We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf
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Plain English Summary
When critic Schwarzkopf threw six methodological objections at the presentiment research program, the original team fired back with receipts. Strip out every study Schwarzkopf questioned? The results are still overwhelmingly significant. Could experimenter expectation explain the effect? They ran a thousand simulated experiments and found roughly 92% of effects survive that critique entirely. Here is a fun twist: the common practice of showing more neutral than emotional images actually makes it harder to find presentiment, meaning the deck was stacked against the researchers, not in their favor. They also showed that higher-quality studies produced bigger effects -- the opposite of what you would expect from a methodological artifact. Their parting shot: presentiment might reflect time-symmetric physics already accepted at the microscopic level.
Research Notes
Paired with Schwarzkopf (2014), forms a complete debate exchange in the presentiment controversy. Notable for the simulation analysis demonstrating that expectation bias cannot explain most presentiment findings, and for the argument that stimulus imbalance biases against the PAA hypothesis.
Six methodological and analytical objections to predictive anticipatory activity (presentiment) raised by Schwarzkopf (2014) are addressed point by point. Removing questioned studies from the original meta-analysis (Mossbridge et al. 2012) still produced overwhelmingly significant results. Simulation of expectation bias detection across 1000 experiments showed ~92% of effects could not be explained by expectation bias (r = -0.16, p > 0.524 between effect size and sample size). Stimulus ratio imbalance (2:1 or 3:1 neutral-to-emotional) actually works against finding presentiment effects. Baseline correction via z-transformation is methodologically appropriate, and higher-quality studies produced larger effect sizes. The authors propose that presentiment may reflect time-symmetric processes consistent with known microscopic physics.
Links
Related Papers
Same Research Program
- Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: A Meta-Analysis — Mossbridge, Julia (2012)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: Critical Analysis and Practical Implications of Predictive Anticipatory Activity — Mossbridge, Julia A (2014)
- Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence — Mossbridge, Julia A (2018)
Cites
Companion
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📋 Cite this paper
Mossbridge, Julia A, Tressoldi, Patrizio, Utts, Jessica, Ives, John A, Radin, Dean, Jonas, Wayne B (2015). We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf. arXiv preprint. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.1501.03179
@article{mossbridge_2015_we_did_see_coming,
title = {We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf},
author = {Mossbridge, Julia A and Tressoldi, Patrizio and Utts, Jessica and Ives, John A and Radin, Dean and Jonas, Wayne B},
year = {2015},
journal = {arXiv preprint},
doi = {10.48550/arXiv.1501.03179},
}