiment, a "sender" and a "receiver" are isolated. The receiver is put into the Ganzfeld state, or Ganzfeld effect
and the sender is shown a video clip or still picture and asked to
mentally send that image to the receiver. The receiver, while in the
Ganzfeld, is asked to continuously speak aloud all mental processes,
including images, thoughts, and feelings. At the end of the sending
period, typically about 20 to 40 minutes in length, the receiver is
taken out of the Ganzfeld state and shown four images or videos, one of
which is the true target and three of which are non-target decoys. The
receiver attempts to select the true target, using perceptions
experienced during the Ganzfeld state as clues to what the mentally
"sent" image might have been.
Participant of a Ganzfeld experiment. Proponents say such experiments have shown evidence of telepathy, while critics like Ray Hyman have pointed out that they have not been independently replicated.
The Ganzfeld experiment studies that were examined by Ray Hyman and Charles Honorton
had methodological problems that were well documented. Honorton
reported only 36% of the studies used duplicate target sets of pictures
to avoid handling cues.
Hyman discovered flaws in all of the 42 Ganzfeld experiments and to
assess each experiment, he devised a set of 12 categories of flaws. Six
of these concerned statistical defects, the other six covered procedural
flaws such as inadequate documentation, randomization and security as well as possibilities of sensory leakage. Over half of the studies failed to safeguard against sensory leakage
and all of the studies contained at least one of the 12 flaws. Because
of the flaws, Honorton agreed with Hyman the 42 Ganzfeld studies could
not support the claim for the existence of psi.
Possibilities of sensory leakage in the Ganzfeld experiments
included the receivers hearing what was going on in the sender's room
next door as the rooms were not soundproof and the sender's fingerprints
to be visible on the target object for the receiver to see.
Hyman reviewed the autoganzfeld experiments and discovered a pattern in
the data that implied a visual cue may have taken place. Hyman wrote
the autoganzfeld experiments were flawed because they did not preclude
the possibility of sensory leakage.
In 2010, Lance Storm, Patrizio Tressoldi, and Lorenzo Di Risio
analyzed 29 Ganzfeld studies from 1997 to 2008. Of the 1,498 trials, 483
produced hits, corresponding to a hit rate of 32.2%. This hit rate is statistically significant
with p < .001. Participants selected for personality traits and
personal characteristics thought to be psi-conducive were found to
perform significantly better than unselected participants in the
Ganzfeld condition. Hyman (2010) published a rebuttal to Storm et al.
According to Hyman, "Reliance on meta-analysis as the sole basis for
justifying the claim that an anomaly exists and that the evidence for it
is consistent and replicable is fallacious. It distorts what scientists
mean by confirmatory evidence." Hyman wrote that the Ganzfeld studies
were not independently replicated and failed to produce evidence for
psi. Storm et al.
published a response to Hyman stating that the Ganzfeld experimental
design has proved to be consistent and reliable, that parapsychology is a
struggling discipline that has not received much attention, and that
therefore further research on the subject is necessary. Rouder et al. 2013 wrote that critical evaluation of Storm et al.'s meta-analysis reveals no evidence for psi, no plausible mechanism and omitted replication failures.
Remote viewing is the practice of seeking impressions about a distant
or unseen target using subjective means, in particular, extrasensory
perception. Typically a remote viewer is expected to give information
about an object, event, person or location that is hidden from physical
view and separated at some distance. Several hundred such trials have been conducted by investigators over the past 25 years, including those by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory (PEAR) and by scientists at SRI International and Science Applications International Corporation. Many of these were under contract by the U.S. government as part of the espionage program Stargate Project, which terminated in 1995 having failed to document any practical intelligence value.
The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff’s remote viewing experiments that were carried out in the 1970s at the Stanford Research Institute.
In a series of 35 studies, they were unable to replicate the results,
motivating them to investigate the procedure of the original
experiments. Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the
judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to the order
in which they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two
targets, or they had the date of the session written at the top of the
page. They concluded that these clues were the reason for the
experiment's high hit rates. Marks was able to achieve 100 per cent accuracy without visiting any of the sites himself but by using cues. James Randi
wrote controlled tests in collaboration with several other researchers,
eliminating several sources of cuing and extraneous evidence present in
the original tests; Randi's controlled tests produced negative results.
Students were also able to solve Puthoff and Targ's locations from the
cues that had inadvertently been included in the transcripts.
In 1980, Charles Tart claimed that a rejudging of the transcripts from one of Targ and Puthoff’s experiments revealed an above-chance result.
