Parapsychology
Early membership included philosophers, scholars, scientists, educators and politicians, such as Henry Sidgwick, Arthur Balfour, William Crookes, Rufus Osgood Mason, and Nobel Laureate Charles Richet.
[28] Presidents of the Society included, in addition to Richet, Eleanor Sidgwick and William James, and subsequently Nobel Laureates Henri Bergson and Lord Rayleigh, and philosopher C. D.
[47] In 1938, the psychologist Joseph Jastrow wrote that much of the evidence for extrasensory perception collected by Rhine and other parapsychologists was anecdotal, biased, dubious and the result of "faulty observation and familiar human frailties".
[48] Rhine's experiments were discredited due to the discovery that sensory leakage or cheating could account for all his results, such as the subject being able to read the symbols from the back of the cards and being able to see and hear the experimenter to note subtle clues.
[49][50][51][52] Illusionist Milbourne Christopher wrote years later that he felt "there are at least a dozen ways a subject who wished to cheat under the conditions Rhine described could deceive the investigator".
[97] Storm et al. published a response to Hyman stating that the Ganzfeld experimental design has proved to be consistent and reliable, that parapsychology is a struggling discipline that has not received much attention, and that therefore further research on the subject is necessary.
[107] The psychologists David Marks and Richard Kammann attempted to replicate Russell Targ and Harold Puthoff's remote viewing experiments that were carried out in the 1970s at SRI International.
Marks and Kammann discovered that the notes given to the judges in Targ and Puthoff's experiments contained clues as to the order in which they were carried out, such as referring to yesterday's two targets or having the session date written at the top of the page.
[113] Marks and Christopher Scott (1986) wrote, "Considering the importance for the remote viewing hypothesis of adequate cue removal, Tart's failure to perform this basic task seems beyond comprehension.
[115] The advent of powerful and inexpensive electronic and computer technologies has allowed the development of fully automated experiments studying possible interactions between mind and matter.
In the most common experiment of this type, a random number generator (RNG), based on electronic or radioactive noise, produces a data stream that is recorded and analyzed by computer software.
[119] According to Massimo Pigliucci, the results from PEAR can be explained without invoking the paranormal because of two problems with the experiment: "the difficulty of designing machines capable of generating truly random events and the fact that statistical "significance" is not at all a good measure of the importance or genuineness of a phenomenon.
NDEs include one or more of the following experiences: a sense of being dead; an out-of-body experience; a sensation of floating above one's body and seeing the surrounding area; a sense of overwhelming love and peace; a sensation of moving upwards through a tunnel or narrow passageway; meeting deceased relatives or spiritual figures; encountering a being of light, or a light; experiencing a life review; reaching a border or boundary; and a feeling of being returned to the body, often accompanied by reluctance.
Later researchers, such as psychiatrist Bruce Greyson, psychologist Kenneth Ring, and cardiologist Michael Sabom, introduced the study of near-death experiences to the academic setting.
"[167] Philosopher and skeptic Robert Todd Carroll has written research in parapsychology has been characterized by "deception, fraud, and incompetence in setting up properly controlled experiments and evaluating statistical data.
"[168] The psychologist Ray Hyman has pointed out that some parapsychologists such as Dick Bierman, Walter Lucadou, J. E. Kennedy, and Robert Jahn have admitted the evidence for psi is "inconsistent, irreproducible, and fails to meet acceptable scientific standards.
[165] Fundamental endemic problems in parapsychological research include, amongst others: insufficient definition of the subject matter, total reliance on negative definitions of their phenomena (e.g., psi is said to occur only when all known normal influences are ruled out); failure to produce a single phenomenon that neutral researchers can independently replicate; the invention of "effects" such as the psi-experimenter effect to explain away inconsistencies in the data and failures to achieve predicted outcomes; unfalsifiability of claims; the unpredictability of effects; lack of progress in over a century of formal research; methodological weaknesses; reliance on statistical procedures to determine when psi has supposedly occurred, even though statistical analysis does not in itself justify a claim that psi has occurred; and failure to jibe with other areas of science.
"[165] Alcock and cognitive psychologist Arthur S. Reber have criticized parapsychology broadly, writing that if psi effects were true, they would negate fundamental principles of science such as causality, time's arrow, thermodynamics, and the inverse square law.
[190] Planer writes that such experiments are extremely sensitive and easy to monitor but are not utilized by parapsychologists as they "do not hold out the remotest hope of demonstrating even a minute trace of PK" because the alleged phenomenon is non-existent.
The claim that quantum mechanics allows for the possibility of mental power influencing randomizers—an alleged case of micro-PK—is ludicrous since that theory respects the said conservation principles, and it deals exclusively with physical things.
In spite of all the tests devised by parapsychologists like Jahn and Radin, and huge amounts of data collected over a period of many years, the results are no more convincing today than when they began their experiments.
[200] Some of the more specific criticisms state that parapsychology does not have a clearly defined subject matter, an easily repeatable experiment that can demonstrate a psi effect on demand, nor an underlying theory to explain the paranormal transfer of information.
The aim of parapsychologists "is not that of finding laws and systematizing them into theories in order to understand and forecast" but to "buttress ancient spiritualist myths or to serve as a surrogate for lost religions.
"[193] The psychologist David Marks has written that parapsychologists have failed to produce a single repeatable demonstration of the paranormal and described psychical research as a pseudoscience, an "incoherent collection of belief systems steeped in fantasy, illusion and error.
[212][213] George Albert Smith and Douglas Blackburn were claimed to be genuine psychics by the Society for Psychical Research, but Blackburn confessed to fraud: For nearly thirty years the telepathic experiments conducted by Mr. G. A. Smith and myself have been accepted and cited as the basic evidence of the truth of thought transference... ...the whole of those alleged experiments were bogus, and originated in the honest desire of two youths to show how easily men of scientific mind and training could be deceived when seeking for evidence in support of a theory they were wishful to establish.
[214]The experiments of Samuel Soal and K. M. Goldney of 1941–1943 (suggesting the precognitive ability of a single participant) were long regarded as some of the best in the field because they relied upon independent checking and witnesses to prevent fraud.
However, he flaunted standard academic protocol by refusing to divulge the names of the fraudsters, which means that there is unknown number of published papers in the literature that claim paranormal effects while in fact they were the result of conscious deception.
For example, the experiments at the PEAR laboratory were criticized in a paper published by the Journal of Parapsychology in which parapsychologists independent from the PEAR laboratory concluded that these experiments "depart[ed] from criteria usually expected in formal scientific experimentation" due to "[p]roblems with regard to randomization, statistical baselines, application of statistical models, agent coding of descriptor lists, feedback to percipients, sensory cues, and precautions against cheating."
These critics hold that concluding the existence of psychic phenomena based on chance deviation in inadequately designed experiments is affirming the consequent or begging the question.
Critics say that analogous problems with meta-analysis have been documented in medicine, where it has been shown different investigators performing meta-analyses of the same set of studies have reached contradictory conclusions.
