What do new replications of Dr. Daryl Bem’s parapsychology research tell us about the original phony replications?

photo by: Skeptiko

On this episode of Skeptiko, I’m joined by science/psychology podcaster and creator of ThePsychFiles.com, Dr. Michael Britt. And while I didn’t contact Michael looking for a way to follow-up on Dr. Daryl Bem’s Feeling the Future experiment, I found one… and a lot more. Because it’s only through the lens of time (Bem’s original work was published in 2011) and through the hard work of Bem and his colleagues who replicated this important parapsychology experiment 90 times that can we truly appreciate what the PSYOP parapsychologists are up against…

Michael Britt: I have to say I’m a little uncomfortable with you playing clips from previous episodes. I don’t know if it’s fair to play a clip from what someone said without that person being here.

Alex Tsakiris: Well the first clip was your clip, right?

Michael Britt: And frankly, I was curious whether or not you used my clip. And I thought to myself, you know, if I go along with this guy and I say something that he disagrees with, so it’s three or four episodes down the line, are you going to say, “Here’s a clip of Michael Britt saying this,” and then criticize it without me being there to say, “Well, you know, he didn’t clarify.”

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s break that down because this could be the most important part of the discussion. Michael, I played a clip from your show. So if it was a clip that was out of context, I would understand that objection and we could deal with that. Was the clip out of context? Was it different? Did I edit out something at the beginning or the end that would add to what you said?

Michael Britt: Not to my knowledge.

Click here for forum discussion

Click here for Dr. Michael Britt’s podcast — The Psych Files

Click here for Dr. Daryl Bem’s Meta-analysis of 90 Experiments on

the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events (and his website)

NEW: leave a message on the call in number (858) 876-4505

Alex Tsakiris: Here’s the story. Daryl Bem, who’s this highly regarded social psychologist, publishes this parapsychology experiment in 2011, and unlike 99% of other parapsychology experiments, this one kind of explodes on the stage and makes a big splash. And he’s on the Colbert Report, on Comedy Central, and he’s in all these places — then boom, out of nowhere, out comes Richard Wiseman. Out comes other scientists saying we not only object to this experiment and all these ways that it was done, we question whether or not psychology can even go forward with the kind of crazy statistics we use that allow people like Dr. Daryl Bem to come up with these crazy conclusions. It was really kind of an outrageous claim. And then they doubled down by saying we’re going to challenge everyone to replicate this experiment, but we’re only going to give you six months to do it. And then they did that and as planned, they got a failure of replication.