Are ESP experiments reproducible?

Lens adapted to this topic: Evidence offered for limited or conditional reproducibility

The pro-psi or anomalistic-research reading holds that reproducibility may be conditional rather than universal: small effects can emerge under particular protocols, participant groups, experimenters, or study procedures. It points to meta-analytic evidence, historical dream-ESP findings, experimenter differences, and new transparent replication designs. These findings support continued investigation, but they do not by themselves establish a consistently reproducible ESP effect.

• A 2023 meta-analysis reported that forced-choice experiments show potential ESP effects, though only to a small degree.
• A review of dream-ESP studies reported above-chance judging overall, while noting that success differed between the Maimonides and post-Maimonides research and that methodological shortcomings existed.
• One common-protocol study reported an experimenter-associated performance difference and a significant result for disguised ESP trials, suggesting that experimenter effects may influence reproducibility.
• A multi-site replication project used preregistration, open data, logs, video documentation, tamper-evident software, and external auditing to test a prominent precognition experiment.
• The existence of transparent and preregistered replication efforts is presented as a way to distinguish genuine effects from artifacts, even though the excerpt does not establish a definitive positive outcome.

Featured sourceAssessing 36 Years of the Forced Choice Design in Extra Sensory Perception Research: A Meta-Analysis, 1987 to 2022exa.ai5 sourcesView sources