Targ and Puthoff again refused to provide copies of the transcripts and
it was not until July 1985 that they were made available for study,
when it was discovered they still contained sensory cues.
Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote "considering the importance
for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart’s
failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension. As
previously concluded, remote viewing has not been demonstrated in the
experiments conducted by Puthoff and Targ, only the repeated failure of
the investigators to remove sensory cues."
PEAR closed its doors at the end of February 2007. Its founder, Robert G. Jahn,
said of it that, "For 28 years, we’ve done what we wanted to do, and
there’s no reason to stay and generate more of the same data."
Statistical flaws in his work have been proposed by others in the
parapsychological community and within the general scientific community. The physicist Robert L. Park said of PEAR, "It’s been an embarrassment to science, and I think an embarrassment for Princeton".
Psychokinesis on random number generators
The advent of powerful and inexpensive electronic and computer
technologies has allowed the development of fully automated experiments
studying possible interactions between mind and matter. In the most common experiment of this type, a random number generator (RNG), based on electronic or radioactive noise, produces a data stream that is recorded and analyzed by computer software.
A subject attempts to mentally alter the distribution of the random
numbers, usually in an experimental design that is functionally
equivalent to getting more "heads" than "tails" while flipping a coin.
In the RNG experiment, design flexibility can be combined with rigorous
controls, while collecting a large amount of data in a very short period
of time. This technique has been used both to test individuals for
psychokinesis and to test the possible influence on RNGs of large groups
of people.
Major meta-analyses of the RNG database have been published every few years since appearing in the journal Foundations of Physics in 1986. PEAR founder Robert G. Jahn
and his colleague Brenda Dunne say that the experiments produced "a
very small effect" not large enough to be observed over a brief
experiment but over a large number of trials resulted in a tiny
statistical deviation from chance. According to Massimo Pigliucci
the results from PEAR can be explained without invoking the paranormal
because of two problems with the experiment "the difficulty of designing
machines capable of generating truly random events and the fact that
statistical "significance" is not at all a good measure of the
importance or genuineness of a phenomenon." Pigluicci has written the statistical analysis used by the Jahn and the PEAR group relied on a quantity called a "p-value"
but a problem with p-values is that if the sample size (number of
trials) is very large like PEAR then one is guaranteed to find
artificially low p-values indicating a statistical "significant" result
even though nothing was occurring other than small biases in the
experimental apparatus.
Two German independent scientific groups have failed to replicate the PEAR results.
Pigliucci has written this was "yet another indication that the
simplest hypothesis is likely to be true: there was nothing to
replicate." The most recent meta-analysis on psychokinesis was published in Psychological Bulletin,
along with several critical commentaries. It analyzed the results of
380 studies; the authors reported an overall positive effect size that
was statistically significant but very small relative to the sample size
and could, in principle, be explained by publication bias.
Direct mental interactions with living systems
Formerly
called bio-PK, "direct mental interactions with living systems" (DMILS)
studies the effects of one person's intentions on a distant person's psychophysiological state.
One type of DMILS experiment looks at the commonly reported "feeling of
being stared at." The "starer" and the "staree" are isolated in
different locations, and the starer is periodically asked to simply gaze
at the staree via closed circuit video links. Meanwhile, the staree's
nervous system activity is automatically and continuously monitored.
Parapsychologists have interpreted the cumulative data on this
and similar DMILS experiments to suggest that one person's attention
directed towards a remote, isolated person can significantly activate or
calm that person's nervous system. In a meta-analysis of these experiments published in the British Journal of Psychology
in 2004, researchers found that there was a small but significant
overall DMILS effect. However, the study also found that when a small
number of the highest-quality studies from one laboratory were analyzed,
the effect size was not significant. The authors concluded that
although the existence of some anomaly related to distant intentions
cannot be ruled out, there was also a shortage of independent
replications and theoretical concepts.
Dream telepathy
Parapsychological studies into dream telepathy were carried out at the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York led by Stanley Krippner and Montague Ullman. They concluded the results from some of their experiments supported dream telepathy. However, the results have not been independently replicated.
The picture target experiments that were conducted by Krippner and Ullman were criticized by C. E. M. Hansel.
According to Hansel there were weaknesses in the design of the
experiments in the way in which the agent became aware of their target
picture. Only the agent should have known the target and no other person
until the judging of targets had been completed; however, an
experimenter was with the agent when the target envelope was opened.
