An attempted replication of the PRL ganzfeld research - Psychophysical Research Laboratories - Autoganzfeld, part 2

First-Timers (ordinary): This series included all participants who had not had prior experience in the autoganzfeld but who did not fit the category of "emotionally close." Senders in this series were usually friends or lab friends (i.e., a friend who is on the staff), though occasionally a member of the staff previously unacquainted with the receiver served as sender. The planned two series, FT1 and FT2, were completed.

Emotionally Close First-Timers: This series was for sessions in which both the sender and the receiver are emotionally close. This includes happily married couples, parent-child pairs, and siblings. After consultation with a clinical psychologist, we decided not to include newlyweds or courting couples as this is often an anxiety-prone period in a relationship and possibly not conducive to ESP.

The EC series was not designed to be a formal comparison with non-emotionally close sender/receiver pairs. Rather, it was an exploratory investigation using a subset of participants that might provide important clues both to the nature of the ESP interaction and to what classes of participants are likely to succeed in the ganzfeld. A formal comparison would have required, at the least, that both the receiver and the experimenter be kept blind as to whether the sender was the emotionally close partner who came to the session or a complete stranger. We felt that since a primary goal was to replicate the PRL findings, the necessary manipulations - either deception or an elaborate explanation to avoid deception - plus the additional manipulations, would make such a testing situation radically different from the PRL sessions.

The idea that emotionally close people may be especially prone to experiencing ESP between them has always been a feature of spontaneous case investigations (Schouten, 1982); a few experimental investigations have been reported as well. In a free-response experiment that explored agent-percipient relationship and GESP performance (Smart, 1946), significantly positive results were obtained by closely related pairs (twins, married couples, and engaged couples), whereas unrelated pairs gave significantly negative results. Inspired by Stuart's work, Rice & Townsend (1962) designed an experiment to test the hypothesis that emotionally close pairs would score higher in a GESP test than those pairs that were not closely related. A highly significant scoring difference between the two groups was found. The related couples scored positively to a significant degree, whereas the unrelated pairs scored in a significantly negative direction.

The immediate impetus for focusing on emotionally close participants in the ganzfeld grew out of discussions with a supporter of ganzfeld research who felt that the anecdotal evidence for emotional closeness as a facilitator of ESP was very compelling. He also thought that the ganzfeld would be a good vehicle for investigating that relationship.

Near that same time, we were involved in a complete review of the PRL records in collaboration with Daryl Bem. The PRL investigators classified sender-receiver pairs into only three categories: Lab sender, lab friend, and friend. The "friend" category subsumed all closer relationships. By examining the paper records, however, it was possible to identify with a reasonable degree of accuracy a subset of PRL "friends" who conformed to our definition of emotionally close. This subset amounted to 36 sessions with 15 direct hits for a scoring rate of 42 percent. Thus, at least informally, it appeared that emotionally close participants were among the most successful in the PRL series.