Summary: Interview with Cornell University Professor Emeritus Dr. Daryl Bem looks at the reaction to his groundbreaking parapsychology experiments. Join Skeptiko host Alex Tsakiris for an interview with noted psychology professor Dr. Daryl Bem. During the interview Bem discusses the reaction to his research among parapsychology opponents: Alex Tsakiris: What do you think is going to happen with this latest round of debunking? The skeptics have risen up and it seems like a very well-organized, concerted effort to knock down your research. What do you think their game plan is? What do you think is going to happen? Dr. Daryl Bem: Well, I think the flurry of activity in the popular media will just sort of die down. When I look at Google News on it there are still four or five articles that pop up in which it just shows how successful Wiseman is at getting his point of view out. I have been replying to people who’ve asked me to reply to blogs and things of that sort. Without accusing him of actually being dishonest, he has now published the three studies that he and French and Ritchie tried to get published in several journals that rejected it. I replied with a comment on that. If there’s anything dishonest there, it’s when you publish an article, even if it’s of your own three experiments—they did three experiments that failed trying to replicate one of my experiments—you always have a literature review section where you talk about all the previous research and known research on the topic before you present your own data. What Wiseman never tells people is in Ritchie, Wiseman and French is that his online registry where he asked everyone to register, first of all he provided a deadline date. I don’t know of any serious researcher working on their own stuff who is going to drop everything and immediately do a replication... anyway, he and Ritchie and French published these three studies. Well, they knew that there were three other studies that had been submitted and completed and two of the three showed statistically significant results replicating my results. But you don’t know that from reading his article. That borders on dishonesty. Dr. Daryl Bem's Website Play It: Download MP3 (45 min.) Read It: Today we welcome Dr. Daryl Bem to Skeptiko. Dr. Bem is a very highly regarded social psychologist and Professor Emeritus from Cornell who created quite a stir last year with his paper, “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect.” Alex Tsakiris: Dr. Bem, it’s a great pleasure to have you on Skeptiko. Thanks for joining me. Dr. Daryl Bem: Good to be here. Alex Tsakiris: So a lot of our audience is going to be familiar with this paper and your work but for those that are not, can you tell us a little bit about it, and in particular, why you published this little package of well-defined psi experiments the way you did? Dr. Daryl Bem: Okay. The article contains nine different experiments. About half of them are actually replications of the others because I didn’t want to publish something that I’d only one once. I wanted to make sure that at least I could reproduce them again if necessary. As the title of the article suggests, I call it “retroactive causation” or “retroactive influence.” People are more familiar with the phenomenon just under the term, “precognition,” the ability to respond to a future event that could not be anticipated by any normal inferential process that we know of. So what I did because I wanted to address my fellow academics, my colleagues particularly in social and cognitive psychology, so what I did was look through the literature of social psychology and said, “I would like to take several very familiar phenomena that social psychologists already believe in and show that I can reverse them. That is, instead of presenting the stimuli and then measuring the response,
