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Reflections on being a parapsychologist
Journal of Parapsychology, The, Fall, 2003 by Carlos S. Alvarado
Certainly we have a right to express our opinions and to evaluate our evidence as we see fit, and it is important to express what we believe. But we need to strike a balance between exaggerated claims and the need to present our claims in a convincing way. After all, if we do not project a positive feeling in our writings, how can we expect to convince others to engage in meaningful discussions of our findings? What worries me is that sometimes we present a too positive and rosy picture of the field, forgetting to acknowledge the difference between our personal hopes and the state of the field as a whole. A view of the field that does not acknowledge the social reality we surfer under does not help parapsychology among other scientists because we appear to be ignoring the obvious and exaggerating the replicability of our research.
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But to promote out views, be they bold or conservative, we need to do something even more basic. We need to increase the frequency of formal publication of our research. Most of our research work stays in PA proceedings and does not get published in refereed journals, whether they are parapsychological journals or the journals of other disciplines. This creates serious problems in the diffusion of information. While journals are abstracted in a variety of databases, the privately printed PA proceedings are not. Consequently, if someone does not attend a PA convention, or if one does not buy a copy of the proceedings (sold almost exclusively to PA members), he or she will not have access to current research information. Do we really think it is in the best interests of parapsychology to allow only a very small group of individuals to have access to out research reports? We always complain that out work is not cited nor widely read, but to some extent this is out own fault.
The fact that some of this research can be found now in personal websites, or that it may appear in the future on the PA website is helpful, but it is no substitute for formal journal publication. Outsiders do not value websites as reliable publication outlets. If we allow our research to remain only in such private venues, no matter how many hits such a site would get, we will project the image that parapsychologists do not follow the standard publication practices of science, and like the occultists, provide out materials only to those few "in the know."
Another problem, and one that may be explained by the low number of research workers in our field, is the lack of replication and extension on promising leads and on specific theoretical models. There have been few attempts to follow Thouless and Wiesner's (1947) model of psi psychophysical interaction, Hans Eysenck's (1967) model of cortical arousal and ESP, Harvey Irwin's (1979, 1985) ESP information-processing model and his absorption-synesthesia OBE model, or Roll and colleagues' rotating beam model of poltergeists (Roll, Burdick & Joines, 1973). There is a general lack of follow-up in some of our most important areas. One wonders if the same will happen to other lines of research, such as attempts to replicate, extend, and understand the correlations between ESP and geomagnetism or local sidereal time. Of course, we have to acknowledge once again that some of this may be explained by the lack of human and financial resources in the field. But when one sees parapsychologists abandoning their own promising research areas and coming up with new projects when there is so much basic research to be done on the questions they previously asked, one wonders if our profession sometimes has an undisciplined tendency towards the pursuit of the novel.
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