How not to test mediums : critiquing The Afterlife Experiments - 1

Professor Gary Schwartz makes revolutionary claims that he has provided competent scientific evidence for survival of consciousness and--even more extraordinary--that mediums can actually communicate with the dead. He is badly mistaken. The research he presents is flawed, and in numerous ways. Probably no other extended program in psychical research deviates so much from accepted norms of scientific methodology as this one.

Gary Schwartz is professor of psychology, medicine, neurology, psychiatry, and surgery at the University of Arizona. After receiving his Ph.D. in personality psychology from Harvard University, he taught at Harvard and then at Yale University for twenty-eight years as a professor of psychology and psychiatry. He has published more than 400 scientific papers. He came to the University of Arizona in 1988 to do research on, among other things, the relationship between love and health. In 1993 he met Linda Russek and married her soon after. Linda was still grieving over the death of her father. Soon after she met Schwartz, Linda asked him, "Do you think it is possible that my father is still alive?"

That question triggered a research program to answer it and the more general question of survival of consciousness. At first the program was conducted in secret and then became public around 1997. Since 1997, Schwartz has reported a number of studies in which he and his coworkers have observed some talented mediums such as John Edward and George Anderson give readings to sitters in his laboratory. This work has attracted considerable attention because of Schwartz's credentials and position. Even more eye-opening is Schwartz's apparent endorsement of the mediums' claims that they are actually communicating with the dead.

For Schwartz this conclusion follows from the famous principle known as Occam's Razor. Schwartz paraphrases Occam's principle as "All things being equal, the simpler hypothesis is usually the correct one," (2) As Schwartz sees it, "The best experiments [supporting the reality of communicating with the dead] can be explained away, only if one makes a whole series of assumptions...." These assumptions include: 1) that mediums use detectives to gather some of their information; 2) that sitters falsely remember specific facts such as the names of relatives; 3) that the mediums are super guessers; 4) that mediums can interpret subtle cues such as changes in breathing to infer specific details about the sitter and her relatives; and 5) that the mediums use super telepathy to gather facts about the sitter's deceased friends and family. According to Schwartz, such assumptions create unnecessary complexity. "However, if we were to apply Occam's Razor to the total set of data collected over the past hundred years, inc luding the information you have read about in this book, there is a straightforward hypothesis that is elegant in its simplicity. This is the simple hypothesis that consciousness continues after death. This hypothesis accounts for all the data" [p. 254].

Schwartz's new book The Afterlife Experiments presents evidence from a series of five reports in which Schwartz and his associates observed mediums give readings to sitters "in stringently monitored experiments." Schwartz does admit that his experiments were not ideal. For example, only the very last in his sequence of studies used a truly double-blind format. Yet he insists that the mediums, although often wrong, consistently came up with specific facts and names about the sitters departed friends and relatives that the skeptics have been unable to explain away as fraud, cold reading, or lucky guesses. He provides several examples of such instances throughout the book. These examples demonstrate, he believes, that the readings given by his mediums are clearly different from those given by cold readers and less gifted psychics. "If cold readings are easy to spot by anyone familiar with the techniques, the kinds of readings we have been getting," he asserts, "in our laboratory are quite different in character ."

Could It Be Cold Reading?

Now it so happens that I have devoted more than half a century to the study of psychic and cold readings. I have been especially concerned with why such readings can seem so concrete and compelling, even to skeptics. As a way to earn extra income, I began reading palms when I was in my teens. At first, I was skeptical. I thought that people believed in palmistry and other divination procedures because they could easily fit very general statements to their particular situation. To establish credibility with my clients, I read books on palmistry and gave readings according to the accepted interpretations for the lines, shape of the fingers, mounds, and other indicators. I was astonished by the reactions of my clients. My clients consistently praised me for my accuracy even when I told them very specific things about problems with their health and other personal matters. I even would get phone calls from clients telling me that a prediction that I had made for them had come true. Within months of my entry into palm reading, I became a staunch believer in its validity. My conviction was so strong that I convinced my skeptical high school English teacher by givi ng him readings and arguing with him. I later also convinced the head of the psychology department where I was an undergraduate.