Action on Hearing Loss

THINKING CRITICALLY ABOUT

5-22 How do ESP claims hold up when put to the test by scientists?

Without sensory input, are we capable of extrasensory perception (ESP)? Nearly half of Americans believe we are (AP, 2007; Moore, 2005).

Are there indeed people—any people—who can read minds, see through walls, or correctly predict the future? Before we evaluate claims of ESP, let’s review them. The most testable and, for this chapter, most relevant ESP claims are

• telepathy: mind-to-mind communication.
• clairvoyance: perceiving remote events, such as a house on fire in another state.
• precognition: perceiving future events, such as an unexpected death in the next month.

Closely linked with these are claims of psychokinesis, or “mind over matter,” such as using mind power alone to raise a table or affect the roll of a die. (The claim is illustrated by the wry request, “Will all those who believe in psychokinesis please raise my hand?”)

Facts or Fantasies?

Most research psychologists and scientists—including 96 percent of the scientists in one U.S. National Academy of Sciences survey—are skeptical of ESP claims (McConnell, 1991). No greedy—or charitable—psychic has been able to choose the winning lottery jackpot ticket, or make billions on the stock market. In 30 years, unusual predictions have almost never come true, and psychics have virtually never anticipated any of the year’s headline events (Emery, 2004, 2006). The new-century psychics failed to anticipate the big-news events such as the horror of 9/11. (Where were the psychics on 9/10 when we needed them?)

What about the hundreds of visions offered by psychics working with the police? When asked, 65 percent of the police departments of America’s 50 largest cities said they had never used psychics (Sweat & Durm, 1993). Of those that had, not one had found them helpful. Psychics’ police work has been no more accurate than guesses made by others (Nickell, 1994, 2005; Reiser, 1982).

Are everyday people’s “visions” any more accurate? Do our dreams predict the future, or do they only seem to do so when we recall or reconstruct them in light of what has already happened? After aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby son was kidnapped and murdered in 1932 but before the body was discovered, two psychologists invited people to report their dreams about the child (Murray & Wheeler, 1937). How many replied? 1300. How many accurately saw the child dead? 65. How many also correctly anticipated the body’s location—buried among trees? Only 4. Although this number was surely no better than chance, to those 4 dreamers the accuracy of their apparent prior knowledge must have seemed uncanny.

Given the billions of events in the world each day and given enough days, some stunning coincidences are sure to occur. By one careful estimate, chance alone would predict that more than a thousand times a day someone on Earth will think of another person and then within the next five minutes will learn of that person’s death (Charpak & Broch, 2004). With enough time and people, the improbable becomes inevitable.

Testing ESP

When faced with claims of mind reading or out-of-body travel or communication with the dead, how can we separate bizarre ideas from those that sound strange but are true? At the heart of science is a simple answer: Test them to see if they work. If they do, so much the better for the ideas. If they don’t, so much the better for our skepticism.

How might we test ESP claims in a controlled experiment? An experiment differs from a staged demonstration. In the laboratory, the experimenter controls what the “psychic” sees and hears. On stage, the “psychic” controls what the audience sees and hears.

Daryl Bem, a respected social psychologist, once joked that “a psychic is an actor playing the role of a psychic” (1984). Yet this one-time skeptic has reignited hopes for scientific evidence of ESP with nine experiments that seemed to show people anticipating future events (2011). In one, for example, people guessed when an erotic scene would appear on a screen in one of two randomly selected positions. Participants guessed right 53.1 percent of the time, beating 50 percent by a small but statistically significant margin.

Bem’s research survived critical reviews by a top-tier journal. But other critics found the methods “badly flawed” (Alcock, 2011) or the statistical analyses “biased” (Wagenmakers et al., 2011). Still others predicted the results could not be repeated by “independent and skeptical researchers” (Helfand, 2011).

Anticipating such skepticism, Bem has made his computer materials available to anyone who wishes to replicate his studies. Regardless of the outcomes, science has done its work. It has been open to a finding that challenges its own worldview, and follow-up research is now assessing the validity of that finding. And that is how science sifts crazy-sounding ideas, leaving most on the historical waste heap while occasionally surprising us.

One skeptic, magician James Randi, has a long-standing offer of $1 million to be given “to anyone who proves a genuine psychic power under proper observing conditions” (Randi, 1999; Thompson, 2010). French, Australian, and Indian groups have made similar offers of up to 200,000 euros (CFI, 2003). Large as these sums are, the scientific seal of approval would be worth far more. To silence those who say there is no ESP, one need only produce a single person who can demonstrate a single, reproducible ESP event. (To silence those who say pigs can’t talk would take but one talking pig.) So far, no such person has emerged.