Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect
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Plain English Summary
Remember Daryl Bem's headline-grabbing 2011 claim that people could sense the future? This study put one of his flashiest experiments to the test, and the results were a resounding thud. Three independent university teams (Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, and Hertfordshire) each ran Bem's "retroactive recall" experiment with 50 participants, using his own software and methods. Combined, they had a massive 99.92% statistical power to detect his claimed effect. The result? Absolutely nothing. No hint of precognition in any of the three attempts. Notably, the researchers pre-registered their studies (publicly committing to their methods in advance) and used blind raters, setting a gold standard for how replications should be done. Their verdict: Bem's original positive finding was likely due to experimental artifacts rather than psychic ability. This became a landmark data point in the ongoing debate over Bem's controversial research.
Research Notes
One of the earliest pre-registered direct replication failures of Bem's precognition research and a key data point in Controversy #2. The multi-site design, pre-registration, and blind coding helped set methodological standards for the wave of Bem replications. Included in Bem et al. (2015) meta-analysis.
Three pre-registered, independent replication attempts of Bem's Experiment 9 ('retroactive facilitation of recall') were conducted at Edinburgh, Goldsmiths, and Hertfordshire, each with 50 participants (combined N = 150, 99.92% power to detect original d = .42). Using Bem's original software and procedure, none produced significant effects: Replication 1 DR% = 0.19% (p = .46), Replication 2 DR% = −2.72% (p = .94), Replication 3 DR% = 2.58% (p = .61); combined p = .83 (one-tailed). A methodological improvement over Bem's original used blind raters for ambiguous word coding. The authors favour experimental artifacts as the explanation for Bem's original result.
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Cites
- Why Psychologists Must Change the Way They Analyze Their Data: The Case of Psi — Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan (2011)
- A Bayes Factor Meta-Analysis of Bem's ESP Claim — Rouder, Jeffrey N (2011)
- Back from the Future: Parapsychology and the Bem Affair — Alcock, James E (2011)
- Fearing the Future of Empirical Psychology: Bem's (2011) Evidence of Psi as a Case Study of Deficiencies in Modal Research Practice — LeBel, Etienne P (2011)
- Why Is Psi So Elusive? A Review and Proposed Model — Kennedy, James E (2001)
Companion
- Retro-priming, priming, and double testing: psi and replication in a test–retest design — Rabeyron, Thomas (2014)
- Editors' Introduction to the Special Section on Replicability in Psychological Science: A Crisis of Confidence? — Pashler, Harold (2012)
- False-Positive Psychology: Undisclosed Flexibility in Data Collection and Analysis Allows Presenting Anything as Significant — Simmons, Joseph P (2011)
- We Should Have Seen This Coming — Schwarzkopf, D. Samuel (2014)
- Correcting the Past: Failures to Replicate Psi — Galak, Jeff (2012)
- Results from a Confirmatory Replication Study of Bem (2011): Precognitive Detection of Erotic Stimuli? — Wagenmakers, Eric-Jan (2012)
- Bem's 'Feeling the Future' (2011) Five Years Later: Its Impact on Scientific Literature — Silva, Bruno A (2017)
- Raising the value of research studies in psychological science by increasing the credibility of research reports: the transparent Psi project — Kekecs, Zoltan (2023)
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📋 Cite this paper
Ritchie, Stuart J, Wiseman, Richard, French, Christopher C (2012). Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect. PLoS ONE. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0033423
@article{ritchie_2012_failing_future,
title = {Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's 'Retroactive Facilitation of Recall' Effect},
author = {Ritchie, Stuart J and Wiseman, Richard and French, Christopher C},
year = {2012},
journal = {PLoS ONE},
doi = {10.1371/journal.pone.0033423},
}