The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi: A Summary and Hypotheses
🧐 Skeptical/Critical ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Here's a puzzle that sounds almost like a ghost story about ghost stories: after a hundred years of research, psychic phenomena (psi) seem to actively dodge every attempt to pin them down. Kennedy -- himself a parapsychology insider, not an outside critic -- documents a striking pattern. When researchers get promising early results and try to confirm them, the effects often flip direction or simply vanish. Entire research programs experience slow fadeouts. One remarkable finding: after major meta-analyses (studies that pool many experiments together) were published, effect sizes shrank by a whopping 90% on average. It's as if psi knows when you're watching. Kennedy considers several explanations but lands on the most provocative one: maybe psi is supposed to be mysterious, serving some deeper purpose tied to wonder and consciousness rather than lab predictability.
Research Notes
The most systematic treatment in the library of why psi effects resist reliable demonstration. Kennedy (writing from within parapsychology, not as an external skeptic) documents the 'unsustainability' pattern across all major research programs. Directly foundational to Controversy #10 (meta-debate) and cited by 7+ subsequent library papers.
After a century of psychical research, many investigators have concluded that psi may be capricious or actively evasive. Evidence includes negative reliability (significant direction reversals from pilot to confirmation), shifts from intended to unintended secondary effects, pervasive decline effects for subjects, experimenters, and entire research lines, and persistent failure of practical applications. Houtkooper found meta-analytic summary followed by 90% average reduction in effect size across seven series. Three hypotheses are evaluated: competing psi motivation from a polarized population, mechanistic constraints (Lucadou's pragmatic information model), and higher consciousness inducing mystery and wonder. Kennedy favors the last, arguing psi may be inherently unsustainable.
Related Papers
Cites
- Why Is Psi So Elusive? A Review and Proposed Model — Kennedy, James E (2001)
- Mind/Machine Interaction Consortium: PortREG Replication Experiments — Jahn, Robert G (2000)
- Evaluation of a Program on Anomalous Mental Phenomena — Hyman, Ray (1996)
- An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning — Utts, Jessica (1996)
Cited By
- Searching for Global Consciousness: A Seventeen Year Exploration — Bancel, Peter A (2017)
- Searching for Global Consciousness: A Seventeen Year Exploration — Bancel, Peter A (2017)
- Bayesian and Classical Hypothesis Testing: Practical Differences for a Controversial Area of Research — Kennedy, J.E (2014)
- Remote Viewing as Applied to Futures Studies — Lee, James H (2008)
- Conclusions about Paranormal Phenomena — Kennedy, J.E (2013)
- Can Parapsychology Move Beyond the Controversies of Retrospective Meta-Analyses? — Kennedy, J.E (2013)
- Why Most Research Findings About Psi Are False: The Replicability Crisis, the Psi Paradox and the Myth of Sisyphus — Rabeyron, Thomas (2020)
Extended By
- Spirituality and the Capricious, Evasive Nature of Psi — Kennedy, J.E (2006)
- Information in Life, Consciousness, Quantum Physics, and Paranormal Phenomena — Kennedy, J.E (2011)
- Can Parapsychology Move Beyond the Controversies of Retrospective Meta-Analyses? — Kennedy, J.E (2013)
- Bayesian and Classical Hypothesis Testing: Practical Differences for a Controversial Area of Research — Kennedy, J.E (2014)
- Conclusions about Paranormal Phenomena — Kennedy, J.E (2013)
Same Research Program
- Skepticism and Negative Results in Borderline Areas of Science — Kennedy, J.E (1981)
- Methods for Investigating Goal-Oriented Psi — Kennedy, J.E (1995)
- A Proposal and Challenge for Proponents and Skeptics of Psi — Kennedy, J.E (2004)
- Planning Falsifiable Confirmatory Research — Kennedy, James E (2024)
Also by these authors
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📋 Cite this paper
Kennedy, J.E (2003). The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi: A Summary and Hypotheses. The Journal of Parapsychology.
@article{kennedy_2003_capricious_psi,
title = {The Capricious, Actively Evasive, Unsustainable Nature of Psi: A Summary and Hypotheses},
author = {Kennedy, J.E},
year = {2003},
journal = {The Journal of Parapsychology},
}