Hansel also wrote there had been poor controls in the experiment as the
main experimenter could communicate with the subject. In 2002, Krippner denied Hansel's accusations, claiming the agent did not communicate with the experimenter.
An attempt to replicate the experiments that used picture targets
was carried out by Edward Belvedere and David Foulkes. The finding was
that neither the subject nor the judges matched the targets with dreams
above chance level. Results from other experiments by Belvedere and Foulkes were also negative.
In 2003, Simon Sherwood and Chris Roe wrote a review that claimed support for dream telepathy at Maimonides. However, James Alcock
noted that their review was based on "extreme messiness" of data.
Alcock concluded the dream telepathy experiments at Maimonides have
failed to provide evidence for telepathy and "lack of replication is
rampant."
Near-death experiences
Ascent of the Blessed by Hieronymus Bosch (after 1490) depicts a tunnel of light and spiritual figures similar to those reported by near-death experiencers.
A near-death experience (NDE) is an experience reported by a person who nearly died, or who experienced clinical death and then revived. NDEs include one or more of the following experiences: a sense of being dead; an out-of-body experience;
a sensation of floating above one's body and seeing the surrounding
area; a sense of overwhelming love and peace; a sensation of moving
upwards through a tunnel or narrow passageway; meeting deceased
relatives or spiritual figures; encountering a being of light, or a
light; experiencing a life review; reaching a border or boundary; and a feeling of being returned to the body, often accompanied by reluctance.
Interest in the NDE was originally spurred by the research of psychiatrists Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, George G. Ritchie, and Raymond Moody. In 1975, Moody wrote the best-selling book Life After Life and in 1977 he wrote a second book, Reflections on Life After Life. In 1998 Moody was appointed chair in "consciousness studies" at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas. The International Association for Near-death Studies
(IANDS) was founded in 1978 to meet the needs of early researchers and
experiencers within this field of research. Later researchers, such as
psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, psychologist Kenneth Ring, and cardiologist Michael Sabom, introduced the study of near-death experiences to the academic setting.
Reincarnation research
Psychiatrist Ian Stevenson, from the University of Virginia,
conducted more than 2,500 case studies over a period of 40 years and
published twelve books. He wrote that childhood memories ostensibly
related to reincarnation
normally occurred between the ages of three and seven years then fade
shortly afterwards. He compared the memories with reports of people
known to the deceased, attempting to do so before any contact between
the child and the deceased's family had occurred, and searched for disconfirming evidence that could provide alternative explanations for the reports aside from reincarnation.
Some 35 per cent of the subjects examined by Stevenson had
birthmarks or birth defects. Stevenson believed that the existence of
birth marks and deformities on children, when they occurred at the
location of fatal wounds in the deceased, provided the best evidence for
reincarnation.
However, Stevenson has never claimed that he had proved the existence
of reincarnation, and cautiously referred to his cases as being "of the
reincarnation type" or "suggestive of reincarnation". Researchers who believe in the evidence for reincarnation have been unsuccessful in getting the scientific community to consider it a serious possibility.
Ian Wilson argued that a large number of Stevenson’s cases consisted of poor children remembering wealthy lives or belonging to a higher caste. He speculated that such cases may represent a scheme to obtain money from the family of the alleged former incarnation.
Philosopher Keith Augustine has written "the vast majority of
Stevenson's cases come from countries where a religious belief in
reincarnation is strong, and rarely elsewhere, seems to indicate that
cultural conditioning (rather than reincarnation) generates claims of
spontaneous past-life memories." According to the research of Robert Baker
many of the alleged past-life experiences investigated by Stevenson and
other parapsychologists can be explained in terms of known
psychological factors. Baker has written the recalling of past lives is a
mixture of cryptomnesia and confabulation. Philosopher Paul Edwards noted that reincarnation invokes assumptions and is inconsistent with modern science.
Scientific reception
James Alcock is a notable critic of parapsychology.
Evaluation
The scientific consensus is that there is insufficient evidence to support the existence of psi phenomena.
Scientists critical of parapsychology state that its
extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence if they are to be
taken seriously. Scientists who have evaluated parapsychology have written the entire body of evidence is of poor quality and not adequately controlled. In support of this view, critics cite instances of fraud, flawed studies, and cognitive biases (such as clustering illusion, availability error, confirmation bias, illusion of control, magical thinking, and the bias blind spot) as ways to explain parapsychological results.
Research has also shown that people's desire to believe in paranormal
phenomena causes them to discount strong evidence that it does not
exist.
