In Defense of Studying Unserious Things: Precognition

In my previous post, we looked at how studying “unserious” topics like reactions to alien life or competing with robots for jobs can give us deeper insight into what makes us tick, and maybe even how we can foster better intergroup relations. Today, we turn our attention to a topic that’s even more likely to raise eyebrows—the study of precognition.

Feeling the Future

In that earlier post, we saw that aliens and robots are fair game, but what about spooky psychic phenomena? Perhaps no paper published since I started my journey in social psychology has created more controversy than Daryl Bem’s “Feeling the Future.” In 2011, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) published a set of nine studies by Bem presenting evidence of either precognition or retro-causation, depending on one’s interpretation (Bem, 2011). The research was later found to have serious methodological flaws and failed to replicate.

Bem’s approach was to take commonsensical effects—such as the straightforward finding that people tend to remember more words when given a chance to practice them versus being shown them only once before being given a memory test for those words—and simply reverse the order of the procedure. Lo and behold, Bem seemed to find that participants who were given additional exposure to the target words after the recall test performed better on it than those who were exposed to a set of different words. Bem had apparently shown a classic facilitation of recall effect, but with time’s arrow reversed.

Bem reported the same kind of thing when he looked at the mere exposure effect, the finding that, all things being equal, people tend to like things more than they’ve encountered before. In a typical demonstration of this effect, if you were a participant, you might see a set of pictures repeatedly, shown so quickly that you couldn’t consciously determine what you saw. Next, you’d be shown a series of pictures—some that were subliminally presented to you before, and some that were brand new—and you were asked how much you liked each one. Generally, people tend to prefer the picture that was previously presented (Kunst-Wilson & Zajonc, 1980). Here, too, Bem took a classic effect and simply reversed the temporal order of the procedure. And here, too, he found evidence suggesting that people could “feel the future.” Participants in his study appeared to prefer the pictures that they would later be shown subliminally.

The field of parapsychology, which investigates phenomena like ESP, had existed at the fringes of psychology for more than a century. The publication of findings seemly demonstrating precognition in a prestigious social psychology journal lent a new level of credibility to claims that these types of phenomena were real. Bem’s paper also did something else: It helped spark a revolution in social psychology. But not necessarily the revolution he might have hoped for.

A crisis had been brewing in social psychology. Many exciting and widely publicized findings couldn’t be independently replicated by other researchers. Yet, these failed replications were often viewed as uninformative and were difficult to publish. In fact, JPSP famously refused to publish a paper by another group of researchers who used Bem’s methods and failed to find the same results that he did (Ritchie, Wiseman, & French, 2012). However, the journal did later publish another paper detailing a set of failed attempts to replicate Bem’s findings (Galak et al., 2012).

That other researchers generally couldn't reproduce Bem’s results should not be particularly surprising. Bem cut a number of corners in terms of his statistical and methodological approach and has admitted as much (Enberger, 2017). But, in many ways, he cut the same corners that others in the field did all the time (LeBel & Peters, 2011). The realization that these questionable research practices could lead to the successful publication in one of psychology's flagship journals of findings that seemed to defy the laws of physics was, in part, the catalyst for a sea change in research practices and publication policies.

Soon after, Nature reported on Nobel Laureate Daniel Kahneman’s open letter expressing grave concerns about whether a number of famous social priming effects could be replicated (Yong, 2012). And, in fact, large-scale replication efforts conducted by the Open Science Collaboration (2015) and Many Labs (Klein et al., 2018) suggested that many of them could not. More broadly, it appears that around one-third of social psychological findings may not replicate (Nosek et al., 2022).

Soul searching was soon followed by reform. In the years since, Bem’s “Feeling the Future,” leading journals in social psychology, and psychology more generally, implemented reforms that required open sharing of data and transparent reporting of methodological and analytic decisions (such as rules and reasons for excluding subjects from analysis or adding additional covariates). Suddenly, journals were not only willing to publish replication studies, but they also actively encouraged them.

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Psi and Science

In a similar vein, acknowledging the myriad ways in which the same data could be analyzed, and that researchers often deviated from their original methods, often stopped experiments once a desired result was reached, and often came up with their hypotheses after conducting their experiments, a movement to pre-register the hypotheses, methods, and analysis plans of studies before conducting them also took hold. Bem’s work ended up radically reshaping the field of social psychology, not by causing it to accept the reality of phenomena like extrasensory perception (ESP), but by causing the field to examine the ways in which its own practices often led to the publication of results that, although often more plausible, were often no more real.

Conclusion

As I hope the examples from this post and my previous post illustrate, studying “unserious” topics can, in fact, yield serious insight. Beyond revealing novel insight into the human condition, such work (as we saw in this post) can also point to major flaws in the standard operating procedure of an entire scientific field and may help spur needed reform. That’s not to say you should only study vampires or curling. In my career, I've spent plenty of time on “serious” topics as well, ranging from the study of motivation around the globe (Pick et al., 2022) to neuroscience work on emotion regulation (Hampton, Kwon, & Varnum, 2021). But even some of my more "serious" work has had its roots in the unserious.

My longtime collaborator (and dear friend) Igor Grossmann and I have spent much of the past 12 years studying the ways and processes by which cultures change over historical time (Rotella, Varnum, Sng, & Grossmann, 2021; Santos, Varnum, & Grossmann, 2017; Varnum & Grossmann, 2017). We’ve also recently conducted a number of studies in which we ask people to predict or forecast social trends (Grossmann et al., in press; Hutcherson et al., 2022). Both of these lines of work were inspired, at least in part, by reading Issac Asimov’s Foundation novels during childhood and dreaming of one day creating a real-life psychohistory, his fictive scientific discipline that enabled the futures of societies to be accurately predicted.

In closing, I hope we can make a little more room for unserious topics in our field. If we do, we just might learn something interesting.