So here’s the deal: a psychologist is about to publish results of a battery of tests conducted over a number of years which seem to demonstrate a small, but apparently statistically valid, tendency for some test subjects to accurately predict the future:
It describes a series of experiments involving more than 1000 student
volunteers. In most of the tests, Bem took well-studied psychological
phenomena and simply reversed the sequence, so that the event generally
interpreted as the cause happened after the tested behaviour rather
than before it.
The guy is a real scientist and he’s publishing in a real scientific journal . And the story, as you saw if you followed the link, was published in New Scientist.
None of that makes it true, of course. It does appear that the researcher, Darryl Bem of Cornell University, has taken great care in trying to create a valid test and ensuring that the results are real.
So what does this all mean? You tell me.
Results here. (Use links to see results for all questions.)
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