Professor Chris French 
is the Head of the Anomalistic Psychology Research Unit in the Psychology Department at Goldsmiths, University of London. He is also a Fellow of the British Psychological Society and of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry and a member of the Scientific Advisory Board of the British False Memory Society. His main current area of research is the psychology of paranormal beliefs and anomalous experiences. He frequently appears in the media casting a skeptical eye over paranormal claims. He edited The Skeptic magazine for more than a decade and sometimes writes for the Guardian’s online science pages.
Ever since records began, people have reported strange experiences that appear to contradict our conventional scientific understanding of the universe. These have included reports that appear to support the possibility of life after death, such as near-death experiences, ghostly encounters and apparent communication with the dead, as well as claims by various individuals that they possessed mysterious powers such as the ability to read minds, see into the future, obtain information from remote locations without the use of the known sensory channels, or to move objects by willpower alone. Such accounts are accepted as veridical by most of the world’s population in one form or another and claims relating to miraculous healing, alien abduction, astrological prediction and the power of crystals are also accepted by many. Belief in such paranormal claims is clearly an important aspect of the human condition. What are we to make of such accounts from a scientific perspective?
Should we accept at least some of these claims more or less at face value? That is to say, should we accept that extrasensory perception (ESP), psychokinesis (PK), and life after death are all real? Parapsychologists have systematically investigated such phenomena for around 130 years but have so far failed to convince the wider scientific community that this is the case. The eminent scientists and intellectuals who founded the Society for Psychical Research in 1882 were convinced that, with the tools of science at their disposal, they would settle the issue one way or another within a few years. Clearly, that has not happened. Instead, parapsychology has been characterised by a series of ‘false dawns’ during which it has been declared that at last a technique has been developed which can reliably show under well-controlled conditions that paranormal effects are real. With time, however, the technique falls out of favour as subsequent research fails to replicate the initially reported effects and methodological shortcomings become apparent.
The latest candidate for such a ‘false dawn’ is a series of relatively straightforward experiments reported by Daryl Bem in the prestigious Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. In eight of nine experiments, involving more than a thousand participants in total, Bem reported significant results suggesting that human beings are able in some way to sense events before they happen. For example, the study which produced the largest effect size appeared to show that participants are able to recall more words if they rehearse them than if they do not – even if the rehearsal does not take place until after recall has been tested! As so often happens, these controversial findings received widespread coverage in the mainstream science media. However, subsequent attempts at replication have failed, including a study involving three independent replication attempts carried by Richard Wiseman (University of Hertfordshire), Stuart Ritchie (University of Edinburgh), and myself (Goldsmiths, University of London).
If paranormal forces really do not exist, how are we to explain the widespread belief in them and the sizeable minority of the population who claim to have had direct personal experience of paranormal phenomena? One possible answer is that there are certain events and experiences which may appear to involve paranormal phenomena but which can in fact be fully explained in non-paranormal, usually psychological, terms. This is the approach adopted by anomalistic psychologists. In general, anomalistic psychologists attempt to explain such phenomena in terms of known psychological effects such as hallucinations, false memories, the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, placebo effects, suggestibility, reasoning biases and so on. It is noteworthy that anomalistic psychologists have, in just a few decades, produced many examples of replicable effects that adequately explain a range of ostensibly paranormal phenomena.
Anomalistic psychology is definitely on the rise. Not only is it now offered as an option on many psychology degree programmes, it is also an option on the most popular A2 psychology syllabus in the UK. Every year more books and papers in high quality journals are published in this area and more conferences and symposia relating to topics within anomalistic psychology are held. There is no doubt that anomalistic psychology is flourishing.
And what of parapsychology? The health of this discipline is somewhat harder to assess but apart from the occasional ray of hope offered by the latest false dawn, the situation does not look encouraging for parapsychologists. Funding for such research is inevitably more difficult to obtain in times of economic uncertainty. Scarce research funding will be invested in areas where the probability of success is high – and the history of parapsychology shows all too clearly that studies in this area often involve huge investments of time and resources and produce nothing in return. Without a genuine breakthrough in the near future, can parapsychology survive for much longer? Without psychic powers, it’s difficult to know but I certainly would not bet on it.
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It is unfair to claim that Parapsychology is not producing good data. I’m sure those who have published dream, Ganzfeld, presentiment, and micro-PK work would strongly disagree. The false dawn French alludes to in relation to Bem is a misnomer. Certainly it doesn’t look like the easily repeatable experiment that it was initially hoped for, but this was never claimed. Also, there have been successful replications since Bem (Schooler, Franklin, Bethyany). Finally, French has always claimed that no evidence of psi has been found in his lab, but there was a recent replication of Ertel’s ball drawing paradigm and a Ph.D was awarded on successful PK work. (I know this because I proof read the Ph.D thesis!). Wiseman and French are on an agenda to bring academic parapsychology down and it stinks.
