Fringe-ology (9 page)

The pseudoscience claim is often made of psi. But is there any data to support it? Well, in 2003, French sociologist M. C. Mousseau compared ten markers of good science with the work of parapsychologists. Her aim was to see whether psi researchers really are practicing pseudoscience.

She defined a
real
scientist as one who gathers or uses quantitative data, seeks empirical confirmation or disconfirmation, looks for correlations, relies on logic, proposes and tries new hypotheses, admits gaps in the current database, and is consistent with scientific work in other fields. She then reviewed the work in four “fringe” journals studying the paranormal and found them to be rigorously consistent in employing the methods of good science. In fact, when comparing the “fringe” journals to mainstream journals in physics, psychology, and optics, she found “no qualitative difference” between them. The fringe journals published fewer experiments, which she attributes to the relatively small number of practicing parapsychologists. (I saw just that, firsthand, in Seattle.) They do, however, publish a comparable amount of empirical data—and also question their own findings with an admirable openness. In fact, while parapsychologists regularly publish “null” results—studies in which no evidence of psi is found—the mainstream journals Mousseau studied published nothing but confirmatory data. In sum, then, when skeptics accuse parapsychologists of practicing pseudoscience, they are either lying; uneducated about what the parapsychologists are doing; uneducated about standard scientific practice; or, as I'm about to argue, engaged in a prolonged bout of self-deceit.

Chris Carter's
Parapsychology and the Skeptics
neatly captures the history of the schism between the two camps. That said, for the purposes of this book, the situation can be assessed with a few telling war stories, many of which include James Randi. Often called the godfather of skepticism, Randi has been a fount of both entertainment and valuable lessons in critical thinking. Think of him as a loud, small, gray-haired, and angry Velma from
Scooby-Doo
—always eager to pull the sheet off the supposed ghost and reveal the huckster within. He has successfully debunked psychic surgeons and faith healers. But far too often, he mixes his good work with bad, undermining the movement he purports to lead.

Does telepathy exist? Randi would say there is no valid evidence for it. But the truth is far more complicated. There is in fact good evidence to suggest psi is real. But as yet, there is no scientific consensus. What the ongoing furor over psi demonstrates, however, is that even rationalists can come to look like believers—motivated less by the data in front of them than by the worldviews closest to their hearts.

The foundation for the modern skeptical movement was laid by CSICOP, the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. CSICOP was founded by humanist philosopher Paul Kurtz in 1976, when Kurtz asked fellow skeptic Marcello Truzzi to join him as co-chairman. Truzzi published his own privately circulated newsletter at the time,
The Zetetic,
which served as a forum for skeptics and proponents of anomalous phenomena to engage in an ongoing dialogue. In contrast, Kurtz's own publication,
The Humanist,
seemed too shrill by half—tossing religious claims and well-controlled psi experiments into the same large dust bin. It is perhaps not surprising, then, that Truzzi was removed as editor of the group's new publication and left CSICOP shortly after joining it, convinced the board was more interested in promoting a polemical agenda than engaging in real inquiry.

Over the years, though he remained a skeptic, Truzzi thought the researchers turning up positive data for psi were on the whole ethical and practicing science. But “the problem with CSICOP is that it has made debunking more important than impartial inquiry,” he later wrote. He even began using the term
pseudoskeptics
to describe the attitude of the worst offenders on CSICOP's board.

Things might have quieted down with Truzzi gone. But the internal purging grew bloodier. Dennis Rawlins, an astronomer enlisted into CSICOP, was the next to find his head on the chopping block. In a 1981
Fate
magazine essay, Rawlins portrayed CSICOP as a gang of fanatics. And according to Rawlins's article, they began revealing themselves behind the scenes, in 1975, as CSICOP was forming.

The controversy started when prominent French psychologists Michel and Francoise Gauquelin presented evidence for what they dubbed the “Mars effect,” which claimed a disproportionate number of European sports champions had been born with Mars rising in their astrological signs. Kurtz published a pair of damning essays on the subject in the
Humanist
, which mishandled some of the statistical fine points along the way. The Gauquelins, in turn, threatened legal action.

Kurtz struck a deal with the neo-astrologers. Their data would be submitted for a new analysis under terms agreeable to both parties. Whatever the result, Kurtz would publish the findings. According to Rawlins, he warned Kurtz that the terms of the new test would probably still yield evidence for a Mars effect. But Kurtz blew him off. And the new analysis, just as Rawlins feared, turned out in favor of the neo-astrologers. Rawlins felt not the least bit convinced the Mars effect was real. (There was an anomaly, he felt, in the sample the statistics were based on.) But he did feel a rationalist organization should keep the agreements it makes.