The psychologists Donovan Rawcliffe (1952), C. E. M. Hansel (1980), Ray Hyman
(1989) and Andrew Neher (2011) have studied the history of psi
experiments from the late 19th century up until the 1980s. In every
experiment investigated, flaws and weaknesses were discovered so the
possibility of sensory leakage and trickery were not ruled out. The data from the Creery sister and the Soal-Goldney experiments were proven to be fraudulent, one of the subjects from the Smith-Blackburn experiments confessed to fraud, the Brugmans experiment, the experiments by John Edgar Coover and those conducted by Joseph Gaither Pratt and Helmut Schmidt
had flaws in the design of the experiments, did not rule out the
possibility of sensory cues or trickery and have not been replicated.
According to critics, psi is negatively defined as any effect
that cannot be currently explained in terms of chance or normal causes
and this is a fallacy as it encourages parapsychologists into using any
peculiarity in the data as a characteristic of psi.
Parapsychologists have admitted it is impossible to eliminate the
possibility of non-paranormal causes in their experiments. There is no
independent method to indicate the presence or absence of psi. Persi Diaconis
has written that the controls in parapsychological experiments are
often loose with possibilities of subject cheating and unconscious
sensory cues.
The existence of parapsychological phenomena and the scientific
validity of parapsychological research is disputed by independent
evaluators and researchers. In 1988, the U.S. National Academy of Sciences
published a report on the subject that concluded that "no scientific
justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the
existence of parapsychological phenomena." No accepted theory
of parapsychology currently exists, and many competing and often
conflicting models have been advocated by different parapsychologists in
an attempt to explain reported paranormal phenomena. Terence Hines in his book Pseudoscience and the Paranormal
(2003) wrote "Many theories have been proposed by parapsychologists to
explain how psi takes place. To skeptics, such theory building seems
premature, as the phenomena to be explained by the theories have yet to
be demonstrated convincingly." Skeptics such as Antony Flew have cited the lack of such a theory as their reason for rejecting parapsychology.
In 1998, physics professor Michael W. Friedlander
noted that parapsychology has "failed to produce any clear evidence for
the existence of anomalous effects that require us to go beyond the
known region of science." Philosopher and skeptic Robert Todd Carroll
has written research in parapsychology has been characterized by
"deception, fraud, and incompetence in setting up properly controlled
experiments and evaluating statistical data." The psychologist Ray Hyman
has pointed out that some parapsychologists such as Dick Bierman,
Walter Lucadou, J. E. Kennedy, and Robert Jahn have admitted the
evidence for psi is "inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet
acceptable scientific standards." Richard Wiseman
has criticized the parapsychological community for widespread errors in
research methods including cherry-picking new procedures which may
produce preferred results, explaining away unsuccessful attempted
replications with claims of an "experimenter effect", data mining, and retrospective data selection.
In a review of parapsychological reports Hyman wrote "randomization is often inadequate, multiple statistical testing without adjustment for significance levels is prevalent, possibilities for sensory leakage are not uniformly prevented, errors in use of statistical tests are much too common, and documentation is typically inadequate". Parapsychology has been criticized for making no precise predictions.
Ray Hyman (standing), Lee Ross, Daryl Bem and Victor Benassi at the 1983 CSICOP Conference in Buffalo, New York
In 2003, James Alcock Professor of Psychology at York University published Give the Null Hypothesis a Chance: Reasons to Remain Doubtful about the Existence of Psi,
where he claimed that parapsychologists never seem to take seriously
the possibility that psi does not exist. Because of that, they interpret
null results as indicating only that they were unable to observe psi in
a particular experiment, rather than taking it as support for the
possibility that there is no psi. The failure to take the null hypothesis
as a serious alternative to their psi hypotheses leads them to rely
upon a number of arbitrary "effects" to excuse failures to find
predicted effects, excuse the lack of consistency in outcomes, and to
excuse failures to replicate.
Basic endemic problems in parapsychological research include
amongst others: insufficient definition of the subject matter, total
reliance on negative definitions of their phenomena (E.g.- psi is said
to occur only when all known normal influences are ruled out); failure
to produce a single phenomenon that can be independently replicated by
neutral researchers; the invention of "effects" such as the
psi-experimenter effect to explain away inconsistencies in the data and
failures to achieve predicted outcomes; unfalsifiability of claims;
unpredictability of effects; lack of progress in over a century of
formal research; methodological weaknesses; reliance on statistical
procedures to determine when psi has supposedly occurred, even though
statistical analysis does not in itself justify a claim that psi has
occurred; and failure to jibe with other areas of science. Overall, he
argues that there is nothing in parapsychological research that would
ever lead parapsychologists to conclude that psi does not exist, and so,
even if it does not, the search is likely to continue for a long time
to come. "I continue to believe that parapsychology is, at bottom,
motivated by belief in search of data, rather than data in search of
explanation."
