SynthesisPsychonomic bulletin & review2011
A Bayes factor meta-analysis of Bem's ESP claim.
Synthesis in Psychonomic bulletin & review, 2011. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 65 papers, 7 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
65 citing papers in PubMed, 7 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 200 citations in OpenAlex.
- Evaluating the robustness of DTI-ALPS in clinical context: a meta-analytic parallel on Alzheimer's and Parkinson's diseases.Scientific reports · 2024Pooled it
- Robust Bayesian meta-analysis: Model-averaging across complementary publication bias adjustment methods.Research synthesis methods · 2023Pooled it
- Bayesian hypothesis testing and estimation under the marginalized random-effects meta-analysis model.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2022Pooled it
- Auditory Distraction During Reading: A Bayesian Meta-Analysis of a Continuing Controversy.Perspectives on psychological science : a journal of the Association for Psychological Science · 2018Pooled it
- Cognitive control in media multitaskers: Two replication studies and a meta-Analysis.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2017Pooled it
- Parafoveal preview effects from word N + 1 and word N + 2 during reading: A critical review and Bayesian meta-analysis.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2017Pooled it
- Dealing with clinical heterogeneity in meta-analysis. Assumptions, methods, interpretation.International journal of methods in psychiatric research · 2013Pooled it
- Amodal processing in human prefrontal cortex.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2013Trial
- Trial
- Experiment-based calibration: Inference and decision-making.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- Bayes factor hypothesis testing in meta-analyses: Practical advantages and methodological considerations.Research synthesis methods · 2026Review
- Bayesian Hierarchical Models With Calibrated Mixtures of g-priors for Assessing Treatment Effect Moderation in Meta-Analysis.Statistics in medicine · 2026Article
- Approaching Significance: Statistical Guidance for Authors and Reviewers.Journal of neurologic physical therapy : JNPT · 2025Article
- Pragmatics partially segregated from Theory of Mind: evidence from resting-state functional connectivity.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Do Experimental Manipulations of Pathogen Avoidance Motivations Influence Conformity?Personality & social psychology bulletin · 2024Article
- Do They Know It's Christmash? Lexical Knowledge Directly Impacts Speech Perception.Cognitive science · 2024Article
- A signal-detection account of item-based and ensemble-based visual change detection: A reply to Harrison, McMaster, and Bays.Journal of vision · 2024Article
- Cognitive styles and psi: psi researchers are more similar to skeptics than to lay believers.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Inhibitory temporo-parietal effective connectivity is associated with explicit memory performance in older adults.iScience · 2023Article
- Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project.Royal Society open science · 2023Article
5 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
In recent years, statisticians and psychologists have provided the critique that p-values do not capture the evidence afforded by data and are, consequently, ill suited for analysis in scientific endeavors. The issue is particular salient in the assessment of the recent evidence provided for ESP by Bem (2011) in the mainstream Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Wagenmakers, Wetzels, Borsboom, and van der Maas (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100, 426-432, 2011) have provided an alternative Bayes factor assessment of Bem's data, but their assessment was limited to examining each experiment in isolation. We show here that the variant of the Bayes factor employed by Wagenmakers et al. is inappropriate for making assessments across multiple experiments, and cannot be used to gain an accurate assessment of the total evidence in Bem's data. We develop a meta-analytic Bayes factor that describes how researchers should update their prior beliefs about the odds of hypotheses in light of data across several experiments. We find that the evidence that people can feel the future with neutral and erotic stimuli to be slight, with Bayes factors of 3.23 and 1.57, respectively. There is some evidence, however, for the hypothesis that people can feel the future with emotionally valenced nonerotic stimuli, with a Bayes factor of about 40. Although this value is certainly noteworthy, we believe it is orders of magnitude lower than what is required to overcome appropriate skepticism of ESP.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.