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The capricious, actively evasive, unsustainable nature of psi: a summary and hypotheses
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Spring, 2003 by J.E. Kennedy
Despite these various declines, the overall significance level for most of these participants, experimental series, and lines of research remains significant. There is evidence for psi, but the effects seem systematically unstable.
These declines are an anomalous form of unreliability that indicate an inhibitory process. Unreliability normally manifests in one of two patterns over time. The effect sizes and proportion of studies with statistically significant outcomes will tend to increase for later studies if relevant variables are identified and controlled. Alternatively, the effects will remain relatively uniform across studies if there is no progress in understanding the phenomenon. The widespread declines found in psi research indicate an inhibition of psi as well as a general lack of progress in understanding psi.
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LESS PSI WITH IMPROVED METHODOLOGY
Braud (1985) and Batcheldor (1994) have suggested that psi appears to occur more readily in situations with lower methodological quality. For example, Dunne and Jahn (2002) noted that their 25-year experience with remote viewing found a steady decline that occurred as they attempted to develop increasingly objective, quantitative evaluation methods. Braud (1985) also noted that more sophisticated, process-oriented studies seem less likely to obtain psi effects than simple studies intended to provide evidence for the existence of psi. Of course, skeptics interpret these trends as evidence that ostensible psi phenomena actually result from methodological problems.
However, there is a clear mechanism for a misleading, noncausal association between psi effects and methodological quality. The normal process for scientific research is to develop increasingly controlled and analytical research methods as research progresses. The declines over time in psi effects for a line of research will therefore be correlated with higher quality methodology even though they may be independent processes.
This possibility is supported by cases when declines occur even when the methodology remains constant or becomes less well controlled. For example, in a study investigating the use of ESP to find land mines, the initially significant results declined even though the methodology did not change (J. B. Rhine, 1971). The loss of effect with the attempted replication of the PEAR REG studies occurred even though the replication efforts used an REG that was lower quality (had less redundant failsafe measures) than the REG for many of the early studies (Jahn et al., 2000). Also, the REG used in the replication studies had been used with positive results is some earlier studies. Given the evidence for widespread declines in psi effects, a more sophisticated analysis is needed before a negative association between psi and methodological quality can be taken as evidence for the evasive nature of psi.
At the same time, the idea that psi effects are inversely related to experimental sophistication needs to be evaluated. The notable lack of comparative studies in some of the most successful lines of psi research appears to indicate that parapsychologists have tacit, working assumptions favoring simple, unrevealing experiments (perhaps as a result of operant conditioning by actively evasive psi). As a conspicuous example, research attempting to show that the ganzfeld procedure is psi conducive has rarely included a control group even though that is a fundamental departure from the basic principles of research design. The assumptions underlying this practice need to be acknowledged and made explicit.
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