Finding Or Imagining Flawed Research?

Dear Editor: The article “Finding and Correcting Flawed Research Literatures” by Delgado-Romero and Howard (2005) provides an ironic example of flawed research. I will restrict my comments just to their treatment of the ganzfeld telepathy test. Delgado-Romero and Howard (2005) were motivated to reexamine the ganzfeld effect because they suspected that the previous meta-analytic estimates of the hit rate in that experiment were biased by the filedrawer effect. They were apparently unaware that, in 1975, the officers of the Parapsychological Association (an affiliate of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and principal international scientific organization interested in these topics) adopted a policy specifically opposing the selective reporting of positive outcomes, precisely to avoid the filedrawer problem. In addition, because there are so few investigators in parapsychology, it has been possible to survey virtually everyone who had ever conducted a ganzfeld test to gauge the actual size of the filedrawer. In 1980, such a survey was undertaken by an outspoken critic of this research. That survey concluded that “the bias introduced by selective reporting of ESP ganzfeld studies is not a major contributor to the overall proportion of significant results” (Blackmore, 1980, p. 217). Analyses of potential filedrawer biases in later metaanalyses of this literature have repeatedly confirmed that filedrawer effects cannot plausibly explain the observed significant results (Radin, 2006). Another motivation cited by Delgado-Romero and Howard (2005) were the “conflicting results” (p. 298) of two positive and one negative meta-analysis of the THE HUMANISTIC PSYCHOLOGIST, 35(3), 297–299 Copyright © 2007, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.