Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can people really read each other's minds? This meta-analysis (a study that pools results from multiple experiments) gathered 16 telepathy experiments spanning 20 years, covering over 21,000 trials using phone calls, emails, texts, card guessing, and virtual environments. The headline: 75% of experiments found hit rates above what pure chance would predict, with a small but positive overall effect size of 0.091. That said, this is very much a preliminary effort -- it lacks several standard quality checks like measuring how much results varied between studies or checking whether only positive results got published. Interestingly, when high-scoring participants were retested, their performance tended to drop, a puzzling pattern known as the decline effect. The author honestly flags potential issues like cheating and the difficulty of separating telepathy from other claimed abilities like precognition (sensing the future) or clairvoyance (sensing distant events). A useful snapshot, but not the final word.
Abstract
The meta-analysis aims to detect telepathy's effect in the extrasensory perception (ESP) experiments in the last 20 years. Seven articles were chosen from psycho INFOR, and an extra two were found from a summary table for telepathy experiments in one selected paper. In these studies, the difference between the observed hit rates and the expected one represented the impact of telepathy. These papers included 16 experiments, and their data were collected to calculate their effect size. The weighted effect size was the original one multiplied by the proportion of trials. The overall effect size summed the weighted effect sizes and got 0.091. The small effect size illustrates that the effect brought by telepathy on participants' performance obtained from these experiments is very small.
Related Papers
Meta Analyzes
More in Telepathy
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Taking the Mindfield Literally: Discovering Minds by Assuming Competence Among Nonspeakers
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
Meta-Analysis of Free-Response Studies 2009-2018: Assessing the Noise-Reduction Model Ten Years On
📋 Cite this paper
Liu, Yawen (2021). Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research.
@article{liu_2023_detecting_telepathy_meta,
title = {Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years},
author = {Liu, Yawen},
year = {2021},
journal = {Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research},
}