Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences

DARYL J. BEM
Department of Psychology - Uris Hall

URL:  http://dbem.ws/

Bem, D. J. (in press)
'Feeling the Future: Experimental evidence
 for anomalous retroactive influences on
  cognition and affect.'

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Abstract:

 The term psi denotes anomalous processes
of information or energy transfer that are
currently unexplained in terms of known
physical or biological mechanisms.
Two variants of psi are precognition
(conscious cognitive awareness) and
premonition (affective apprehension) of a
future event that could not otherwise be
anticipated through any known inferential
process. Precognition and premonition are
themselves special cases of a more general
phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive
influence of some future event on an
individual's current responses, whether
those responses are conscious or nonconscious,
cognitive or affective. This article reports
9 experiments, involving more than 1,000
participants, that test for retroactive
influence by "time-reversing" well-established
psychological effects so that the individual's
responses are obtained before the putatively
causal stimulus events occur.
Data are presented for 4 time-reversed
effects: precognitive approach to erotic
stimuli and precognitive avoidance of
negative stimuli; retroactive priming;
retroactive habituation; and retroactive
facilitation of recall. The mean effect
size (d) in psi performance across all
9 experiments was .21, and all but one of
them yielded statistically significant results.
The individual-difference variable of stimulus
seeking, a component of extraversion, was
significantly correlated with psi performance
in 5 of the experiments, with participants who
scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus
seeking achieving a mean effect size of .42.
Skepticism about psi, issues of replication,
and theories of psi are also discussed.

http://dbem.ws/online_pubs.html

These effects are explained by "signal nonlocality."