Precognition: Feeling What Hasn't Happened Yet
Two separate research threads asked essentially the same question with different methods — and one of them ended up changing how all of psychology is done, regardless of what you conclude about precognition itself.
The Study That Broke a Field
In 2011, Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published "Feeling the Future" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology — one of the field's top journals. Nine experiments, over 1,000 participants, using entirely normal, accepted methods. Nearly all nine came back statistically significant, showing people responding to events (like a randomly-selected image) before they happened.
Then independent replication attempts failed. That's the headline — but the more important story is what it triggered: if a paper following every normal rule of psychological research could produce an impossible result, what did that say about every other paper using those same methods that hadn't produced an obviously impossible conclusion? Bem's paper became one of the central sparks of psychology's "replication crisis" — a real, field-wide reckoning that led directly to reforms (pre-registering studies before running them, larger sample sizes, open data) that make psychology a more reliable science today. The specific claim didn't hold up. The event it caused was one of the best things to happen to the field in decades.
Presentiment: The Body Before the Mind
A separate line of research, led by Dean Radin and later Dick Bierman, measured skin conductance, heart rate, and pupil size in the seconds before participants were shown a randomly-chosen emotional or calm image. Across a 2012 meta-analysis pooling 90 experiments, the body's response measurably differed before the emotional images appeared, compared to before the calm ones — small, but statistically significant.
THE SPECIFIC, TECHNICAL COMPLICATION
In 2014, researcher Sam Schwarzkopf identified a real methodological problem: many of these studies correct their data against a "baseline" taken just before the stimulus — but if that baseline period still carries leftover signal from the previous trial (a slower return to calm after an arousing image than after a calm one), the correction itself can manufacture a fake "before" effect that's actually contamination from what came right before it. The original researchers (Mossbridge and colleagues) responded in 2015 that the effect held up even after excluding the studies with that specific flaw. Neither side has fully settled it.
Try It Yourself
The historical, low-tech version of this is card-guessing — the same basic method parapsychology researcher J.B. Rhine used decades before any of the above:
- Shuffle a deck, or use any random generator (an app, dice, drawn cards).
- Before each reveal, everyone silently writes down a guess — red or black, a specific suit, whatever you choose.
- Reveal, tally hits against chance, run enough rounds to make the tally mean something (at least 20–30 per person).
- Track it across sessions, same as every other chapter here — one night proves nothing, a running log over months might show you something real about your own results.
References & Resources
Bem, D. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3). — The original study, and the replication failures that followed it.
Mossbridge, J., Tressoldi, P. & Utts, J. (2012). Predictive physiological anticipation preceding seemingly unpredictable stimuli: a meta-analysis. Frontiers in Psychology. — The 90-experiment presentiment meta-analysis.
Schwarzkopf, D.S. (2014). We should have seen this coming. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. — The circular-inference/baseline-artifact critique.
Mossbridge, J. et al. (2015). We did see this coming: Response to "We should have seen this coming." — The reply, defending the effect after excluding flawed studies.