Clay sez, "Stuart Ritchie, a psychology doctoral student in Edinburgh, worked with two colleagues to try to replicate the results of a famous recent experiment, claiming people could predict in advance whether they were about to be shown erotic images. When the three failed to find any such evidence for ESP they sent their results out for publication, and the British Psychology Journal, one of the journals to which it was sent, in turn sent the trio's article out for review. When Ritchie et al got the responses back '…there were two reviews, one very positive, urging publication, and one quite negative. This latter review didn't find any problems in our methodology or writeup itself, but suggested that, since the three of us (Richard Wiseman, Chris French and I) are all skeptical of ESP, we might have unconsciously influenced the results using our own psychic powers.' They are still looking for a place to publish their findings

Anyway, the BJP editor agreed with the second reviewer, and said that he'd only accept our paper if we ran a fourth experiment where we got a believer to run all the participants, to control for these experimenter effects. We thought that was a bit silly, and said that to the editor, but he didn't change his mind. We don't think doing another replication with a believer at the helm is the right thing to do, for the reason above, and for the reason that Bem had stated in his original paper that his experimental paradigms were designed so that most of the work is done by a computer and the experimenter has very little to do (this was explicitly because of his concerns about possible experimenter effects). So, after this very long and unproductive delay, we're off to another journal to try again. How frustrating.

Wait, Maybe You Can't Feel the Future

(Thanks, Clay!)

(Image: Marina Psychic Tells Past – Present – Future, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from dsifry's photostream)