Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring

Journal of Parapsychology, The, Sept, 1997 by Richard Wiseman, Marilyn Schlitz

Procedure

The receivers were run individually. On arriving at the laboratory, each one was met by either R. W. or M. S. Most were run by whichever of the experimenters was free to carry out the session; however, on a few occasions (e.g., when a receiver was a friend or colleague of one of the experimenters) the experimenter would be designated in advance of the trial. Thus most subjects were assigned to experimenters in an opportunistic way, rather than by one that was properly randomized (e.g., via random number tables or the output of a random number generator). The experimenter showed the subject to the receiver's room and explained the purpose of the experiment. Next, the experimenter attached electrodes to the first and third fingers of the participant's nondominant hand and made sure that the RelaxPlus system was correctly monitoring their EDA. The receivers were asked not to move their hand unnecessarily, nor to try to guess when they might be being stared at, but instead to simply remain as open as possible to any remote influence. The experimenter entered the receiver's personal data in a computerized database, initiated the recording of EDA, started a stopwatch, and left the receiver's room.

It was important that receivers were not aware of the order of the stare and non-stare trials before the start of the experimental session. For this reason, the list of trial orders was only selected by the experimenter only after he or she had left the receiver's room. The experimenter then went to R. W.'s office, retrieved the folder containing the lists of thai orders, selected any sheet he or she wanted, and proceeded to the sender's room.

Two minutes after initiating the recording of the receiver's EDA, the experimenter started to carry out the designated order of stare and non-stare trials; this order was presented to the experimenters in the form of a list. During stare trials, the experimenter quietly directed his/her attention toward the receiver; during non-stare trials the experimenter quietly directed this attention away from the receiver Each trial lasted 30 seconds. Throughout this time the receiver completed the belief-in-psi questionnaire and then read some magazines. All of the magazines were selected to be relatively bland in content in order to minimize possible effects on the receivers' EDA.

On completion of all 32 trials, the experimenter returned to the receiver's room, thanked the participant, and told him or her that feedback of the overall results would be given within the next few weeks.

At the end of each experimental day, both experimenters copied that day's data (from their own participants as well as from the other experimenter's participants) onto their own floppy disk.

RESULTS(1)

Primary Analyses

All analyses were preplanned. A Wilcoxon signed rank test was used to compare receivers' total EDA for the 16 stare trials with their total EDA during the 16 non-stare trials.(2) Receivers run by R. W. did not differ from chance expectation (Wilcoxon z = -.44, df = 15, p = .64, two-tailed). In contrast, receivers run by M. S. showed a significant effect (Wilcoxon z = -2.02, df = 15, p = .04, two-tailed).