Controversy in parapsychology

While parapsychology is a recognized discipline, the scientific reality of parapsychological phenomena and the validity of scientific parapsychological research within it remain a subject of dispute and criticism.

In response to this criticism, the scientific standards in parapsychology have been continuously tightened, and parapsychologists say that current experiments such as the autoganzfeld meet the highest scientific standards. Critics, however, say that replications are still needed before the existence of psi can be considered a scientific fact.

General context

Many skeptics of parapsychology hold that the entire body of evidence to date is of poor quality and not properly controlled; in their view, the entire field of parapsychology has produced no conclusive results whatsoever. They often cite instances of fraud, flawed or potentially flawed studies, a psychological need for mysticism, and cognitive bias as ways to explain parapsychological results.

Why, then, are so many people predisposed to believe that ESP exists? In part, such beliefs may stem from understandable misperceptions, misinterpretations, and selective recall. But some people also have an unsatisfied hunger for wonderment, an itch to experience the magical. In Britain and the United States, the founders of parapsychology were mostly people who, having lost their religious faith, began searching for a scientific basis for believing in the meaning of life and in life after death (Alcock, 1985; Beloff, 1985).

Skeptic Susan Blackmore also states that "People's desire to believe in the paranormal is stronger than all the evidence that it does not exist."

Some proponents of parapsychology argue that those who hold these views have not had sufficient contact with the published literature of the field such as that which can be found in the Journal of Parapsychology, the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, or in the proceedings of the annual convention of the Parapsychological Association. Instead, many skeptics seem to have relied on the analyses made by members of the skeptical community, who sometimes assume that all parapsychological experiments suffer from flaws, and therefore no parapsychological experiment may be considered conclusive. Working psi researchers often welcome criticisms which are not psychologically or ideologically biased and which are based on knowledge of the peer-reviewed, published literature of the field. Criticisms which consist of blanket dismissals are non-scientific. (Radin, 1997: 205-227)

However, even "insiders" in the parapsychological community worry about the possible harm that naive belief in paranormal phenomena can have on individuals, culture and societies. A great deal of effort has been put into the development of expertise in dealing with reported experiences both in a clinical sense, and as a topic of investigation. J.B. Rhine warned that

Parapsychologists had better give some thought to the fact that their kind of psi is no longer nearly as securely under their own social control as in the past. The time has come when we who work with psi need to decide whether we really do know where we belong and just what our territory is. - - - Is there any other experimental science that rests on such a slight basis of uniformity and standardization? (Rhine, 1972, 175).

One point raised by both proponents and skeptics of parapsychology is the need to be critical of the theory, methods, and conclusions of all persons who investigate or comment on parapsychology as a science, no matter what point of view they represent. In order to be an objective professional, a commentator must understand the vast past and present published scientific literature in the field of parapsychology, and an unbiased attitude. Selective and historically uninformed "armchair cheerleading" and "armchair skepticism" are equally useless in all fields of inquiry and science. (Radin, 1997: 205-227)

Criticism of parapsychology

Reliability of evidence

A common criticism is that parapsychology relies on Anecdotal evidence, which may be unreliable both in observation and analysis. Anecdotes may have natural, non-anomalous explanations such as random coincidence, fraud, imagination, or auto-suggestion. Therefore any parapsychology research (or any scientific research) relying purely on anecdotal evidence is worthless.

Much of the hard evidence for psi phenomena today is founded on laboratory experiments and not anecdotal evidence. Although anecdotal evidence can be used for specific cases such as in law and many other fields, it is not necessary to use it to prove the general existence of psi.

Controlled conditions

Experiments in parapsychology have been criticized for not being sufficiently controlled to prevent fraud, and thus parapsychology results cannot be trusted. This is especially so given the fact that a number of people who claimed to possess psi abilities were later proven to be frauds.

There is no such thing as a completely foolproof experiment in any field of science. According to proponents, standards in the field of parapsychology are usually higher than in other fields, and it is being unreasonably held to a higher standard of epistemology than the other sciences.

PARAPSYCHOLOGY, widely dismissed as a sloppy pseudoscience, makes far more use of rigorous experimental methods than other scientific disciplines, according to a study of the prevalence of "blind" methodology in research.

