He has also researched psi phenomena,[1][2] group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation, and personality theory and assessment.

[4] Bem testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the psychological effects of police interrogation[5] and served as an expert witness in court cases involving sex discrimination.

Bem and McConnell demonstrated this by measuring the change in Carnegie Mellon students' attitudes toward having control of their university curriculum.

[11] Bem based this theory in part on the finding that a majority of gay men and lesbians report being gender-nonconforming during their childhood years.

Bem also acknowledged that gay men were more likely to have older brothers (the fraternal birth order effect), which appeared to contradict an unfamiliarity with males.

Bem cited cross-cultural studies which also "appear to contradict the EBE theory assertion", such as the Sambia tribe in Papua New Guinea, which ritually enforced homosexual acts among teenagers, yet once these boys reached adulthood, only a small proportion of men continued to engage in homosexual behaviour - similar to levels observed in the United States.

[16]: 164  Social psychologist Justin LehMiller stated that "Bem's theory has received a lot of praise for the way it seamlessly links biological and environmental influences" and that there "is also some support for the model in the sense that childhood gender nonconformity is indeed one of the strongest predicators of adult homosexuality", but that the validity of the model "has been questioned on numerous grounds and scientists have largely rejected it.

"[15] In parapsychology, Bem is known for his defense of the ganzfeld experiment as evidence of psi, more commonly known as extrasensory perception or psychic phenomena.

[17] Bem and Charles Honorton (1994) reviewed the experimental arrangements of the autoganzfeld experiments, and concluded they provided excellent security against deception by subjects and sensory cues.

[17] However, Ray Hyman disagreed with Bem and Honorton as he claims to have discovered some interesting patterns in the data that implied visual cues may have taken place in the experiments.

[18][19][20][21] Julie Milton and Richard Wiseman (1999) who discovered errors in Bem's research carried out a meta-analysis of ganzfeld experiments in other laboratories.

According to Blackmore, psychologists reading Bem's review in Psychological Bulletin would "not have a clue that serious doubt had been cast on more than a quarter of the studies involved".

Blackmore recounts having a discussion with Bem at a consciousness conference where she challenged him on his support of Sargent and Honorton's research; he replied "it did not matter".

It matters because Bem's continued claims mislead a willing public into believing that there is reputable scientific evidence for ESP in the Ganzfeld when there is not".

American author and researcher Mitch Horowitz has noted that Bem's experiments in precognition and retrocausality, which have been validated in a meta-analysis of 90 trials in 33 labs in 14 nations, comport not only with relativity but also with interpretations of quantum physics.

[32] Jeffrey Rouder and Richard Morey, who applied a meta-analytical Bayes factor to Bem's data, concluded, "We remain unconvinced of the viability of ESP.

[37] One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ("Retroactive Facilitation of Recall") was repeated by scientists Stuart J. Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman.

[47] The publication of Bem's article and the resulting controversy prompted a wide-ranging commentary by Etienne LeBel and Kurt Peters.

"[49] In a 2017 follow-up article in Slate magazine on the "Feeling the Future" experiments, Bem is quoted as saying, “I’m all for rigor, but I prefer other people do it.

I used data as a point of persuasion, and I never really worried about, ‘Will this replicate or will this not?’”"[50] While fellow psychologist Stuart Vyse sees this statement as coming "remarkably close to an outright admission of p-hacking", he also notes that Bem "has been given substantial credit for stimulating the movement to tighten the standards for research" such as that taking place in open science.