This is a Pelican introduction to Experimental Psychical Research, or in other words, to the testing of theories of extra-sensory perception (ESP), telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, and associated phenomena together known as Psi, using rigorous scientific experiments and statistical analysis. We are introduced to each of these phenomena in separate chapters, along with chapters introducing the necessary experimental precautions and controls, information on relevant statistical analyses, and examples of the results obtained by various researchers.
It might occur to some readers that these psi phenomena do not warrant serious scientific interest. However those with a more inquiring mind may agree with the author in the aims of the Society for Psychical Research, “To examine without prejudice or prepossession and in a scientific spirit those faculties of man, real or supposed, which appear to be inexplicable on any generally recognized hypothesis.”
If nothing else, the types of experiment presented here are designed in such a way that they will provide evidence that these phenomena are not real, if there is truly nothing in them, and give evidence of their reality if they are real. They are designed to distinguish between results obtained at chance frequency and results obtained that would not be expected by chance. The spirit of the book keeps it in line with good scientific practice – that to establish evidence in favour of a given phenomenon, every effort must be made to disprove its existence. If it still stands up then we can have some grounds for its belief, but this must always be subject to further hypotheses being formed and tested with regard to explaining the results obtained in another way.
Perhaps the most interesting part of this book are the results that have been obtained by researchers. From among the phenomena this book is concerned with, ESP has the largest amount of evidence in its support. This is partly due to practical reasons – that card guessing experiments are much easier to perform, control, and analyse statistically than the experiments that are performed to test the other phenomena such as psychokinesis. While some of the results are strongly in favour of the existence of these phenomena statistically, ongoing experiments and attempts at replication are being made by some serious researchers to this day, and not all attempts at replication have given support to the findings.
But this is not a biased account, and it explains frankly the difficulties facing all researchers, including the practical problems such as the need to rule out fraud, the necessity of having large numbers of repeats, of including in analyses all experiments performed to prevent cherry picking of successful ones, of pre-registering experimental design to prevent fishing for significance. As such, more well-controlled experiments have been performed since this book was written by a number of researchers, but the findings have been mixed, and the jury is still out.
As an introduction to the field this provides a very honest and informative account on the positive and negative findings, and issues involved with this type of research. It also provides the reader with sufficient information to perform well-controlled experiments themselves, and to analyse their results statistically, assuming they already have some scientific background. This is probably mostly of interest to those with some existing interest in psychology or parapsychology, but would also be suitable for the curious general reader. ( )