Richard Land has written that from what is known about human biology it is highly unlikely that evolution has provided humans with ESP as research has shown the recognized five senses are adequate for the evolution and survival of the species. Michael Shermer in an article Psychic Drift: Why most scientists do not believe in ESP and psi phenomena for Scientific American
wrote "the reason for skepticism is that we need replicable data and a
viable theory, both of which are missing in psi research."
In January 2008 the results of a study using neuroimaging
were published. To provide what are purported to be the most favorable
experimental conditions, the study included appropriate emotional
stimuli and had participants who are biologically or emotionally
related, such as twins. The experiment was designed to produce positive
results if telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition
occurred, but despite this no distinguishable neuronal responses were
found between psychic stimuli and non-psychic stimuli, while variations
in the same stimuli showed anticipated effects on patterns of brain
activation. The researchers concluded that "These findings are the
strongest evidence yet obtained against the existence of paranormal
mental phenomena."
Other studies have attempted to test the psi hypothesis by using
functional neuroimaging. A neuroscience review of the studies (Acunzo et al. 2013) discovered methodological weaknesses that could account for the reported psi effects.
A 2014 study discovered that schizophrenic patients have more belief in psi than healthy adults.
Some researchers have become skeptical of parapsychology such as Susan Blackmore and John Taylor after years of study and no progress in demonstrating the existence of psi by the scientific method.
On the subject of psychokinesis, the physicist Sean M. Carroll has written that both human brains and the spoons they try to bend are made, like all matter, of quarks and leptons;
everything else they do emerges as properties of the behavior of quarks
and leptons. And the quarks and leptons interact through the four
forces: strong, weak, electromagnetic and gravitational. Thus either
it's one of the four known forces or it's a new force, and any new force
with range over 1 millimetre must be at most a billionth the strength
of gravity or it will have been captured in experiments already done.
This leaves no physical force that could possibly account for
psychokinesis.
Physicist John G. Taylor
who investigated parapsychological claims has written an unknown fifth
force causing psychokinesis would have to transmit a great deal of
energy. The energy would have to overcome the electromagnetic forces
binding the atoms together. The atoms would need to respond more
strongly to the fifth force while it is operative than to electric
forces. Such an additional force between atoms should therefore exist
all the time and not during only alleged paranormal occurrences. Taylor
wrote there is no scientific trace of such a force in physics, down to
many orders of magnitude; thus if a scientific viewpoint is to be
preserved the idea of any fifth force must be discarded. Taylor
concluded there is no possible physical mechanism for psychokinesis and
it is in complete contradiction to established science.
Felix Planer, a professor of electrical engineering,
has written that if psychokinesis was real then it would be easy to
demonstrate by getting subjects to depress a scale on a sensitive
balance, raise the temperature of a water bath which could be measured
with an accuracy of a hundredth of a degree Celsius
or affect an element in an electrical circuit such as a resistor which
could be monitored to better than a millionth of an ampere.
Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to
monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they "do not hold
out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of PK"
because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent. Planer has written
parapsychologists have to fall back on studies that involve only
statistics that are unrepeatable, owing their results to poor
experimental methods, recording mistakes and faulty statistical
mathematics.
According to Planer, "all research in medicine and other sciences
would become illusionary, if the existence of PK had to be taken
seriously; for no experiment could be relied upon to furnish objective
results, since all measurements would become falsified to a greater or
lesser degree, according to his PK ability, by the experimenter's
wishes." Planer concluded the concept of psychokinesis is absurd and has
no scientific basis.
Philosopher and physicist Mario Bunge
has written that "psychokinesis, or PK, violates the principle that
mind cannot act directly on matter. (If it did, no experimenter could
trust his readings of measuring instruments.) It also violates the
principles of conservation of energy and momentum. The claim that
quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of mental power influencing
randomizers—an alleged case of micro-PK—is ludicrous since that theory
respects the said conservation principles, and it deals exclusively with
physical things."
The physicist Robert L. Park
questioned if mind really could influence matter then it would be easy
for parapsychologists to measure such a phenomenon by using the alleged
psychokinetic power to deflect a microbalance
which would not require any dubious statistics but "the reason, of
course, is that the microbalance stubbornly refuses to budge."
