Daryl J. Bem (born June 10, 1938) is a social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He is the originator of the self-perception theory of attitude change, and has carried out research on psi phenomena (a technical term for extra-sensory perception),^[1] group decision making, handwriting analysis, sexual orientation and personality theory and assessment.

Life[link]

Biography[link]

Bem received a B.A. in physics from Reed College in 1960, and began graduate work in physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The civil rights movement had just begun, and he became so intrigued with the changing attitudes toward desegregation in the American South that he decided to switch fields and pursue a career as a social psychologist specializing in attitudes and public opinion. He obtained his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Michigan in 1964, and has since taught at Carnegie-Mellon University, Stanford, Harvard, and Cornell University. He started at Cornell in 1978 and retired from there in 2007,^[2] becoming a professor emeritus.^[3] He married Sandra Lipsitz,^[4] also a psychology professor.

Bem is coauthor of an introductory textbook in psychology and the author of Beliefs, Attitudes, and Human Affairs (1970). He testified before a subcommittee of the United States Senate on the psychological effects of police interrogation,^[5] and has served as an expert witness in court cases involving sex discrimination.^[2]

Career[link]

Bem is perhaps best known for his theory of "self-perception", the most oft-cited competitor to Leon Festinger's cognitive dissonance theory. According to the self-perception theory, people infer their attitudes from their own behavior much as an outside observer might. For example, a person asked to give a pro-Fidel Castro speech would consequently view him or herself as more in favor of Castro.

In parapsychology, Bem is known for his defense of the ganzfeld experiment as empirical evidence of psi, more commonly known as extra-sensory perception or psychic phenomena.^[6] Bem also supports the idea of a connection between psi and quantum phenomena. More recently, Bem has investigated backward causation.

Exotic Becomes Erotic theory[link]

Bem's Exotic Becomes Erotic theory (EBE) presents one possible explanation as to what differentiates the etiology of homosexuality from heterosexuality.^[7] Bem theorized that the influence of biological factors on sexual orientation may be mediated by experiences in childhood, that the child's temperament predisposes the child to prefer certain activities over others.^[8] Bem noted that, because of their temperament, which is influenced by biological variables such as genetic factors, some children will be attracted to activities that are commonly enjoyed by other children of the same gender, while others will prefer activities that are typical of the other gender. Bem theorized that this makes a gender-conforming child feel different from opposite-gender children, while gender-nonconforming children will feel different from children of their own gender. Bem believes that this feeling of difference evokes physiological arousal when the child is near members of the gender which the child considers as being "different". Bem theorizes that this physiological arousal is later transformed into sexual arousal: that, as adults, these people become sexually attracted to the gender which they see as different, or "exotic".^[9]

Bem based this theory in part on the finding that a majority of gay men and lesbians report being gender-nonconforming during their childhood years. A meta-analysis of 48 studies showed childhood gender nonconformity to be the strongest predictor of a homosexual orientation for both men and women.^[10] Bem also noted that, in a study by the Kinsey Institute of approximately 1000 gay men and lesbians (and a control group of 500 heterosexual men and women), 63% of both gay men and lesbians reported that they were gender nonconforming in childhood (i.e., did not like activities typical of their sex), compared with only 10-15% of heterosexual men and women. Bem also drew from six prospective studies, longitudinal studies that began with gender-nonconforming boys around age 7 and followed them into adolescence and adulthood; a majority (63%) of the gender nonconforming boys become gay or bisexual as adults.^[11]

"Feeling the Future" and the resulting controversy[link]

In 2011, Bem published the article "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology that offered statistical evidence for psi.^[12] If "Feeling the Future" is correct, it would provide evidence for psi, significantly altering the assumption of the linear nature of time, challenging the very core of modern scientific thought on the matter. Both the presentation of this article by a highly respected researcher, and the decision of an upper tier journal to publish it has engendered much controversy. Not only has the paper's publication led to a criticism of the paper itself^[13], but it also prompted a wider debate on the validity of peer review process for allowing such a paper to be published.^[14] Bem has appeared on MSNBC^[15] and The Colbert Report^[16] discussing the experiment.

The methods that Bem uses in his experimentation itself has been viewed as controversial as well. According to understood statistical methodology, Bem incorrectly provides one-sided p values when he should have used a two-sided p values.^[17] This could possibly account for the marginally significant results that he produced in his experiment. A rebuttal to the Wagenmakers et al. critique by Bem and two statisticians was subsequently published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.^[18]

Professor of Psychology, member of CSI and Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, James Alcock after evaluating Bem's 9 experiments claimed to have found metaphorical "dirty test tubes", serious methodological flaws such as changing the procedures partway through the experiments and combining results of tests with different chances of significance. The amount of actual tests done is unknown and no explanation of how it was determined that participants had "settled down" after seeing erotic images was given. Alcock concludes that almost everything that could go wrong with this 9 trial experiment did go wrong. Bem's response to Alcock's critique appeared online at the Skeptical Inquirer website^[19] and Alcock replied to these comments in a third article at the same website.^[20]

