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Plain English Summary
Can you tell who's about to message you? This study built an automated online test where 500 people each had four possible senders -- two real friends and two computer-generated fake ones. A computer secretly picked one sender per round, that person focused on the participant for 30 seconds, then the participant guessed who it was. Across 6,000 trials the guess rate landed at 26.7%, just above the 25% you'd expect from pure luck -- statistically significant, but a tiny effect. The strongest hits came from senders over 500 miles away, hinting distance doesn't weaken whatever is going on. Most strikingly, accuracy plummeted with practice: people started at a remarkable 45% and slid to just 15% by their fourth test, as if nervousness gradually smothered the ability. Filmed sessions confirmed nobody was cheating.
Abstract
In an automated online telepathy test, each participant had four senders, two actual and two virtual, generated by the computer. In a series of 12 30-sec. trials, the computer selected one of the senders at random and asked him to write a message to the subject. After 30 sec., the participant was asked to guess who had written a message. After the computer had recorded his guess, it sent him the message. In a total of 6,000 trials, there were 1,559 hits (26.7%), significantly above the chance expectation of 25%. In filmed tests, the hit rate was very similar. The hit rate with actual senders was higher than with virtual senders, but there was a strong guessing bias in favour of actual senders. When high-scoring subjects were retested, hit rates generally declined, but one subject repeatedly scored above chance.
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Beharee, Ashwin (2009). A Rapid Online Telepathy Test. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970
@article{sheldrake_2009_online_telepathy,
title = {A Rapid Online Telepathy Test},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Beharee, Ashwin},
year = {2009},
journal = {Psychological Reports},
doi = {10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970},
}