Over at his blog, Carlos Alvarado has a summary of a recent survey, by Dr Harvey Irwin, of 114 people involved in parapsychology – an attempt to understand the views of contemporary psi researchers.
From the abstract:
Some issues, such as the reality of psi and the importance of specialist training in parapsychology, attracted substantial consensus, but a disparity of views was evident on other issues (e.g., the unity of ESP and PK); somewhat surprisingly, developments in anomalistic psychology and mainstream concerns over probabilistic evaluation of hypotheses appear to be of limited interest to parapsychologists.
Some of the quick take-aways were:
- When asked for their estimate of the reality of psi, using a scale ranging from 0 to 100%, the mean answer was 78.91.
- When asked about the possibility that their interests were motivated by spiritual concerns, replies were spread fairly evenly: “strongly” 21%, “moderately” 29%, “slightly” 24%, and “not at all” 26%.”
- When asked about belief in life after death: “strongly disagree” 3%, “disagree” 10%, “somewhat disagree” 1%, “neither agree nor disagree” 36%, “somewhat agree” 16%, “agree” 18%, and “strongly agree” 17%.
- How many agreed with (ie. responded ‘somewhat agree’, ‘agree’, and ‘strongly agree’) the following diverse questions: “Ganzfeld now less effective”: 18%; “survival research essential”: 45%; “significance testing unsatisfactory”: 48%.
Additionally:
Three survey items related to the use of constructs from the philosophy of science to discount some findings of parapsychological research . . . Although there was some variation in responses, approximately half of the sample deemed commentators’ use of the concepts of the need for replication and the principle of parsimony to be purely rhetorical devices in the criticism of parapsychological research. On the other hand, over 40% of respondents evidently saw more than rhetoric in the critics’ demand for replicability. Views were rather more cohesive on the third issue: only 13% of the sample believed parapsychologists were using the concept of psi-missing primarily to explain away inconvenient experimental findings.
An open-ended question about current problems of parapsychology elicited mention of low financial support, resistance from institutions to research, the views of critics, and other issues.
