Deception And Self-Deception: Investigating Psychics. - Review - book review

Journal of Parapsychology, The, June, 2000 by Rex G. Stanford

In planning Experiment 2, the investigators did consider the response bias problem in that they included pseudo-important questions in the post-video questionnaire and refocused their interest largely on them, as contrasted with the important questions. This was a step forward, although I doubt that it adequately addresses the response bias issue. At any rate, there was some inconsistency in positive findings across the two studies, and, embarrassingly for their hypothesis, on the unimportant questions, goats scored better than sheep, either suggestively (.06, two-tailed, pseudo-PK demonstration) or significantly (.005, two-tailed, pseudo-ESP experiment). I really do not know what to conclude from this work except that its tantalizing, but very mixed, outcomes with inadequate memory measures warrant further investigation with more adequate methodology.

The authors are to be commended on their own critical observations about their own work, as expressed in their General Discussion section. They did not, however, cover the problems discussed in this review.

That sheep did not significantly rate demonstrations (prior to debunking) as more paranormal than did goats, in 3 of 4 sub-studies, might have been due to impression management. Students might have been aware of the possibility of skepticism by the experimenters and might have wanted to avoid looking foolish. These results should perhaps, then, be taken with a grain of salt. This possibility of an inadequate test of their prediction merited discussion.

Finally, in work of the Wiseman-Morris kind, it would be good to examine whether goats might show their own kind of cognitive error. Might they believe that they remember things indicating a nonpsi explanation when those features were not present in the actual demonstration? (This might be particularly evident with a long retention interval.) Although Wiseman and Morris discuss the importance of future work to examine possible biases by goats, their remarks focus on attribution when observing a demonstration, not on possible false memories on the part of goats. This false-memory issue is important because a number of skeptics have attempted to debunk performances by alleged psychics by saying, afterward, that they saw specific, concrete indications of trickery (or, at least, saw efforts to use trickery).

By contrast, the Smith-Wiseman study in Chapter 10 may prove of relatively little interest to readers, not because it addresses an uninteresting topic (recollection as influenced by information about the authenticity of a psychic performance and the role of belief in the paranormal in possible interaction with the preceding manipulation), but because the only effect was a main effect of the experimental manipulation and because the dependent measure (Psychic Surgery Questionnaire, PSQ) seems unlikely to effectively test these ideas. As the authors themselves noted, the six items of the questionnaire "were not particularly relevant for the accomplishment of trickery" (pp. 248-249). I would note that the details addressed by these questions seem as if they might have been pretty much irrelevant to anything of real interest in the film, at least for typical observers, and they seemed to have involved information that was simply unlikely, in many instances, to have been processed effectively.