Laboratory Psi Effects May Be Put to Practical Use: Two Pilot Studies

I describe two studies that were designed to illustrate the potential applicability of laboratory-derived ESP effects in trying to predict events of practical consequence in the “real world.” Both studies attempt to predict the behavior of sets of fi nancial indices over a designated week in the future. The studies followed up on earlier work on the prediction of scoring direction and scoring extremity. Participants are asked to make repeated calls at the same set of targets, and then their responses are combined through a majority-vote analysis to generate a set of “best predictions” to be tested against the actual yoked outcomes. The results of the fi rst study were statistically signifi cant and powerful enough in terms of amplifi cation to have practical consequences. The second study was less effective, but changes in experimental conditions and participant population justifi ed a post-hoc analysis based on the assumption of overall positive scoring. In this case, results were more encouraging. The Discussion addresses possible problems of data analysis and ethical concerns about the application of psi data.