REANALYSES OF GROUP TELEPATHY DATA WITH A FOCUS ON VARIABILITY

摘要

Reanalyses of data from experiments on telepathic communication of emotions, as evoked by slide pictures, between groups of senders and groups of receivers are reported. In the present study, variability in performance rather than level of performance was in focus. Fits between variability in distributions of hits expected by chance and variability in empirical distributions were explored. The expected distributions were derived by means of the hypergeometric distribution, which provides the number of successes in a sequence of n draws from a finite population without replacement. Session level analyses showed that the variability in hit-rate was smaller than that expected by chance, particularly when the session groups who started as senders and those who started as receivers were analyzed separately and when the geomagnetic activity was low. Monte Carlo analyses indicated that these results could not be explained by stacking effects. Individual level analyses did not show any effects. In a second part of the study, the variability of responses to the individual target pictures was explored. The variability differed significantly among the pictures. Simulation showed that this effect was not attributable to stacking effects. Two predictions to be tested in an ongoing replication experiment are presented. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]