In the words of skeptic Ray Hyman, speaking in 1984 on the science program Nova,

Hansel has a tendency to believe that if any experiment can be shown to be susceptible to fraud, then that immediately means it no longer can be used for evidence for psi. I do sympathize with the parapsychologists who rebut this by saying, well, that can be true for any experiment in the world, because there's always some way you can think of how fraud could have gotten into the experiment. You cannot make a perfectly 100 percent fraud-proof experiment. This would apply to all science. (From a transcript quoted in Radin 1997: 222)

Fraud and incompetence in parapsychology is addressed in the same way it is addressed in any other field of science: repeating experiments at multiple independent laboratories; publishing methods and results of studies in order to receive critical feedback and design better protocols, allow replication, etc. There is no evidence of a greater degree of fraud in parapsychology than in other areas of science. Also, in the words of skeptic Marcello Truzzi, a founder of the Society for Scientific Exploration, director for the Center for Scientific Anomalies Research and founding co-chairman of the skeptical organization Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (now the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry),

In science, the burden of proof falls upon the claimant; and the more extraordinary a claim, the heavier is the burden of proof demanded. The true skeptic takes an agnostic position, one that says the claim is not proved rather than disproved.[...]Critics who assert negative claims, but who mistakenly call themselves "skeptics," often act as though they have no burden of proof placed on them at all, though such a stance would be appropriate only for the agnostic or true skeptic. (On Pseudo-Skepticism by Marcello Truzzi)

Replication

Parapsychology experiments which have had positive results lack replication at independent laboratories. Ray Hyman contends that

Before we abandon relativity and quantum mechanics in their current formulations, we will require more than a promissory note. We will want, as is the case in other areas of science, solid evidence that these findings can, indeed, be produced under specified conditions.

While there is no definitive experiment in parapsychology which will give exactly the same results each time (as would be possible in an experiment to discover at what temperature water boils at a constant pressure), there are high numbers of replications of basic laboratory parapsychological experiments, which allows for meta-analysis of these studies. For instance a meta-analysis on the results of the Stanford Research Institute remote viewing experiments undertaken between 1973 and 1988 returned odds against the hypothesis that the results were due to chance of more than a billion billion to one. These studies were replicated by the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory. (Radin 1997:91-109) (Radin 2006: 278)

Cherry picking

There may be a "file drawer" problem in the field of parapsychology. A "file drawer" problem arises when only positive study results are made public, while studies with negative or null results are not made public.

In meta-analysis, there are statistical methods to infer how many unpublished studies invalidate the findings. When this is applied using standard statistical procedures, it is highly unlikely that there are that many unpublished studies with null or negative results lying around, thus the file drawer problem does not eliminate the statistical significance of parapsychological statistical analysis. (Radin 2006:104, 112-115)

Statistical significance

The positive results in psi experiments are so close to statistical insignificance as to be negligible, i.e. indistinguishable from chance.

In most sciences, a significance test is all that is needed to give evidence for deviation from chance, regardless of the size of significance. According to supporters, there are certain parapsychological phenomena which have been replicated with odds against chance far beyond that required for acceptance in any other science. Meta-analysis show that the low significance levels cannot be accounted for by any presentation bias or file drawer problem. Thus the same criticism would apply to most studies in the fields of sociology, biomedicine, psychology, and biology, which are accepted as scientific fields. (Radin 1997: 219)

Presumption of psi

Parapsychology suffers from what is called The psi assumption. Just because there exist currently inexplicable positive results of apparently sound parapsychological experiments does not prove the existence of psi. Rather, the assumption that any statistical deviation from chance is, strictly speaking, only evidence that either this was a rare, statistically unlikely occurrence that happened by chance, or that something was causing a deviation from chance. Flaws in the experimental design are a common cause of this, and so the assumption that it must be psi is fallacious.

According to Ray Hyman,

[Even if] we were to find that we could reproduce the findings [of certain parapsychological experiments] under specified conditions, this would still be a far cry from concluding that psychic functioning has been demonstrated. This is because the current claim is based entirely upon a negative outcome -- the sole basis for arguing for ESP is that extra-chance results can be obtained that apparently cannot be explained by normal means.

While there are many potential theoretical explanations of psi, parapsychology as a science does not claim to understand what psi is, but

Instead, [parapsychologists] design experiments to test experiences that people have reported throughout history. If rigorous tests for what we have called [say] "telepathy" result in effects that look like, sound like, and feel like the [often more impressive ] experiences reported in real life, then call it what you will, but the experiments confirm that this common experience is not an illusion. (Radin 1997: 210)

"Psi" is the name for an unknown factor, not necessarily for a force or factor outside the current range of scientific knowledge. However, it does seem that psi has some features which may be outside the range of current scientific theory. For instance, the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research Laboratory often included a precognitive aspect, and the studies obtained very highly significant results. (Radin 1997:91-109) Similar precognitive anomalies have been found in many studies. For instance, a study of galvanic skin responses showed a precognitive response to pictures which would appear in the future.

