ESP Paper Rekindles Discussion About Statistics

摘要

The decision by a top psychology journal to publish a paper on extrasensory perception (ESP) has sparked a lively discussion on blogs and in the mainstream media. The paper's author, Daryl Bern, a respected social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University, argues that the results of nine experiments he conducted with more than 1000 college students provide statistically significant evidence of an ability to predict future events. Not surprisingly, word that the paper will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JPSP) has provoked outrage from pseu-doscience debunkers and counteraccusations of closed-mindedness from those willing to consider the possibility of psychic powers. It has also rekindled a long-running debate about whether the statistical tools commonly used in psychology—and most other areas of science—too often lead researchers astray. "The real lesson to be learned from this is not that ESP exists, it's that the methods we're using aren't protecting us against spurious results," says David Krantz, a statistician at Columbia University.