Parapsychological studies and methodological shortcomings Flashcards
Ganzfeld experiments for telepathy
there are two people, one of whom gets to see a certain video in one room (think of: very heavy scary images or very nice funny things), this is the transmitter. The other person is in another room with headphones on with White Noise, ping pong balls on their eyes and a red lamp above the eyes, this is the receiver. This is to cause sensory deprivation. The sender must then transmit information to the receiver by means of telepathy. Criticism: How do you know it’s not a good guess? Suppose the recipient says they have seen a house. That is a very general thing and chances are
that in the 30 minutes of video that the other person was watching, a house came into the picture somewhere. Does that mean they have mutual telepathy?
Ganzfeld experiments for telepathy
there are two people, one of whom gets to see a certain video in one room (think of: very heavy scary images or very nice funny things), this is the transmitter. The other person is in another room with headphones on with White Noise, ping pong balls on their eyes and a red lamp above the eyes, this is the receiver. This is to cause sensory deprivation. The sender must then transmit information to the receiver by means of telepathy. Criticism: How do you know it’s not a good guess? Suppose the recipient says they have seen a house. That is a very general thing and chances are
that in the 30 minutes of video that the other person was watching, a house came into the picture somewhere. Does that mean they have mutual telepathy?
ESP Cards
this is a more standardized research. Five cards with a different face symbol on each card are placed on the table. Then the sender may take a card one by one and the sender must pass this on to the receiver via telepathy. The general conclusion is that if there are five cards you should get it right 20% of the time based on probability. People who claim to have parapsychological powers generally do better (above probability level) with 25% of the answers right. This could be proof that they do indeed possess those powers.
Channeling
an attempt is made to contact the afterlife and thus, for example, with the spirits of the deceased. The idea here is that when you open up you can let yourself be influenced by a spirit. This spirit can give you a message that you can pass on to the surviving relatives who are stillalive. Think of commercial channels with psychics that you can call live. Findings are always in steps and never all at once. So not “The name of the deceased is Petra, is that correct?”But: “I get the letter P; can that be correct?” This continues until they finally arrive at the name Petra
Psychokinesis
Moving objects through mental influence. For example, Uri Geller who could bend spoons by looking at them.James Randy: an illusionist who later dedicated his life to debunk people who claim to have parapsychological powers. He showed the tricks together and found it misleading to say that these are real powers.Daryl Bem: He wrote an article claiming to have found evidence for so-called anomalous retroactive influences of cognition and emotion. He concludes that Psi exists
Meta-analyzes
There are indeed results found above probability level, which suggest that parapsychological phenomena actually exist. But there is also criticism:- There may be errors in the design of the research (for example, experimenter bias or cheating on the sender and receiver).- Publication bias which does not create a representative picture (if evidence is found for parapsychological forces, it is published much fasterthan if no evidence is found, this is often not published).- Freedom and flexibility of researchers in data analysis (analyze researchresults and afterwards change your main question and leave out parts of your research to manipulate the results)
