I'm working on a number of things at the moment, but in the meantime I want to draw your attention to Jon Wilkins's post on the incredibly weird things Daryl Bem has been up to. Jon understates a little how famous Bem is in social psychology circles—he is absolutely huge. He is first-year social psychology material, literally.
So it was a little odd when he published a paper recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that purported to be strong evidence for precognition.
Weirder still: people seem to have precognition for porn. Yeah. You read that right.
I haven't written anything about it because 1) I am pretty skeptical of the research and 2) I'm not sure I have anything intelligent to say about it. That may or may not remain true in the future, but in the meantime, Jon has some interesting things to say, so check out his post.
Update: Check out http://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-daryl-bem-and-precognition.html for some deeper analysis and links to replication efforts. Thanks to Jonathan for pointing this out in the comments.
Sounds more like a study that confirms that probability & statistics are tricky.
ReplyDeleteI agree. The other thing it emphasizes is the need for replication. Unfortunately, replication is not valued very much in social science. In biology, for instance, there's PLoS One, the mandate of which is to publish anything as long as its correct—making it a great outlet for replication studies.
ReplyDeleteInformative blog post about the study here:
ReplyDeletehttp://psychsciencenotes.blogspot.com/2010/11/brief-note-daryl-bem-and-precognition.html
Notably, already 3 failures to replicate and a detailed analysis of the statistical problems with the study.