Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [427]
Currently, incomplete but encouraging evidence suggests that biofeedback may indeed offer at least modest benefits for a variety of medical conditions, including hypertension, anxiety, Raynaud’s syndrome, low-back pain, insomnia, fecal incontinence in children, irritable bowel syndrome, and migraine and tension headaches. Biofeedback does not appear to be effective for asthma.98
Parapsychology: For many decades a number of committed parapsychologists—some are physicists, psychologists, and members of other scientific disciplines, many others laypersons—have been conducting experiments in such “psychic” phenomena as extrasensory perception (ESP), clairvoyance (seeing things that are out of sight), psychokinesis (the ability to move objects or influence machinery by mental power), telepathy, out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, and channeling. The American Society for Psychical Research, founded in 1885, has a substantial endowment fund, publishes a newsletter and a journal, and regularly holds lectures, symposia, and meetings. A Gallup poll in 2005 found that four out of ten Americans believe in ESP, nearly a third in telepathy, and over a quarter in clairvoyance.99
Nearly all parapsychological phenomena, if real, would have practical value (and indeed police and others sometimes pay psychics to try to locate missing persons). The National Research Council committee therefore visited parapsychology laboratories to witness demonstrations and experiments, discussed parapsychological experiments with a number of parapsychologists, and reviewed studies by both believers and skeptics.100 Of this mass of material, the two most positive findings were these:
—Of the vast number of reports of remote viewing achieved by telepathy, only nine were scientific studies, but eight of the nine had serious flaws (the “senders” had unintentionally provided the “receivers” with clues in between trials), and the ninth had a different but equally serious flaw. A later and more rigorous study did produce some results, but below the level of statistical significance.
—Of 332 reports of psychokinetic influence over random number generators, 188 had some claim to scientific status; of these, 58 reported statistically significant results. The two most careful and extensive of these experiments used random number generators that turned out either 0’s or 1’s, averaging 50 percent of each over the long term. Subjects who tried to influence the machines by psychokinesis were able to produce 50.5 percent of 1’s in one laboratory and 50.02 percent in the other, that is, one extra 1 per hundred trials in one laboratory, two extra 1’s in every twenty-five hundred trials in the other laboratory. In view of the large number of trials, these results are statistically significant but they indicate “an extremely weak effect.”
That being the most impressive evidence of parapsychological phenomena, the committee’s conclusion was categorical:
The committee finds no scientific justification from research conducted over a period of 130 years for the existence of parapsychological phenomena.
In the committee’s view, the best scientific evidence does not justify the conclusion that ESP—that is, gathering information about objects or thoughts without the intervention of known sensory mechanisms— exists.
Nor does scientific evidence offer support for the existence of psychokinesis—that is, the influence of thoughts upon objects without the intervention of known physical processes.101
The parapsychological community was, of course, unshaken in its beliefs by the committee’s summary of the evidence. But that was to be expected; you will recall that Festinger, Riecken, and Schachter, in their study of a cult that expected the world to be destroyed by a flood, ruefully reported that when an individual with a commitment to a belief, who has acted upon that belief,