Park has suggested the reason statistical studies are so popular in
parapsychology is because they introduce opportunities for uncertainty
and error which are used to support the biases of the experimenter. Park
wrote "No proof of psychic phenomena is ever found. In spite of all the
tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin,
and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the
results are no more convincing today than when they began their
experiments."
Parapsychological theories are viewed as pseudoscientific by the
scientific community as they are incompatible with well established laws
of science. As there is no repeatable evidence for psi, the field is often regarded as a pseudoscience.
The philosopher Raimo Tuomela
summarized why the majority of scientists consider parapsychology to be
a pseudoscience in his essay "Science, Protoscience, and
Pseudoscience".
Parapsychology relies on an ill-defined ontology and typically shuns exact thinking.
The hypotheses and theories of parapsychology have not been proven and are in bad shape.
Extremely little progress has taken place in parapsychology on the whole and parapsychology conflicts with established science.
Parapsychology has poor research problems, being concerned with
establishing the existence of its subject matter and having practically
no theories to create proper research problems.
While in parts of parapsychology there are attempts to use the
methods of science there are also unscientific areas; and in any case
parapsychological research can at best qualify as prescientific because
of its poor theoretical foundation.
Parapsychology is a largely isolated research area.
The methods of parapsychologists are regarded by critics, including those who wrote the science standards for the California State Board of Education, to be pseudoscientific.
Some of the more specific criticisms state that parapsychology does not
have a clearly defined subject matter, an easily repeatable experiment
that can demonstrate a psi effect on demand, nor an underlying theory to
explain the paranormal transfer of information. James Alcock
has stated that few of parapsychology's experimental results have
prompted interdisciplinary research with more mainstream sciences such
as physics or biology, and that parapsychology remains an isolated
science to such an extent that its very legitimacy is questionable, and as a whole is not justified in being labeled "scientific".
Alcock has written "Parapsychology is indistinguishable from
pseudo-science, and its ideas are essentially those of magic... There is
no evidence that would lead the cautious observer to believe
that parapsychologists and paraphysicists are on the track of a real
phenomenon, a real energy or power that has so far escaped the attention
of those people engaged in "normal" science."
The scientific community considers parapsychology a pseudoscience
because it continues to explore the hypothesis that psychic abilities
exist despite a century of experimental results that fail to
conclusively demonstrate that hypothesis. A panel commissioned by the United States National Research Council
to study paranormal claims concluded that "despite a 130-year record of
scientific research on such matters, our committee could find no
scientific justification for the existence of phenomena such as
extrasensory perception, mental telepathy or ‘mind over matter’
exercises... Evaluation of a large body of the best available evidence
simply does not support the contention that these phenomena exist."
There is also an issue of non-falsifiability associated with psi. On this subject Terence Hines has written:
The most common rationale offered
by parapsychologists to explain the lack of a repeatable demonstration
of ESP or other psi phenomena is to say that ESP in particular and psi
phenomena in general are elusive or jealous phenomena. This means the
phenomena go away when a skeptic is present or when skeptical
“vibrations” are present. This argument seems nicely to explain away
some of the major problems facing parapsychology until it is realized
that it is nothing more than a classic nonfalsifiable hypothesis... The
use of the nonfalsifiable hypothesis is permitted in parapsychology to a
degree unheard of in any scientific discipline. To the extent that
investigators accept this type of hypothesis, they will be immune to
having their belief in psi disproved. No matter how many experiments
fail to provide evidence for psi and no matter how good those
experiments are, the nonfalsifiable hypothesis will always protect the
belief.
Mario Bunge
has written that research in parapsychology for over a hundred years
has produced no single firm finding and no testable predictions. All
parapsychologists can do is claim alleged data is anomalous and lying
beyond the reach of ordinary science. The aim of parapsychologists "is
not that of finding laws and systematizing them into theories in order
to understand and forecast" but to "buttress ancient spiritualist myths
or to serve as a surrogate for lost religions."
In response to Bunge's position, Eberhard Bauer and Walter von Lucadou
have argued that "there is not one single argument used by Bunge which
has not been extensively discussed in the relevant literature for
decades".
The psychologist David Marks has written that parapsychologists have failed to produce a single repeatable demonstration of the paranormal
and described psychical research as a pseudoscience, an "incoherent
collection of belief systems steeped in fantasy, illusion and error." However, Chris French
who is not convinced that parapsychology has demonstrated evidence for
psi, has argued that parapsychological experiments still adhere to the
scientific method, and should not be completely dismissed as
pseudoscience. French has noted his position is "the minority view among
critics of parapsychology".
