Experimenter effects and the remote detection of staring

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

Third, the results could have been caused by experimenter fraud. Although the experiment was not designed to make such fraud impossible, its design does mean that certain types of cheating would have been extremely unlikely. For example, neither experimenter could have decided to include data only from certain subjects because the full list of all subjects was known to both experimenters. However, more sophisticated forms of cheating were theoretically possible. For example, one experimenter could have substituted false sets of EDA values for subjects' actual values before the data were analyzed. Although possible, this would have been far from straightforward because subjects were frequently scheduled back-to-back (thus cutting to a minimum the time available for recording a false replacement session), and each experimenter made a back-up disk of all of the day's sessions at the end of each day (thus minimizing the possibility of an experimenter's substituting data after the day they had been recorded). In addition, no evidence of any cheating was uncovered during the running of the experiment or analysis of the data.

Fourth, one could argue that M. S. was working with a more "psychically gifted" population than R. W. was. This also seems unlikely because the receivers were assigned to the two experimenters in an opportunistic fashion.

Fifth, it is possible that M. S. was more skilled at eliciting subjects' psi ability than R. W. was. Interestingly, M. S.'s subjects scored higher on the "belief-in-psi" questionnaire than R. W.'s subjects did (although this difference just failed to reach significance: unpaired t value = 1.86, df = 30, p = .072, 2-tailed). Given that participants were opportunistically assigned to experimenters, this difference might be a reflection of the different ways in which R. W. and M. S. oriented receivers at the start of the experiment. It seems quite possible that the experimenters' own level of belief/disbelief in the existence of psi caused receivers to express different levels of belief/disbelief in psi and to have different expectations about the success of the forthcoming experimental session. Videotapes of R. W.'s and M. S.'s induction procedures are currently being analyzed to identify differences in interaction and content.

Finally, it is also possible that both R. W. and M. S. used their own psi abilities to create the results they desired. This interpretation, if genuine, supports past research which suggests that successful experimenters (i.e., those who consistently obtain significant effects in psi studies) outperform unsuccessful ones on a variety of psi tasks (see Palmer, 1986, for a review of the literature supporting this notion).

In conclusion, this study reveals the value of developing collaborative relationships between skeptics and psi proponents. Both authors view this study as an initial step in the investigation of experimenter effects in psi research. Additional experiments would further aid our understanding of such effects. For example, it would be useful to carry out an experiment in which one experimenter interacted with the receiver and the other carried out the stare and non-stare trials during the experimental session. Such a study would help discover whether our initial interactions with the receiver or our behavior during the experimental session caused the results reported in this paper. We, the authors, hope to carry out such a study in the near future, and we urge other psi proponents and skeptics to run similar studies.