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Message: <blockquote data-quote="jonesy" data-source="post: 5420946" data-attributes="member: 10324">For a different perspective:<a href="http://news.discovery.com/human/flawed-esp-study-sparks-uproar.html" target="_blank">'Flawed' ESP Study Sparks Uproar : Discovery News</a>"I'm puzzled as to how four referees and two editors of a prestigious journal could allow Bem to publish as 'experiments' studies that violated accepted methodological standards."Experiment 1 is just one example. The first 40 subjects were tested with an equal number of erotic, neutral, and negative pictures. Presumably, although Bem never tells us what his specific prior hypotheses were, the intent was to show that erotic pictures would yield a positive precognitive effect, the neutral pictures would show no effect, and the negative pictures would yield a negative precognitive effect. With no reasonable justification, Bem runs the remaining 60 subjects with a set of pictures, half of which are erotic and the other half are 'non erotic.'"Even if the editors wanted to allow this peculiar combining of two different experiments into one, they should have at least insisted that Bem supply some acceptable rationale for this blatant disregard of experimental methodology.""It gets worse. If you look closely at the study, there's blatant inconsistency between Experiment 1 and Experiment 2 that the journal referees should have, at the very least, required Bem to explain. In Experiment 1, he reports that the negative targets did not have the expected negative effect. Indeed, they were slightly above chance -- in the wrong direction. Yet, he conducts Experiment 2 by using only negative pictures and no erotic ones. This time the negative pictures do produce the predicted negative effect. This suggests that Experiment 2 actually was run before Experiment 1."In my opinion the referees were derelict in not requiring Bem to specify in which order the experiments were conducted, and why he says he planned each experiment to have 100 subjects when some have 150, another has 200, and one has 50."'</blockquote>

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