Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence
⚡ Contested ↗Plain English Summary
Can people actually sense the future? This ambitious review, published in an official American Psychological Association journal, pulls together decades of controlled experiments on precognition -- the idea that humans can somehow perceive events before they happen. The authors examined five different flavors of evidence: prophetic dreams, conscious guessing, free-form impressions, snap-judgment tasks, and bodily reactions that seem to anticipate what's coming. The numbers are striking. Across hundreds of forced-choice studies, the odds against the results being pure luck are roughly a billion to one. Quick-thinking tasks show a small but stubbornly persistent effect, and studies measuring physical responses like heart rate find an even larger signal. Taken together, the authors argue this converging evidence seriously challenges our everyday assumption that causes always come before effects -- a bold claim that immediately drew formal critiques from other researchers.
Research Notes
Published as a target article in APA's Psychology of Consciousness, this is among the most comprehensive reviews of precognition evidence in a mainstream journal. Consolidates presentiment, Bem-style, and forced-choice literatures into a single theoretical framework, directly prompting cross-examination by Houran et al. (2018).
Reviewing controlled experiments across five domains — precognitive dreaming, forced-choice conscious precognition, free-response precognition, implicit (Bem-style) precognition, and physiological presentiment — this paper evaluates whether precognition represents a genuine form of human prospection. The forced-choice literature (309 studies, 1935-1987) yields ES = 0.02, Z = 6.02, p = 1.1x10^-9. Implicit precognition (90 experiments) shows Hedges' g = 0.09, p = 1.2x10^-10, with fast-thinking tasks driving the effect. The presentiment meta-analysis (26 studies) reports ES = 0.21, z = 5.3, p = 5.7x10^-8. The authors conclude converging evidence challenges standard assumptions about temporal causality.
Links
Related Papers
Cites
- Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect — Bem, Daryl J (2011)
- Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events — Bem, Daryl J (2015)
- Must Psychologists Change the Way They Analyze Their Data? — Bem, Daryl J (2011)
- "Future Telling": A Meta-Analysis of Forced-Choice Precognition Experiments, 1935-1987 — Honorton, Charles (1989)
- Information and Uncertainty in Remote Perception Research — Dunne, Brenda J (2003)
- Unconscious Perception of Future Emotions: An Experiment in Presentiment — Radin, Dean I (1997)
- Electrodermal Presentiments of Future Emotions — Radin, Dean I (2004)
- Meta-Analysis of Free-Response Studies, 1992–2008: Assessing the Noise Reduction Model in Parapsychology — Storm, Lance (2010)
- Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi — Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan (2011)
- An Agenda for Purely Confirmatory Research — Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan (2012)
- We Should Have Seen This Coming — Schwarzkopf, D. Samuel (2014)
- Retro-priming, priming, and double testing: psi and replication in a test–retest design — Rabeyron, Thomas (2014)
Critiqued By
Cited By
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)
- We Did See This Coming: Response to 'We Should Have Seen This Coming' by D. Sam Schwarzkopf — Mossbridge, Julia A (2015)
- Predicting the Unpredictable: 75 Years of Experimental Evidence — Radin, Dean I (2011)
Also by these authors
Observer Influence on Quantum Interference: Testing the von Neumann-Wigner Consciousness-Collapse Theory
Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
Anomalous Entropic Effects in Physical Systems Associated with Collective Consciousness
More in Precognition
Sentiment and Presentiment in Twitter: Do Trends in Collective Mood "Feel the Future"?
Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project
A Preregistered Multi-Lab Replication of Maier et al. (2014, Exp. 4) Testing Retroactive Avoidance
Predictive Physiological Anticipation Preceding Seemingly Unpredictable Stimuli: An Update of Mossbridge et al.'s Meta-Analysis
Bem's 'Feeling the Future' (2011) Five Years Later: Its Impact on Scientific Literature
📋 Cite this paper
Mossbridge, Julia A, Radin, Dean (2018). Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence. Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice. https://doi.org/10.1037/cns0000121
@article{mossbridge_2018_precognition,
title = {Precognition as a Form of Prospection: A Review of the Evidence},
author = {Mossbridge, Julia A and Radin, Dean},
year = {2018},
journal = {Psychology of Consciousness: Theory, Research, and Practice},
doi = {10.1037/cns0000121},
}