Examining Psychokinesis: The Interaction of Human Intention With Random Number Generators—A Meta-Analysis
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Plain English Summary
Can you move things with your mind? This landmark meta-analysis, published in one of psychology's most prestigious journals, tackled that question head-on by crunching 380 studies spanning 45 years of people trying to mentally influence random number generators (basically digital coin flips). The verdict? There is a statistically significant effect — but it's breathtakingly tiny, shifting the odds to 50.0286% instead of a perfect 50/50. That's like winning one extra coin flip out of every 3,500. And here's the kicker: smaller studies found bigger effects, which is a classic red flag for publication bias (the tendency for boring null results to stay in file drawers). The researchers ran a clever computer simulation showing that if roughly 1,500 unpublished negative studies existed, it could in principle account for the small effect size and the relationship between sample size and effect (though the authors noted the simulation's fit to the extreme heterogeneity was weaker). Their blunt conclusion borrowed a phrase from 1962: "not proven." This analysis became the single strongest skeptical challenge to the entire mind-over-matter research program and sparked a heated rebuttal from the field's leading proponents.
Abstract
Se´ance-room and other large-scale psychokinetic phenomena have fascinated humankind for decades. Experimental research has reduced these phenomena to attempts to influence (a) the fall of dice and, later, (b) the output of random number generators (RNGs). The meta-analysis combined 380 studies that assessed whether RNG output correlated with human intention and found a significant but very small overall effect size. The study effect sizes were strongly and inversely related to sample size and were extremely heterogeneous. A Monte Carlo simulation revealed that the small effect size, the relation between sample size and effect size, and the extreme effect size heterogeneity found could in principle be a result of publication bias.
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Cites
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Observer Influence on Quantum Interference: Testing the von Neumann-Wigner Consciousness-Collapse Theory
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📋 Cite this paper
Bösch, Holger., Steinkamp, Fiona., Boller, Emil. (2006). Examining Psychokinesis: The Interaction of Human Intention With Random Number Generators—A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Bulletin. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.4.497
@article{bosch_2006_examining,
title = {Examining Psychokinesis: The Interaction of Human Intention With Random Number Generators—A Meta-Analysis},
author = {Bösch, Holger. and Steinkamp, Fiona. and Boller, Emil.},
year = {2006},
journal = {Psychological Bulletin},
doi = {10.1037/0033-2909.132.4.497},
}