Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone
📄 Original study📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can you really sense who's calling before you pick up the phone? Researchers built a fully automated system to test this — no human experimenters, just robots dialing phones. They had 177 people form groups of three and guess which friend was calling. When the caller was chosen before the guess (testing telepathy), people got it right 48.1% of the time versus 33.3% expected by chance — a statistically significant hit. But when the caller was picked after the guess (testing precognition, or seeing the future), accuracy dropped to chance levels. This suggests something telepathic rather than precognitive may be happening. Even wilder, sharing more DNA with your caller made you nearly three times more likely to guess correctly. The big caveat: friends could theoretically have been in the same room coordinating during telepathy trials.
Research Notes
First fully automated, pre-registered telephone telepathy experiment from IONS. Key contribution is the formal comparison of telepathic vs. precognitive mechanisms — post-selected null results with pre-selected positive results replicate Sheldrake (2014). Directly feeds into the Sheldrake 2025 telecommunication telepathy meta-analysis.
A pre-registered study tested whether participants could guess who was calling them using a fully automated Twilio/PHP system. 177 participants in triads completed two randomized trial types: telepathic/pre-selected (caller chosen before guess) and precognitive/post-selected (caller chosen after guess). Pre-selected trials yielded 48.1% accuracy versus 33.3% chance (p < .001), while post-selected trials showed no above-chance performance (32.5%, p = .61). Genetic relatedness at 25% predicted 2.88× higher odds of accuracy (P = .04), and communication frequency was significant (P = .03). Results favor a telepathic over precognitive mechanism, though potential cheating in pre-selected trials where participants could be co-located remains uncontrolled.
Links
Related Papers
Extends
Cites
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert (2004)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- A Rapid Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- An Automated Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2007)
- Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2014)
- Telepathic Telephone Calls: Two Surveys — Sheldrake, Rupert (2000)
- The Anticipation of Telephone Calls: A Survey in California — Brown, David Jay (2001)
- Who's Calling at this Hour? Local Sidereal Time and Telephone Telepathy — Lobach, Eva (2004)
- Meta-Analysis of Free-Response Studies 2009-2018: Assessing the Noise-Reduction Model Ten Years On — Storm, Lance (2020)
- Stage 2 Registered Report: Anomalous Perception in a Ganzfeld Condition - A Meta-Analysis of More Than 40 Years Investigation — Tressoldi, P.E (2024)
- Measuring Extraordinary Experiences and Beliefs: A Validation and Reliability Study — Wahbeh, Helané (2019)
- Exceptional Experiences Reported by Scientists and Engineers — Wahbeh, Helané (2018)
Also by these authors
Experimental Investigation of Precognition in Yoga Practitioners
Observer Influence on Quantum Interference: Testing the von Neumann-Wigner Consciousness-Collapse Theory
Quantum Aspects of the Brain-Mind Relationship: A Hypothesis with Supporting Evidence
More in Telepathy
Rethinking Communication and Consciousness: Lessons from The Telepathy Tapes Podcast
Detecting Telepathy: A Meta-Analysis for Extrasensory Perception Experiments in Last 20 Years
Can Morphic Fields Help Explain Telepathy and the Sense of Being Stared At?
On the Correspondence Between Dream Content and Target Material Under Laboratory Conditions: A Meta-Analysis of Dream-ESP Studies, 1966-2016
EEG Correlates of Social Interaction at Distance
📋 Cite this paper
Wahbeh, Helané, Cannard, Cedric, Radin, Dean, Delorme, Arnaud (2024). Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone. Explore. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.explore.2023.08.008
@article{wahbeh_2024_who_calling_accuracy,
title = {Who's Calling? Evaluating the Accuracy of Guessing Who Is on the Phone},
author = {Wahbeh, Helané and Cannard, Cedric and Radin, Dean and Delorme, Arnaud},
year = {2024},
journal = {Explore},
doi = {10.1016/j.explore.2023.08.008},
}