YNOT – A scholarly paper written by a prominent social psychologist is earning new respect for the less-than-respected study of psychic abilities. Adding icing to the cake — or insult to injury, depending upon one’s perspective — the research behind the conclusions involved pornography.
To produce the report “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Effect,” Professor Emeritus Daryl Bem of Cornell University tested 1,000 college students in nine experiments that looked for evidence of psi, otherwise known as precognition or premonition. Bem defined the phenomena as “anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms.”
Among the most interesting of Bem’s experimental findings: Test subjects were able to predict the appearance of pornographic imagery with greater-than-expected accuracy.
In one experiment, subjects were asked 36 times to predict whether an image of “couples engaged in nonviolent but explicit consensual sexual acts” or nothing at all would show up on a screen. The subjects correctly predicted porn 53.1 percent of the time. Bem called the result “significantly higher” than the statistical average of 50 percent.
The test results led Bem to conclude the existence of “precognitive detection of erotic stimuli” and “precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli.”
Whether the results represented students’ wishful thinking or actual evidence of extrasensory perception remains open for debate, according to skeptics, although even staunch critics of ESP pronounced Bem’s methodologies sound.
The paper is expected to appear in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, a publication of the American Psychological Association.