One of the nine experiments in Bem's study ('Retroactive Facilitation of Recall') has since been replicated by scientists Stuart Ritchie, Chris French, and Richard Wiseman. Their replication was published in PLoS ONE, and found no evidence of precognition.^[21] Several failed attempts by the authors to have their replication study published highlighted difficulties in publishing replications and attracted media attention over concerns of publication bias.^[22][23][24] The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Science Brevia and Psychological Science each rejected the paper on the grounds that it was a replication.^[25] A fourth journal, the British Journal of Psychology refused the paper after reservations from one referee, later confirmed to be Daryl Bem.^[25] Richard Wiseman has set up a register to keep track of other replicating efforts to avoid problems with publication bias and plans to conduct a meta-analysis on registered replication efforts, beginning Dec, 1st 2011.^[26][27]

An analysis by Gregory Francis in Psychonomic Bulletin & Review found statistical evidence of publication bias in the set of nine experiments reported by Bem. His analysis suggests that the number of rejections of the null hypothesis reported by Bem (eight out of nine experiments) is abnormally high given the properties of the experiments and reported effect sizes, with the probability of Bem obtaining such results (0.058) significantly less than the standard criterion used in tests of publication bias (0.1). According to Francis this suggests that Bem's experiments cannot be taken as a proper scientific study, as critical data is likely unavailable. Francis also noted that perhaps the most striking characteristic of Bem's experiments is that they meet current standards of experimental psychology. Drawing on his own analysis and studies suggesting a discrepancy between the observed and expected null hypothesis rejection rates across the field of experimental pyschology, he suggests that the standards and practices of the field are not functioning properly.^[28]

The publication of Bem's article and the resulting controversy prompted a wide-ranging commentary by Etienne LeBel and Kurt Peters.^[29] Using Bem's article as a case study they discussed deficiencies in modal research practice, the methodology most commonly used in experimental psychology. LeBel and Peters suggest that experimental psychology is systemically biased toward interpretations of data that favor the researcher's theory.

On April 1st, 2012, Bem received the infamous "Pigasus Award" in the scientist category. Announced on April Fool's Day, the James Randi Educational Foundation gives the awards to highlight parapsychological, paranormal, or psychic fakers that the organization finds to be harmful to society. ^[30]

Selected publications[link]

References[link]

External links[link]

• Official Page, Site of Cornell University
• Personal Home Page
• Publications online at Personal Home Page

Dean Radin (born February 29, 1952) is a researcher and author in the field of parapsychology. He has been Senior Scientist at the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS), in Petaluma, California, USA, since 2001, and is on the Adjunct Faculty in the Department of Psychology at Sonoma State University, on the Distinguished Consulting Faculty at Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center, and former President of the Parapsychological Association.^[1][2] He is also co-editor-in-chief of the Elsevier journal Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing.^[3]

Biography[link]

Professionally, Radin worked as a concert violinist for five years,^[4] later switching to engineering after earning an undergraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Massachusetts Amherst, as well as both a master's degree in electrical engineering and a doctorate in educational psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.^[4]

After graduation, Radin worked at Bell Labs, and then conducted research at Princeton University, GTE Laboratories, University of Edinburgh, SRI International, Interval Research Corporation, and was a faculty member at University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Radin was elected President of the Parapsychological Association in 1988, 1993, 1998, and 2005 and has published a number of articles and scientific papers,^[5][6] as well as two books directed to a popular audience: The Conscious Universe and Entangled Minds.

Radin's books have drawn mixed reviews.^{[7][8][9][10][11][12]} A critical review of The Conscious Universe was published by Nature,^[13] to which Dean Radin objected due to what he described as factual inaccuracies. Following an exchange of letters, in April 1998 Nature published an acknowledgment of a numerical error introduced during the editing process, and later in July 1998 reproduced a slightly edited version of the original letter from Radin requesting the correction.^[14]

Research[link]

Radin has conducted parapsychological research in several areas, drawing a conclusion that some psychic phenomena exist. Radin was featured on the BBC Horizon TV series explaining an experiment he designed that recorded people's emotional response to a randomized series of pictures. He believes the results to be evidence of retrocausation, a conclusion not supported by mainstream scientists.^[15][16] Radin's research has yet to capture the attention of the mainstream scientific community as a whole.^[13]

Books[link]

• Entangled Minds: Extrasensory Experiences in a Quantum Reality (2006)
• Captain of My Ship, Master of My Soul: Living With Guidance (2001), with F. Holmes Atwater, Joseph McMoneagle, Skip Atwater
• The Conscious Universe: The Scientific Truth of Psychic Phenomena (1997, HarperCollins). Note: in Great Britain this book is entitled The Noetic Universe.

See also[link]

• Parapsychology

References[link]

External links[link]

• Dean Radin's official website - Contains a blog and various resources to do with his work
• Dean Radin articles & MP3 audio provided by Shift in Action, sponsored by the Institute of Noetic Sciences
• [3] Dean Radin Lecture Entangled Minds at Theosophy Hall, NYC Part 1 of 2
• [4] Dean Radin Lecture Entangled Minds at Theosophy Hall, NYC Part 2 of 2
• [5] - Interview with Radin responds to criticisms of Global Consciousness Project