Michael Duggan Ph.D
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The real issue, Chris, is explaining why pathological disbelief is rife among scientists (the classic example of this phenomenon being the rejection by scientists of the idea that meteorites fall from the sky, despite this having been witnessed by many people). My comments on pathological disbelief are available here
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Anyone who attempts to consider together such a diverse collection of “paranormal” phenomena — life after death, near-death experiences, ghostly encounters, communication with the dead, telepathy, precognition, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, miraculous healing, alien abduction, astrological prediction, and the power of crystals — is certainly not thinking very clearly about these matters, or perhaps even doing science.
If this is “anomalistic psychology”, then it might be considered an embarrassment to the field of psychology as a whole. The position here is not at all “skeptical” as claimed, but firm disbelief — an extreme starting point suitable only for proof finding and self-confirmation, not for trying to learn something about nature. The latter is the essence of science after all, the true skeptical position.
In fact, there is abundant evidence for some of these phenomena in carefully controlled and repeatable laboratory experiments. But to fully appreciate this, one has to carefully choose and actually read and understand the evidence, something this author has apprently not yet managed. For those of us who are serious about studying a few well-confirmed anomalous so-called “psychic” phenomena, and are developing explanations within existing physics, this article is quite disappointing to see, especially associated with a widely-read journal.
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I find this article rather unusual, ignoring certain physical phenomena. These studies, e.g. are well known – http://www.theafterlifeinvestigations.com/ and confirm other studies, for instance by Sir William Crookes, https://webspace.yale.edu/chem125/125/history99/8Occult/CrookesPsychic.pdf
Note that the light phenomena, observed in both cases by excellent and experienced scientists and investigators well over a century apart, are similiar – so repeatability and thus science.
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If anyone doubted that challenging ideas at any level can be vehemently rejected, there is the story of Daniel Schechtman and his pseudo-crystals. For the importance of deviant individuals for the progress of science, there is David Kaiser’s book ‘How the Hippies Saved Physics’. The social phenomenon of conformist science was satirised by Leo Szilard in his “The Mark Gable Foundation’.
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Chris, Before you get too cozy with this emerging discipline, it is interesting to reflect on how modern skepticism is transforming itself to become anomalistic psychology. First we have the transformation of CSICOP (Committee for the Scientific Investigation into Claims of the Paranormal) into CSI (Committee for Skeptical Inquiry). CSI dropped the pretense of being scientific in the wake of the Dennis Rawlins “sTarbaby” exposé of the committee’s unscientific handling of the Mars effect set out by the late Michel Gauquelin. (BTW, in 1988, this effect was elevated by Suitbert Ertel through objective data ranking to the status of the Mars eminence effect). This more recent anomalistic psychology approach seems to favor skeptical rhetoric under the guise of “critical thinking” over the evaluation of evidence.
Consider the popular claim that astrology works by cognitive bias. This is a widely held belief among intelligent people, but no one has ever demonstrated it. Although classroom Forer-type tests have been performed hundreds of times, and are widely assumed to disprove astrology, they only demonstrate the Barnum effect, and cannot legitimately claim to refute astrology. The reason is because the sample of “astrology” to be evaluated by the students is carefully cherry picked to elevate the Barnum effect. This is not a scientific test of astrology with proper samples and rating of choices. Nothing of the sort has ever been published. Yet it is always trotted out in discussions against astrology. Is an example of anomalistic psychology that you teach your students?
It is interesting to find this “soapbox” in the online pages of Nature. Research in astrology is done by interested amateurs, funded from their own pockets, as Gauquelin had done. There has not been a mainstream scientific forum for them to exchange ideas.
For example, In 1986 Nature published an article by Shawn Carlson entitled “A double blind test of astrology.” This article brought instant fame to its author and is still one of the most frequently cited studies to have claimed to scientifically refute astrology. Yet this article was not properly vetted by peer review because it contains design and methodological flaws that should have been caught, if perhaps they were not so well concealed. When evaluated against the actual design of the experiment (which Carlson set out but did not follow) and the normal evaluations for significance used in the social sciences, the data marginally supports the participating astrologers.
It is frustrating to astrological researchers to see such a prestigious study as Carlson’s go unchallenged in mainstream media. For those who wish to pursue the Carlson controversy, and Chris I strongly suggest that you do, please refer to the following links for references to the original article by Carlson and the ensuing peer reviewed discourse by Ertel and myself. My article includes a discussion of follow-up studies. The Carlson study needs a replication that incorporates the many useful suggestions that have been made through the discourse of these and other authors to make a fair and scientific study.
A double-blind test of astrology
Appraisal of Shawn Carlson’s Renowned Astrology Tests
Support for astrology from the Carlson double-blind experiment