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Methods for investigating goal-oriented PSI
Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1995 by J.E. Kennedy
CONCLUSIONS
The motivations of experimenters and experimental participants form a hierarchy of goals that ranges from wanting success on individual trials to wanting success for the field of parapsychology. The goal-oriented psi hypothesis implies that key assumptions for usual statistical methods do not apply for outcomes that are below the psi source's primary goal in the hierarchy of goals. Majority-vote studies provide strong evidence that goal-oriented psi and the associated nonapplicability of normal statistical assumptions can occur on the lower levels of the hierarchy. If the psi sources have goals that are high on the hierarchy, the usual experimental research methods may be undermined. Psi may influence the experimental outcome as a unitary event to obtain the result that the psi source favors. Thus, experimental methods may not provide meaningful results, other than evidence that psi occurred. The available evidence from meta-analyses is consistent with the hypothesis that goal-oriented psi frequently operates on higher level goals such as goal-oriented experimenter effects. However, the data are not compelling at present because of possible confounding factors.
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Goal-oriented psi can be investigated by determining where on the hierarchy of goals psi bypasses normal statistical assumptions about the properties of data aggregation. In addition, the evidence from majority-vote studies that psi achieves the goals in an efficient manner provides a basis for investigating goal-oriented psi in many situations and at many different levels of the hierarchy of goals. However, research may be complicated by shifting goals in the hierarchy and different patterns for different researchers.
APPENDIX
SUMMARY OF INFORMATION-PROCESSING CONCEPTS RELATED TO GOAL-ORIENTED PSI
This appendix was prepared in response to a request by a reviewer that I discuss the relationship between goal-oriented psi as described in this paper and other writings on task complexity and information-processing. This discussion is presented as an appendix because it is a technical digression from the primary purpose of the paper. Four fundamental aspects of information-processing that are relevant to task complexity and goal-oriented psi are summarized below, followed by a discussion of how they apply to several topics relating to psi information-processing.
Redundant Opportunities for Psi
The presence of multiple or redundant opportunities for psi to operate is a form of information-processing that is a key assumption for majority-vote procedures and for statistical experimental methodology. Normal statistical methods are based on the assumption that the aggregation of data from multiple or repeated measurements of an effect will lead to increased reliability or accuracy of estimation. Note that the presence of this redundancy does not change the a priori probability of a successful outcome. For example, the a priori probability of a hit on each trial in Schmidt's (1974) PK study was .5, whether the trial was a majority-vote or single-event trial. Likewise, from the perspective of goal-oriented psi experimenter effects, the a priori probability of a successful outcome is .05 (or the alpha significance level of the experiment) independent of the sample size.
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