The first instalment of Richard Wiseman’s remote viewing experiment on Twitter was done yesterday, with three more over the next few days. Having now seen the setup, here’s a few observations/criticisms:
To start, this first ‘official’ experiment had a different question set than the initial trial, and I have to say it made me a little suspicious as to whether they’re testing RV, or looking for correlations between aspects of psi belief. The survey asked whether you believed in psychic ability, whether you believed you had psychic ability, and how confident you were in your target selection. Hopefully this is all just for further analysis of the dataset, rather than a ploy to gather information surreptitiously for analysis of psi beliefs (if the former, would have been great to have things like handedness, and intuitive/artistic vs logical/scientific).
Personally, my ‘feeling’ during the experiment was of a lot of concrete, with nothing specific. This was later followed by the thought of large ships. So when the five target choices were displayed, I didn’t have much to go with (click for larger image):
I eventually settled on (c) after considering all but (b), because it seemed the most filled with concrete. The correct answer was in fact (d). Now I don’t consider myself to have a psychic bone in my body, so I’m not particularly devastated that I got it wrong. But my own experience did show that the pool of targets could have been better selected to have some serious differences – in Experiment 1, we had four very urban looking photographs (in my view, they are so similar they could all have been within 100 metres of each other).
A second possible problem is the tight framing of each image, although it depends on whether the experiment is aiming at viewing the actual photograph of the target, or the place that Wiseman is standing Everything mentioned so far suggests the latter, in which case it would perhaps be a better idea to show the complete scene, rather than a tight portrait shot (for example, of the columned entrance…what does the rest of the building look like? Is it beside the harbour, or a stream with nature?). Better still, have a straight dichotomy between target and simple background locality (e.g. Stonehenge).
Still, all good fun and I’m looking forward to seeing the data at the end of all this. I mentioned on Twitter last night that I suspected the most selected target would be (b), as I think the majority of people would see nature scenes when they close their eyes and think relaxing thoughts (perhaps borne out by this tag cloud made up from Twitter replies). So might be kind of fun to see if some logical thinking can ‘foresee’ the actual results as well, based on mass participation of the public.
When I first found out about the experiment, I worked hard trying to organise some experience remote viewers to do the test as well as a group, to see if their results were above the rest of the public. However, it was just too short a time frame, and most were in the US, so we couldn’t work something out unfortunately (there was additional concern about a lack of variation in the targets, which seems might be the case). However, we’re very keen to put together our own little test at a later date with a bit more planning time, so stay tuned.
