| A lot of commenters don't appear to have read the paper on which the article is based on - critiquing at its best. Some factoids of note: The Bem study isn't unique, there have been 1000s of studies exploring psi that have arrived at significant results. Look up Dean Radin for starters in case you're interested. The Bem study is unique in that it is getting published in a mainstream journal, which is unusual since the mainstream psychology community doesn't believe or like the idea of researching psi, i.e. most consider it impossible. But that mainstream attitude is just that, an attitude. Bem is fairly unusual as most researchers that do psi-research are considered on the fringe of the community and don't get in to the mainstream journals. Researchers that do explore psi risk their reputations and careers. Bem started out as a skeptic when he was invited to critique another researchers psi experiments. He's a well reputed researcher who has contributed his own theories that have been a real contribution to the field of psychology(non-psi related), something few scientists achieve in their careers. So far, 2 papers have been written in response to Bem's study, as noted by another commenter. The first uses the Bem study to argue an entirely different agenda: the need for changes in the way general studies use statistics. The core of their argument would affect hundreds of thousands of papers across the entire field of psychology (and others). How valid the authors points are in relation to the Bem study is open to debate. In the 2nd paper by other authors, it was attempted to replicate their findings. If you read the paper, you can't even tell how closely they followed Bem's original experiment, ie. what software did they use, how did the users install it etc? (and they didn't replicate all of Bem's experiments). One big warning bell is that they used internet participants, which is a shoddy way to do a psi experiment, or most any experiment for that matter. For those that critique the design: Bem took 9 classic psychological experiments that the field is extremely familiar with and reversed them. Designing a good psi-experiment is incredibly hard and a lot more thought and scrutiny than the average experiment. Using classic experiments makes a great deal of sense. @araneae:
Welcome to psychology research. Almost all the experiments, findings and studies that make it into journals were paved in copious amounts of (pilot)studies and experiments that yielded no results. Such is the nature of doing research in the field of psychology. Designing a psi experiment that stands up to scrutiny requires even more work, failures etc. The concept of backward causation has been verified in other fields, like quantum biology and from a physics point of view, it is widely accepted both by theory and empirical study. It's not that big of stretch of the imagination that the most sophisticated organ that we have encountered in the universe (our brain) might be capable of it. Fact #389: number one reason start ups fail and random critiques are flawed: they're based on relentlessly operating on unproven, unverified assumptions. |