Chris French: Lessons for psychology and parapsychology from the Bem controversy

In 2011, Professor Daryl Bem of Cornell University published a controversial paper in a prestigious mainstream psychology journal claiming to show that precognition (the alleged ability to sense future events psychically) was real. His results, based upon nine experiments involving over 1,000 participants, were reported far and wide by the science media. Many parapsychologists viewed this paper as long-awaited confirmation of the reality of psi but predictably sceptics criticized the studies on both methodological and statistical grounds.

To his credit, Bem stated that he wanted others to replicate his findings and even offered to make copies of the software he had used to run the experiments freely available to anyone who wanted to try. Richard Wiseman, Stuart Ritchie, and Chris French took him up on his kind offer and we each carried out an attempted replication of Bem’s Experiment 9, the one with the largest effect size. Unsurprisingly, none of the three studies replicated Bem’s results.

When we submitted our report to the same journal that had published Bem’s paper, it was rejected without even being sent out for peer review. Two other high impact science journals did the same thing, revealing a worrying bias in science publishing at that time. Eventually the paper was published in the open access journal PLOSOne (and has since been viewed well over 50,000 times). The controversy generated by Bem’s results and attempted replications fed into the so-called replication crisis in psychology which ultimately led to improvements within the discipline and beyond.