From: The Wall Street Journal
The Challenges of Debunking ESP
The Wall Street Journal:
Earlier this year, a major psychology journal published a paper suggesting that there was some evidence for “pre-cognition,” a form of ESP. Stuart Ritchie, a doctoral student at the University of Edinburgh, is part of a team that tried, but failed, to replicate those results. Here, he tells the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Tom Bartlett about the difficulties he’s had getting the results published.
Several journals told the team they wouldn’t publish a study that did no more than disprove a previous study. (This is an example of what researchers call “publication bias” — positive results get published, negative ones don’t. Man-bites-dog findings also face an uphill climb, and few findings could be less surprising than that we can’t see the future.)
Read the whole story: The Wall Street Journal
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