The phychology of the "psi-conductive" experimenter: personality, attitudes towards psi, and personal psi experience

ABSTRACT

The experimenter effect, in which some experimenters are consistently more successful than other experimenters in obtaining evidence for psi, continues to be a major challenge for modern parapsychology. The term psi-conducive experimenter has been adopted to refer to a consistently "successful" experimenter, whereas an experimenter who has been consistently "unsuccessful" in obtaining psi effects is typically described as psi-inhibitory. Fifty researchers were identified who had acted as an experimenter in at least one published parapsychology experiment and who were likely to be able to be contacted by the author either in person or bye-mail. Of these, 40 completed and returned questionnaire booklets that included the Keirsey Temperament Sorter and a 6-item questionnaire asking about attitudes towards psi. They were also asked to indicate whether they had ever practised a mental discipline and whether they had ever had any personal psi experiences. Participants were also asked to rate the 50 named researchers according to whether they considered them to be psi-conducive or psi-inhibitory. Significant correlations were found between psi-conduciveness and belief in one's own ESP ability, belief in one's own PK ability, belief that ESP is possible, and belief that ESP can be demonstrated in an experiment.

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It has long been recognised that some experimenters in parapsychology appear to be consistently more successful than others in obtaining evidence for psi (e.g., Rhine & Pratt, 1957). This observation, referred to as the experimenter effect, recently led two researchers, Marilyn Schlitz and Richard Wiseman, one with a history of significant findings in support of psi (Schlitz) and one with a history of obtaining nonsignificant findings (Wiseman), to conduct studies under the same conditions. In two studies they found that data collected by Wiseman continued to be at a chance level, whereas Schlitz's data continued to show a significant deviation from chance expectation (Wiseman & Schlitz, 1997, 1999). The authors argued that the findings were unlikely to be explained in terms of randomisation artifacts, sensory leakage, participant cheating, or experimenter fraud. In addition, they treat as unlikely the possibility that Schlitz's participants were more "psychically gifted" than Wiseman's participants because o f the opportunistic way in which participants were assigned to experimenters. We are therefore left with the possibility that the differential findings are best explained by some undetermined differences between the two experimenters. For example, the two experimenters clearly have contrasting views regarding psi phenomena (we are told that whereas Schlitz is a "psi proponent," Wiseman is a "skeptic regarding the claims of parapsychology"). In addition, they differ in terms of both age and gender and are likely to differ to some extent in terms of personality.

One question, therefore, is which of these variables, if any, are helpful in predicting the likelihood of "success" as a psi experimenter? Following Parker (1977a, 1997b), experimenters who consistently obtain evidence in favour of the psi hypothesis are typically referred to as psi-conducive experimenters, whereas those who consistently do not obtain evidence in favour of psi have become labelled as psi-inhibitory experimenters. Although these labels refer to the outcomes of the experimenter's past research, they imply that psi-conduciveness is in some way linked to characteristics of the individual experimenter.

Such observations have led some researchers to examine more systematically those variables that may help distinguish apparently psi-conducive experimenters from psi-inhibitory experimenters. For example, Parker (1977a, 1977b) administered a personality factor questionnaire, the 16 PF, to American and European parapsychologists. Three judges (themselves psi researchers) classified respondents as either psi-conducive or psi-inhibitory according to their recently published experiments, which resulted in 15 psi-conducive and 14 psi-inhibitory experimenters being identified. On the basis of anecdotal reports of what makes a "successful" psi experimenter (see, e.g., Rhine, 1934/1973; Stanford, Zenhausern, Taylor, & Dwyer, 1975), it was predicted that psi-conducive experimenters would score higher than psi-inhibitory experimenters on dimensions of extraversion, warmth and sociability, confidence adequacy, and tenderness and sensitivity. However, no significant differences on any of these dimensions were obtained. A post hoc analysis of the other factors measured by the 16 PF revealed a tendency for psi-conducive experimenters to be more self-assertive and more intellectually sophisticated than psi-inhibitory experimenters.

In another study, students rated a number of parapsychologists against a list of 30 descriptive adjectives after watching video-recorded conference presentations by each one (Schmeidler & Maher, 1981a). Twenty-seven researchers' presentations at the 1979 Parapsychological Association Convention were video-recorded. From these, 5 psi-conducive and 5 psi-inhibitory researchers were selected who were matched in terms of age, sex, overt physical characteristics, and whether they grew up in the United States. Findings from both this study and an attempted replication (Edge & Farkash, 1992) found that the psi-conducive experimenters were generally rated as more enthusiastic, warmer, and less egoistic than experimenters classified as psi-inhibitory.