We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf
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Plain English Summary
When critic Schwarzkopf threw six methodological objections at the presentiment research program, the original team fired back with receipts. Strip out every study Schwarzkopf questioned? The results are still overwhelmingly significant. Could experimenter expectation explain the effect? They ran a thousand simulated experiments and found roughly 92% of effects survive that critique entirely. Here is a fun twist: the common practice of showing more neutral than emotional images actually makes it harder to find presentiment, meaning the deck was stacked against the researchers, not in their favor. They also showed that higher-quality studies produced bigger effects -- the opposite of what you would expect from a methodological artifact. Their parting shot: presentiment might reflect time-symmetric physics already accepted at the microscopic level.
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Related Papers
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- Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: A Meta-Analysis — Mossbridge, Julia (2012)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Critical Analysis and Practical Implications of Predictive Anticipatory Activity — Mossbridge, Julia A (2014)
- Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence — Mossbridge, Julia A (2018)
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📋 Cite this paper
Mossbridge, Julia A, Tressoldi, Patrizio, Utts, Jessica, Ives, John A, Radin, Dean, Jonas, Wayne B (2015). We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1501.03179
@article{mossbridge_2015_we_did_see_coming,
title = {We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf},
author = {Mossbridge, Julia A and Tressoldi, Patrizio and Utts, Jessica and Ives, John A and Radin, Dean and Jonas, Wayne B},
year = {2015},
journal = {arXiv preprint},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.1501.03179},
}