Glossary

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Spring, 2004

STACKING EFFECT: A spuriously high (or low) score in a test of ESP when two or more percipients make guesses in relation to the same sequence of targets; it is due to a fortuitous relationship occurring between the guessing biases of the percipients and the peculiarities of the target sequence.

TARGET: In a test of ESP, the object or event that the percipient attempts to identify through information paranormally acquired; in a test of PK, the physical system, or a prescribed outcome thereof, that the

subject attempts to influence or bring about.

TELEPATHY: The paranormal acquisition of information about the thoughts, feelings, or activity of another conscious being.

TRIAL: An experimentally defined smallest unit of measurement in a test of psi: in a test of ESP, it is usually associated with the attempt to gain information paranormally about a single target; in a test of PK, it is usually defined in terms of the single events to be influenced.

VARIANCE: A statistic for the degree to which a group of scores are scattered or dispersed around their average; formally, it is the average of the squared deviations from the mean; in parapsychology, the term is often used somewhat idiosyncratically to refer to the variance around the theoretical mean of a group of scores (e.g., MCE) rather than around the actual, obtained mean.

Run-Score Variance: The variance around the mean of the scores obtained on individual runs.

Subject Variance: The variance around the mean of a subject's total score.