Feeling The Future Summary

Daryl Bem is a well-known social psychologist and originator of the self-perception theory of attitude formation and change. He is very influential in the field of psychology, yet his work on ESP has brought a lot of controversy. Specifically, in his article “Feeling the Future” in which he offered statistical evidence for ESP. In this article he conducted his own research and challenged modern scientific conceptions about the unidirectional nature of time. Bem used countless, used and well-accepted psychological experiments but with a twist, which I will be talking about one specifically. One experiment Bem used was to test the effect of habituation in his study "Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Human Cognition …show more content…
To test this, Radin and fellow psychologist Marilyn Schlitz in the "Gut Feelings, Intuition, and Emotions: An Exploratory Study” , tested peoples own physiological changes before and after they were shown a series of either emotional or placid pictures. In this experiment, the subject was sat before a blank computer screen. They were then told that they were about to see a series of digitalized photographs. Some were calm pictures (ex: lake), others were supposed to bring out more emotion (ex: big spider). On two fingers of the subject’s left hand, electrodes were attached that measures tiny changes in skin resistance. On the third finger, an electrode was place that monitored blood flow. They were also measured for heart rate. For five seconds the screen remains blank, and then the computer randomly selects one picture out of a law pool of photos. Some were calming, some were provocative. The picture was displaced for three seconds, and the screen goes blank again for eight seconds. Finally, a message appears announcing that the subject can start the next trial when they are ready. This was then repeated forty …show more content…
In a room close by, a second subject, the receiver, would sit with their eyes covered and headphones on in order to block out all incoming stimuli. Once the experiment had started, the sender would be asked to concentrate on the target while the receiver would verbally describe the image they see in their head. This would last for about thirty minutes. Afterwards, the receiver would be presented with four images, with one of them being the correct image. They were then asked to rate which one matched what they saw from a scale of one to four. Four being highest, one being the lowest. If the actual picture was rated the highest of the four images this was classified as a “hit”. By chance alone, the hit rating should be