Methods for investigating goal-oriented PSI

Journal of Parapsychology, The, March, 1995 by J.E. Kennedy

1 Schmidt (1974) did not discuss the signal enhancement aspect of majority votes. Rather, he considered the majority-vote trials to be more complex or difficult than the single-event trials because a greater number of individual RNG events would have to be influenced on majority-vote trials to give the same scoring rate found in single-event trials. With this perspective, lower scoring rates are expected on the majority-vote trials because the individual RNG events comprising the majority votes are viewed as diluting a psi effect on a fixed number of trials rather than as opportunities for psi to occur as assumed under the signal-enhancement assumption. The majority-vote scoring rate was suggestively lower than the single-event rate (p = .07). However, the majority-vote scoring rate was significantly higher (p [less than] .02) than the rate of 50.5% expected under the assumption that majority-vote trials are more difficult and complex (see Kennedy, 1978, for details of the calculation of the expected rate.

2 For example, with a 55% scoring rate on the raw trials, over half of the majorities should be 55/100 or larger. However, these majorities have the same majority-vote outcome as majorities of 51/100. The information reflecting the magnitude of the majorities is discarded in the majority-vote process, but is utilized in the analysis of the raw data.

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