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10. When Parapsychologists Harm Their Cause
The
conservatism some express about particular areas of parapsychology can be, in my
opinion, harmful to the field. But parapsychologists exhibit many other
behaviors that also hinder the field in a variety of ways. One such behavior
encompasses statements about the existence of the phenomena we study. Let me
give some examples from the old days. In 1913
Hyslop stated that survival was
"proved and proved by better evidence than supports the doctrine of evolution
..." (Hyslop, 1913, p. 88). In 1921
Gustave Geley wrote: "Today we know well the
genesis of materializations" (Geley, 1921, p. 174). In 1923
Camille Flammarion
stated that "telepathy ... is as certain as the existence of London, Sirus and
oxygen ..." (Flammarion, 1923, p. 22). These, and many more recent statements
such as overenthusiastic evaluations of the value and role of meta-analysis in
parapsychology (Broughton, 1991) and statements predicting the acceptance of
parapsychology by science in a relatively short time period (e.g., Honegger,
1982, p. 21; Murphy & Kovach, 1972, p. 475; Stanford, 1974, p. 160) do not help
our credibility.
Certainly we have a right to express our opinions and to evaluate our evidence
as we see fit, and it is important to express what we believe. But we need to
strike a balance between exaggerated claims and the need to present our claims
in a convincing way. After all, if we do not project a positive feeling in our
writings, how can we expect to convince others to engage in meaningful
discussions of our findings? What worries me is that sometimes we present a too
positive and rosy picture of the field, forgetting to acknowledge the difference
between our personal hopes and the state of the field as a whole. A view of the
field that does not acknowledge the social reality we surfer under does not help
parapsychology among other scientists because we appear to be ignoring the
obvious and exaggerating the replicability of our research.
But to promote our views, be they bold or conservative, we need to do something
even more basic. We need to increase the frequency of formal publication of our
research. Most of our research work stays in PA proceedings and does not get
published in refereed journals, whether they are parapsychological journals or
the journals of other disciplines. This creates serious problems in the
diffusion of information. While journals are abstracted in a variety of
databases, the privately printed PA proceedings are not. Consequently, if
someone does not attend a PA convention, or if one does not buy a copy of the
proceedings (sold almost exclusively to PA members), he or she will not have
access to current research information. Do we really think it is in the best
interests of parapsychology to allow only a very small group of individuals to
have access to our research reports? We always complain that out work is not
cited nor widely read, but to some extent this is out own fault.
The fact that some of this research can be found now in personal websites, or
that it may appear in the future on the PA website is helpful, but it is no
substitute for formal journal publication. Outsiders do not value websites as
reliable publication outlets. If we allow our research to remain only in such
private venues, no matter how many hits such a site would get, we will project
the image that parapsychologists do not follow the standard publication
practices of science, and like the occultists, provide out materials only to
those few "in the know."
Another problem, and one that may be explained by the low number of research
workers in our field, is the lack of replication and extension on promising
leads and on specific theoretical models. There have been few attempts to follow
Thouless and Wiesner's (1947) model of psi psychophysical interaction, Hans
Eysenck's (1967) model of cortical arousal and ESP, Harvey Irwin's (1979, 1985)
ESP information-processing model and his absorption-synesthesia OBE model, or
Roll and colleagues' rotating beam model of poltergeists (Roll, Burdick & Joines,
1973). There is a general lack of follow-up in some of our most important areas.
One wonders if the same will happen to other lines of research, such as attempts
to replicate, extend, and understand the correlations between ESP and
geomagnetism or local sidereal time. Of course, we have to acknowledge once
again that some of this may be explained by the lack of human and financial
resources in the field. But when one sees parapsychologists abandoning their own
promising research areas and coming up with new projects when there is so much
basic research to be done on the questions they previously asked, one wonders if
our profession sometimes has an undisciplined tendency towards the pursuit of
the novel.
In addition, as Rex Stanford (2003) has suggested, there is a need for research
that goes beyond relationships between two variables. The great bulk of our
experimental psychological studies have tried to relate ESP to belief in its
occurrence, as well as to introversion-extroversion, altered states of
consciousness, creativity, experimenter effects, and other variables. But there
is much to do to understand why, for example, an altered state may induce ESP.
It may be argued that an altered state affects ESP by producing psychophysiological changes, nonlinear thinking, or changes in a person's belief
systems, or by reducing ownership resistance (Alvarado, 2000). Furthermore, one
or more of the variables probably interacts with a variety of other mediating
and moderating variables (Stanford,
2003).
Another important research-related issue is that of wasted opportunities. It is
unfortunate to see that most recent free-response ESP researchers have done
nothing with the rich imagery of participant's mentation other than use it for
defining hits and misses statistically. While explorations of this sort have
been conducted by Deborah Delanoy (1989), and more recently by James Carpenter
(1995) and Adrian Parker (Parker, Persson & Haller,
2000), they are exceptions.[8] Almost all of our recent free-response ESP work has not been conducted with
these interests in mind. In other words, as parapsychologists we limit what we
can learn by the way we analyze our data.[9]
[8]
See also Hastings's (2001) and White's (1964) analyses.
[9] This is further complicated by the practice of only using first-time
participants. While it may be argued that this comes from the belief that
first-timers are more spontaneous and that this may produce better results, such
practice does not allow us to study possible recurrent patterns in our
participant's mentations, such as symbols and distortions.
Similarly, other research areas are also affected by what we chose to emphasize
in our research. Most of the questionnaire research of spontaneous experiences
is generally limited to the experience's prevalence or frequency as the unit of
analysis (e.g., Irwin, 1994). This may project a simplistic view of the
phenomena because we can easily forget the different features of the experiences
and ignore possible interactions between those features (Alvarado,
1996a,
1997).
Next part: 11.
Concluding
Remarks
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