Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect.

By D. Bem. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2011

796 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual's current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by "time-reversing" well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

Subfields: Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics, Developmental and Educational Psychology, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/053428187307008d657c815c6b2dff7130750cb9

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Atomic and Molecular Physics, and Optics

In Developmental and Educational Psychology

In Social Psychology

Citations in the corpus

Default Bayes Factors for Model Selection in Regression (2012, background): “ESP has become topical with the recent reports of Bem (2011) and Storm, Tressoldi, and Di Rosio (2010).”
An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research (2012, neutral): “We conclude by illustrating the remedy of preregistration using a replication attempt of an extrasensory-perception (ESP) experiment reported by Bem (2011).”
Recommendations for Increasing Replicability in Psychology † (2013, critical): “This has perhaps been best highlighted by publication of the highly implausible precognition results in volume 100 of JPSP (Bem, 2011) that, according to the editor, could not be rejected because this study was conducted according to current methodological standards.”
Statistical Significance and the Dichotomization of Evidence (2017, background): “…has been well-investigated by statisticians over the decades (Diaconis 1978; Diaconis and Graham 1981; Diaconis andMosteller 1989; Briggs 2006) and which has surfaced again recently (Bem 2011)—that there is strong evidence for the existence of psychic powers such as extrasensory perception.”
Bayesian Assessment of Null Values Via Parameter Estimation and Model Comparison (2011, neutral): “The scenario is motivated very loosely from an experiment by Bem (2011), discussed by Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, and van der Maas (2011) and by Rouder and Morey (in press). At issue is the measurement of ‘‘psi,’’ which in this case is the ability to anticipate events in the future. Specifically”
Bayesian Cognitive Modeling: A Practical Course (2014, methodology): “1 Prior and posterior distributions for the Fisher z-transformed correlation coefficient between sample size and effect size in the Bem (2011) experiments.”
Default Bayes factors for ANOVA designs (2012, background): “Consider a recent study of Bem (2011), who claims that people may feel or sense future events that could not be known without psychic powers.”
A Call for Examining Replication and Bias in Special Education Research (2014, background): “In psychology, the need for replication was highlighted by the publication of a series of experimental studies supporting the existence of psi, or the ability of people to feel the future (Bem, 2011).”
Editors’ Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science (2012, background): “These doubts emerged and grew as a series of unhappy events unfolded in 2011: the Diederik Stapel fraud case (see Stroebe, Postmes, & Spears, 2012, this issue), the publication in a major social psychology journal of an article purporting to show evidence of extrasensory perception (Bem, 2011) follo”
Simple relation between Bayesian order-restricted and point-null hypothesis tests (2014, methodology): “These experiments were direct replications of an experiment by Bem (2011), in which participants were shown lists of words for later recall.”
The Connection Between Varying Treatment Effects and the Crisis of Unreplicable Research (2015, background): “Joke research, for example the attempts of Bem (2011) to prove that he found ESP and the claims of Kanazawa (2005, 2007) that nurses are more likely to have daughters, big strong”
How Trustworthy Is the Scientific Literature in Industrial and Organizational Psychology? (2013, background): “…such as the Mozart effect on spatial task performance (Rauscher, Shaw, & Ky, 1993), social priming (Bargh, Chen, & Burrows, 1996), psychic effects (Bem, 2011), verbal overshadowing (Schooler & Engstler-Schooler, 1990), and ‘‘practical’’ intelligence measures purported to yield a general…”
Large-Scale Replication Projects in Contemporary Psychological Research (2017, background): “This problem appears particularly acute in psychology, where the failure to replicate several prominent findings (for example, Bargh, Chen, and Burrows (1996); Bargh et al. (2001); Carney, Cuddy, and Yap (2010); Bem (2011)) has attracted the attention of both academics and the popular press.”