Gambling

Psychics could make a lot of money predicting or even controlling (via PK) the outcomes of boxing matches, football games, roulette wheel spins, individual stock price changes, and so on, but none of them seem to do so. This seems to indicate that psychic powers do not exist.

In response, Dean Radin has said, "Except for being profit-oriented, many gambling games are essentially identical to psi experiments conducted in the laboratory." (Radin 1997: 175). However, while psi effects do occur, real psi anomalies usually have only a very weak effect, which is not sufficient to overcome the bias against the gambler introduced by gambling houses. (see Radin 1997: 175-189). According to Dr. Radin,

The theoretical house advantage for some casino games is fairly small, e.g., about 1% for optimally-played craps. This means that over the long term, a good craps player might get back 99 cents for each dollar they play. If they hit a "hot streak," they might even win some money. In practice, the actual house take for most games is fairly large (about 25% for table games) because people rarely play consistently, they reinvest their winnings, and the casino environment is intentionally designed to be noisy and visually distracting. Thus, for a given psychic to make any notable differences in long-term casino profits, they would have to (a) understand the strategies of each game they play, (b) consistently play according to those strategies, (c) stop when they are ahead, and (d) consistently apply strong, reliable psi.

Over the long term casino profits are predictably stable, but given that some psi effects are known to be genuine, in principle a good, consistent psychic (who knows how to play the casino games) might make some money by gambling. In addition, many people applying weak psi may cause small fluctuations in casino profits, but testing this would require analyzing an enormous amount of casino data, and such data is difficult to obtain.

Conflict with known science

Psi phenomena are often considered by critics to violate "the known laws of physics".

Human knowledge of the "laws of physics" is incomplete. For instance Newtonian Mechanics, General Relativity and Quantum Mechanics, even when taken together, do not add up to a complete description of how the universe works (see standard model). A "physical law" is only a mathematical description of the way natural systems behave. If natural systems are seen to behave differently than predicted by physics, then physics needs to be revised (see scientific method). Also, it is unknown whether the laws of physics as currently understood are actually violated by psi, or whether psi simply operates in a manner which current physics does not describe, much as the workings of the interior of an atom cannot be described by Einstein's theory of general relativity. So if the existence of psi phenomenon are ever undeniably proved, explaining how they work might not require revising the known laws of physics, but might merely require their extension. Precognition, for example, would challenge commonly held (though unproved) notions about causality and the unidirectional nature of time on a macroscopic scale. But such notions do not hold the status of "Physical Laws," as for example in the case of the law of conservation of energy. Beliefs about how nature works are already being challenged by modern physical theories, quite apart from psi phenomena (see string theory). (see Radin 1997: 221-222)

Market bias

The paranormal is culturally very popular and profitable. This has led to the production of vast amounts of material on topics such as ESP. Skeptics have been able to show that some of the pro-paranormal material is unreliable, misleading or inaccurate. However, its producers continue to market it in spite of such serious shortcomings. Skeptics have therefore claimed that the market is biased in favor of books, TV specials, etc. which support paranormal interpretations, and that this leaves the public poorly informed..

Parapsychologists have often been concerned that the science of parapsychology may be confused in the public mind with paranormal claims which are not scientifically justified, to the detriment of the field's standing. Those of the Rhinean School of parapsychology felt that the

only firmly settled parapsychological subject matter consists of extrasensory perception (ESP) and psychokinesis (PK). This explains why Rhine considered the "occult wave" (Bender, 1976, 7) which became prominent in the Western countries during the seventies and included acupuncture, Kirlian photography and astrology, as very dangerous for the image of parapsychology as an experimental science.

Danger to social order

Some opponents claim that parapsychology should not be pursued because it represents a danger to society. According to Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove, Director of the Intuition Network, Institute of Noetic Sciences, there are sometimes psychological reasons for objecting to research on psi, and to any positive results of psi experiments. These include fear of magic and witchcraft, loss of normal ego boundaries and the ability to keep secrets, social censure, madness, the rising tide of pseudoscience and superstition, and fear of empathy which would result from knowing other people's emotions and suffering.

The legitimacy of the argument that parapsychology is a danger to society often rests on the assumption that it is a pseudoscience. Science is concerned with the pursuit of natural phenomena, not with defending social structures, and thus any psychological fears do not constitute valid criticisms. If parapsychology is scientifically rigorous, fears concerning pseudoscience would be unfounded.

Interdisciplinary field

The claim that parapsychology is a truly interdisciplinary field is disputable. As Alcock has noted:

"Physicists and paraphysicists do not overlap in their research. Physicists do not find it necessary to turn to the parapsychological literature to gain insight into problems that they are working on, nor do psychologists" .

