Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can people really read each other's minds? This meta-analysis (a study that pools results from multiple experiments) gathered 16 telepathy experiments spanning 20 years, covering over 21,000 trials using phone calls, emails, texts, card guessing, and virtual environments. The headline: 75% of experiments found hit rates above what pure chance would predict, with a small but positive overall effect size of 0.091. That said, this is very much a preliminary effort -- it lacks several standard quality checks like measuring how much results varied between studies or checking whether only positive results got published. Interestingly, when high-scoring participants were retested, their performance tended to drop, a puzzling pattern known as the decline effect. The author honestly flags potential issues like cheating and the difficulty of separating telepathy from other claimed abilities like precognition (sensing the future) or clairvoyance (sensing distant events). A useful snapshot, but not the final word.
Research Notes
A student-level conference meta-analysis that provides a recent quantitative synthesis of telephone/digital telepathy experiments. Methodologically weak by meta-analytic standards — no heterogeneity statistics, no publication bias assessment, no moderator analysis, non-standard effect size metric. Useful as a complement to Sheldrake's more comprehensive 2025 meta-analysis and as an example of the field's replication challenges.
Meta-analysis of 16 telepathy experiments from 9 articles published over the prior 20 years, encompassing 21,441 total trials across telephone, email, SMS, card-guessing, and virtual-environment paradigms. Effect sizes were calculated as the deviation of observed from expected hit rates normalized by binomial standard deviation, then weighted by trial proportion. The overall weighted effect size was 0.091 (average unweighted 0.15), indicating a small positive effect. Twelve of 16 experiments (75%) showed statistically significant above-chance hit rates. Decline effects were observed when high-scoring participants were retested. The author notes limitations including possible cheating, confounds with precognition or clairvoyance, and variable replication success across labs.
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📋 Cite this paper
Liu, Yawen (2023). Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years. Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research.
@article{liu_2023_detecting_telepathy_meta,
title = {Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years},
author = {Liu, Yawen},
year = {2023},
journal = {Advances in Social Science, Education and Humanities Research},
}