Philosopher Bradley Dowden
characterized parapsychology as a pseudoscience as parapsychologists
have no valid theories to test and no reproducible data from their
experiments.
There have been instances of fraud in the history of parapsychology research. In the late 19th century the Creery Sisters (Mary, Alice, Maud, Kathleen, and Emily) were tested by the Society for Psychical Research
and believed them to have genuine psychic ability; however, during a
later experiment they were caught utilizing signal codes and they
confessed to fraud. George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn were claimed to be genuine psychics by the Society for Psychical Research but Blackburn confessed to fraud:
For nearly thirty years the
telepathic experiments conducted by Mr. G. A. Smith and myself have been
accepted and cited as the basic evidence of the truth of thought
transference...
...the whole of those alleged experiments were bogus, and
originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of
scientific mind and training could be deceived when seeking for evidence
in support of a theory they were wishful to establish.
The experiments of Samuel Soal and K. M. Goldney
of 1941–1943 (suggesting precognitive ability of a single participant)
were long regarded as some of the best in the field because they relied
upon independent checking and witnesses to prevent fraud. However, many
years later, statistical evidence, uncovered and published by other
parapsychologists in the field, suggested that Soal had cheated by
altering some of the raw data.
In 1974, a number of experiments by Walter J. Levy, J. B. Rhine's
successor as director of the Institute for Parapsychology, were exposed
as fraudulent.
Levy had reported on a series of successful ESP experiments involving
computer-controlled manipulation of non-human subjects, including rats. His experiments showed very high positive results. However, Levy's
fellow researchers became suspicious about his methods. They found that
Levy interfered with data-recording equipment, manually creating
fraudulent strings of positive results. Levy confessed to the fraud and
resigned.
In 1974 Rhine published the paper Security versus Deception in Parapsychology in the Journal of Parapsychology
which documented 12 cases of fraud that he had detected from 1940 to
1950 but refused to give the names of the participants in the studies. Massimo Pigliucci has written:
Most damning of all, Rhine admitted publicly that he had
uncovered at least twelve instances of dishonesty among his researchers
in a single decade, from 1940 to 1950. However, he flaunted standard
academic protocol by refusing to divulge the names of the fraudsters,
which means that there is unknown number of published papers in the
literature that claim paranormal effects while in fact they were the
result of conscious deception.
Martin Gardner claimed to have inside information that files in Rhine's laboratory contain material suggesting fraud on the part of Hubert Pearce.
Pearce was never able to obtain above-chance results when persons other
than the experimenter were present during an experiment, making it more
likely that he was cheating in some way. Rhine's other subjects were
only able to obtain non-chance levels when they were able to shuffle the
cards, which has suggested they used tricks to arrange the order of the
Zener cards before the experiments started.
A researcher from Tarkio College in Missouri, James D. MacFarland, was suspected of falsifying data to achieve positive psi results.
Before the fraud was discovered, MacFarland published 2 articles in the
Journal of Parapsychology (1937 & 1938) supporting the existence of
ESP. Presumably speaking about MacFarland, Louisa Rhine wrote that in
reviewing the data submitted to the lab in 1938, the researchers at the
Duke Parapsychology Lab recognized the fraud. "...before long they were
all certain that Jim had consistently falsified his records... To
produce extra hits, Jim had to resort to erasures and transpositions in
the records of his call series." MacFarland never published another article in the Journal of Parapsychology after the fraud was discovered.
Some instances of fraud amongst spiritualistmediums were exposed by early psychical researchers such as Richard Hodgson and Harry Price. In the 1920s, magician and escapologist Harry Houdini said that researchers and observers had not created experimental procedures which absolutely preclude fraud.
Criticism of experimental results
Critical analysts, including some parapsychologists, are not satisfied with experimental parapsychology studies. Some reviewers, such as psychologist Ray Hyman,
contend that apparently successful experimental results in psi research
are more likely due to sloppy procedures, poorly trained researchers,
or methodological flaws rather than to genuine psi effects. Fellow psychologist Stuart Vyse hearkens back to a time of data manipulation, now recognized as "p-hacking," as part of the issue.
Within parapsychology there are disagreements over the results and
methodology as well. For example, the experiments at the PEAR laboratory
were criticized in a paper published by the Journal of Parapsychology
in which parapsychologists independent from the PEAR laboratory
concluded that these experiments "depart[ed] from criteria usually
expected in formal scientific experimentation" due to "[p]roblems with
regard to randomization, statistical baselines, application of
statistical models, agent coding of descriptor lists, feedback to
percipients, sensory cues, and precautions against cheating." They felt
that the originally stated significance values were "meaningless".