Psi phenomena do not appear to interfere with the work of other scientists. Particle physicists have seen no need to invoke "experimenter effects" to explain anomalous observations: they are not confronted with phenomena that are produced only when a certain physicist wants them to be reproduced, nor do they have to keep people skeptical of quantum physics out of the laboratory. Moreover, skeptics have argued, if physicists, for example, did not read the parapsychological literature, they would be unaware of any psi observations that supposedly require an explanation. Skeptics point to the isolation of parapsychology within science and use this to bolster their claim that whilst parascientists may not be practicing bad science, they may be searching for and trying to study non-existent phenomena.

Parapsychologists feel that isolation from other branches of science does not occur because parapsychology has nothing to offer other fields, but because of bias. Parapsychologists feel that they can contribute in many ways. One area where parapsychological research into the possible effects of human consciousness on matter might benefit physicists is in the area of quantum theory. Robert G Jahn, professor of aerospace sciences and dean emeritus of the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Princeton University, while writing about the effects of human consciousness on the quantum world, said

I think we have long since passed the place in high energy physics where we're examining the structure of a passive universe. I think we're into the domain where the interplay of consciousness in the environment is taking place on such a primary scale that we are indeed creating reality by any reasonable definition of the term.

This view of quantum theory is held by many physicists, and it is well within the realm of parapsychological study. But parapsychologists are often excluded from the discussion.

"Most physicists develop a somewhat schizophrenic view," quantum theorist Fritz Rohrlich of Syracuse University was quoted as saying in the New York Times. "On the one hand they accept the standard interpretation of quantum theory [that it is partially determined by observation]. On the other hand they insist on the reality of quantum systems even when these are not observed."

Thus, the interaction of consciousness with matter is sometimes acknowledged by physicists, yet parapsychological results are not considered relevant. Parapsychologists point to such contradictions as evidence that their isolation from other fields of science may be due to bias.

Pseudoscience

Parapsychologists make illegitimate use of well established scientific theories. Many ideas in physics have been invoked to explain or justify the existence of putative psi phenomena: Relativity theory and the concept of simultaneity; the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen (EPR) paradox, time reversal, tachyon particles and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle - the latter having been used to explain negative results ('experimenter' and 'sheep-goat)') effects). As Alcock has noted:

"Ideas emanating from modern physics are often pushed to great lengths to support a belief in parapsychology, and such ideas may appear convincing to the individual totally unfamiliar with relativity and quantum mechanics.".

However, Alcock and others have maintained that:

"Casual, almost flippant, references to [the Heisenberg uncertainty principle] are often used to suggest that at the sub-atomic level determinacy breaks down, and that physics and metaphysics merge into one. Most parapsychologists... appear to "latch on" to Heisenberg as a way of demonstrating the "scientific" basis for their position".

Parapsychologists do not claim to understand psi. Psi is the name for an unknown phenomenon or unknown phenomena, which have given rise throughout history to many extraordinary human experiences, and which have been demonstrated in the laboratory. However, quantum mechanics and other physical theories have many similarities with parapsychological observations of psi. These similarities have not been shown to explain psi, predict psi, or even to be relevant to psi. However, the topical similarities are suggestive, and have lead parapsychologists and some quantum theorists to speculate that they may eventually lead to an expanded understanding of physics which embraces psi.

Some parapsychogists have stated that modern physics should not be used to explain psi, and that difficult issues, like the EPR paradox, do not necessarily require a psi explanation:

"Modern physics, to be sure, is concerned with phenomena which can be as bizarre at first as psi, and the two can sometimes resemble each other on a superficial level. But on closer inspection, the physics problems turn out to be comprehensible within a powerful and coherent set of ideas which have brilliantly withstood years of testing"

Scientists specializing in distinct disciplines within mathematics and physics work collaboratively with deeply complicated concepts that often require bold, intuitive and imaginative speculation, yet in spite of this, the community generally rejects hypotheses proposed to account for psi. However, according to Professor Brian Josephson,

"It is not too far fetched to say that if psychic phenomena had not been found experimentally, they might have been predicted by an imaginative theoretician."

See also

• Parapsychology
• Anomalous phenomenon
• Clairaudience
• Clairvoyance
• Committee for Skeptical Inquiry
• Extra-sensory perception
• Ganzfeld experiment

• Haunting
• List of parapsychologists
• List of spirituality-related topics
• Near-death experience
• Out-of-body experiences
• Paranormal

• Paraphysics
• Parapsychology basic topics
• Patapsychology
• Prophecy
• Psychokinesis
• Reality shifts

• Reincarnation
• Remote viewing
• Scientific investigation of telepathy
• Telepathy
• The Bélmez Faces
• Transpersonal psychology