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Parapsychology

Abstract

DESPITE the unusual nature of ESP reports, we feel that they should be treated in the same way, and, in particular, subjected to similar refereeing standards, as the more pedestrian majority of papers published. We would therefore like to take issue with the publication, in Nature, of the report “Identification of Concealed Randomized Objects through Acquired Response Habits of Stimulus and Word Association”1. A reader should be able to make an independent, reasonably informed, judgment of the possibility that the results presented have been produced by mechanisms other than those invoked by the experimenters. This criterion should be satisfied in any research report, but especially when the report is in a field notorious for unrepeatable experiments. It seems a pity that the authors have not benefited from the experiences of other parapsychologists who have already been exposed to the kinds of criticism to which they are now open. If they have results which they consider to be significant, then they are not being fair to themselves if they do not report the methods used to obtain them in a rigorous way.

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ROBERTSON, A., FIENBERG, S. Parapsychology. Nature 221, 687–688 (1969). https://doi.org/10.1038/221687a0

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