A typical measure of psi phenomena is statistical deviation from
chance expectation. However, critics point out that statistical
deviation is, strictly speaking, only evidence of a statistical anomaly,
and the cause of the deviation is not known. Hyman contends that even
if psi experiments could be designed that would regularly reproduce
similar deviations from chance, they would not necessarily prove psychic
functioning. Critics have coined the term The Psi Assumption
to describe "the assumption that any significant departure from the
laws of chance in a test of psychic ability is evidence that something
anomalous or paranormal has occurred...[in other words] assuming what
they should be proving." These critics hold that concluding the
existence of psychic phenomena based on chance deviation in inadequately
designed experiments is affirming the consequent or begging the question.
In 1979, magician and debunkerJames Randi engineered a hoax, now referred to as Project Alpha
to encourage a tightening of standards within the parapsychology
community. Randi recruited two young magicians and sent them undercover
to Washington University's
McDonnell Laboratory where they " fooled researchers ... into believing
they had paranormal powers." The aim was to expose poor experimental
methods and the credulity thought to be common in parapsychology.
Randi has stated that both of his recruits deceived experimenters over a
period of three years with demonstrations of supposedly psychic
abilities: blowing electric fuses sealed in a box, causing a lightweight
paper rotor perched atop a needle to turn inside a bell jar, bending
metal spoons sealed in a glass bottle, etc.
The hoax by Randi raised ethical concerns in the scientific and
parapsychology communities, eliciting criticism even among skeptical
communities such as the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of
Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP), which he helped found, but also
positive responses from the President of the Parapsychological
Association Stanley Krippner. Psychologist Ray Hyman, a CSICOP member,
called the results "counterproductive".
Selection bias and meta-analysis
Selective reporting
has been offered by critics as an explanation for the positive results
reported by parapsychologists. Selective reporting is sometimes referred
to as a "file drawer" problem, which arises when only positive study
results are made public, while studies with negative or null results are
not made public. Selective reporting has a compounded effect on meta-analysis, which is a statistical technique that aggregates the results of many studies in order to generate sufficient statistical power to demonstrate a result that the individual studies themselves could not demonstrate at a statistically significant level. For example, a recent meta-analysis combined 380 studies on psychokinesis,
including data from the PEAR lab. It concluded that, although there is a
statistically significant overall effect, it is not consistent and
relatively few negative studies would cancel it out. Consequently, biased publication of positive results could be the cause.
The popularity of meta-analysis in parapsychology has been criticized by numerous researchers, and is often seen as troublesome even within parapsychology itself.
Critics have said that parapsychologists misuse meta-analysis to create
the incorrect impression that statistically significant results have
been obtained that indicate the existence of psi phenomena. Physicist Robert Park
states that parapsychology's reported positive results are problematic
because most such findings are invariably at the margin of statistical
significance and that might be explained by a number of confounding
effects; Park states that such marginal results are a typical symptom of
pathological science as described by Irving Langmuir.
Researcher J. E. Kennedy has said that concerns over the use of
meta-analysis in science and medicine apply as well to problems present
in parapsychological meta-analysis. As a post-hoc analysis,
critics emphasize the opportunity the method presents to produce biased
outcomes via the selection of cases chosen for study, methods employed,
and other key criteria. Critics say that analogous problems with
meta-analysis have been documented in medicine, where it has been shown
different investigators performing meta-analyses of the same set of
studies have reached contradictory conclusions.
Anomalistic psychology
In anomalistic psychology, paranormal phenomena have naturalistic explanations resulting from psychological and physical factors which have sometimes given the impression of paranormal activity to some people when, in fact, there have been none. According to the psychologist Chris French:
The difference between anomalistic
psychology and parapsychology is in terms of the aims of what each
discipline is about. Parapsychologists typically are actually searching
for evidence to prove the reality of paranormal forces, to prove they
really do exist. So the starting assumption is that paranormal things do
happen, whereas anomalistic psychologists tend to start from the
position that paranormal forces probably don't exist and that therefore
we should be looking for other kinds of explanations, in particular the
psychological explanations for those experiences that people typically
label as paranormal.
Whilst parapsychology has been said to be in decline, anomalistic
psychology has been reported to be on the rise. It is now offered as an
option on many psychology degree programmes and is also an option on the
A2 psychology syllabus in the UK.
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