Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect

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⚡ Bem Feeling The Future 📖 Newcomer Survey 📖 Psi Debate

Plain English Summary

This is the paper that shook psychology to its core. Daryl Bem ran nine experiments with over 1,000 Cornell students, flipping classic psychology experiments backward in time to test whether people can sense future events. Eight out of nine came back positive, with participants seemingly anticipating random stimuli — especially erotic images (because of course those grab attention, even from the future). The average effect was small but consistent. Thrill-seekers did even better, nearly doubling it. Bem ruled out faulty random-number generators with control simulations. Published in one of psychology's top journals, this paper became a lightning rod — sparking Bayesian critiques, failed replications, and helping launch psychology's entire replication crisis.

Actual Paper Abstract

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual's current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by "time-reversing" well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

Research Notes

The most influential psi paper of the 21st century, published in JPSP and widely credited with catalyzing psychology's replication crisis. Central to Controversy #2 (Bem FTF). Prompted Bayesian reanalyses (Wagenmakers et al. 2011), failed replications (Galak et al. 2012), and a large-scale meta-analysis (Bem et al. 2015).

Nine experiments (total N = 1,050 Cornell undergraduates) tested for anomalous retroactive influence by time-reversing well-established psychological effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli, precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli, retroactive affective priming, retroactive habituation, and retroactive facilitation of recall. Eight of nine experiments yielded statistically significant results (one-tailed), with a mean effect size of d = 0.22. Stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, correlated with psi performance in five experiments; high stimulus seekers achieved a mean d = 0.43. Both hardware-based and software-based RNGs were used across experiments, and control simulations with random inputs yielded null results, arguing against artifacts of inadequate randomization.