Kurtz?

Not so much.

According to Rawlins, Kurtz and CSICOP engaged in a massive cover-up of the study to which they had agreed. They didn't publish the findings for two years, and when they did the result was a kind of statistical hash—attempting to explain away the Gauquelins' apparent success. Stunned, Rawlins went into overdrive, alerting other key members of CSICOP. But he found that the organization was being steered along a strictly political path: His objections were based in sound science; problem was, sound science just didn't make CSICOP look good.

Rawlins felt pressured to keep quiet, and Kurtz was in a panic over Rawlins's dissent. “I'll do anything to avoid trouble,” he said, according to Rawlins.

Even more telling, when Rawlins confronted James Randi, he asked him why all the chicanery was in order. Why not simply print the study everyone agreed to and move on?

Writes Rawlins, “The reply was ever the same: We can't let the mystics rejoice.”

This isn't even a remotely scientific motivation, and it reveals the extent to which CSICOP was more devoted to spreading a worldview, like religious leaders, than practicing scientific methods. Randi even spoke to Rawlins in language that likened CSICOP to a cult. “Drink the Kool-Aid, Dennis,” Rawlins says he chided him, referring to the Jonestown, Guyana, “massacre” in 1978, in which nine hundred cult members killed themselves by drinking poisoned Kool-Aid.

After Rawlins forced this debacle to a head, the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal voted to discontinue any further scientific investigations. From that point forward, they have been literally just a debunking and propaganda society. But their methods, and their unofficial mantra—
We can't let the mystics rejoice
—too often seem to describe the modern skeptical movement. For decades, in fact, the CSICOP crowd has been the public face of skepticism—names like Philip Klass, James McGaha, and of course James Randi popping up on our TV screens whenever something needs explaining.

The trouble for those of us who come in contact with a paranormal claim in the media is that this overzealous gang of self-proclaimed rationalists dominates one-half of the conversation. They are usually contextualized as the people who coldly appraise the data. But the skeptic, too, comes in bearing a bias that can render her or him just as untrustworthy as any street-corner psychic. In fact, in the wake of Rawlins's charges, other analyses appeared that backed up his account. The most damning was that of another former CSICOP fellow, Richard Kammann, who argued that the same psychological dynamic that accounts for irrational belief was operating in the skeptics by his side: “A process of
subjective validation
took over,” he writes, “which I have outlined in
The
Psychology of the Psychic
to account for the existence of false beliefs in the face of contrary evidence. The model says that once a belief or expectation is found, especially one that resolves uncomfortable uncertainty, it biases the observer to notice new information that confirms the belief, and to discount evidence to the contrary. This self-perpetuating mechanism consolidates the original error and builds up an overconfidence in which the arguments of opponents are seen as too fragmentary to undo the adopted belief.”

Right out of the gate, it seems, the skeptical movement had run into the barriers inside their own heads. And don't worry, we'll get to the psychics a bit later on that very same score. But for now, I want to travel a bit deeper into the skeptical rabbit hole.

In the early 1970s the famous Israeli magician-cum-paranormalist Uri Geller was winning frenzied headlines. He made numerous media appearances, seemingly bending spoons with the power of his mind and perceiving information at a distance. Subsequent research into his abilities conducted and filmed at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI) yielded mixed results. He could
not
bend spoons under controlled conditions. He
did
score far above chance in remote viewing experiments. James Randi subsequently investigated, and in his 1982 book
Flim-Flam!,
he argues that films made of the Geller experiments were not shot, as had been claimed, by famous
Life
war photographer Zev Pressman. The films credit Pressman as cameraman without his knowledge or permission, claimed Randi. Even more alarming, Pressman supposedly told others at SRI that the successful Geller tests were conducted after he had gone home for the day. In sum, writes Randi, “[Pressman] knew nothing about most of what appeared under his name, and he disagreed with the part that he did know about”—namely, that Geller displayed any psychic functioning at all.

These would have been damning facts—if they were true. Pressman's own account was subsequently captured by writer Guy Lyon Playfair: “The ‘revelations' [Randi] attributes to me are pure fiction.” According to writer Jonathan Margolis, Pressman maintained that the videos were authentic throughout his life. Randi further quotes a physicist named Arthur Hebard accusing the SRI scientists of lying about positive results of paranormal experiments he himself had witnessed. But, well, he
also
denied Randi's statements. He told Paul H. Smith, the remote viewing Texan I met when I first arrived in Seattle, that he never would have accused anyone of lying. (Smith further explains that Hebard's account of what happened at the experiment better matches the parapsychologists' report than it does Randi's.) We are left, then, not only questioning Geller but also his chief critic. Randi, however, is far from the only skeptic whose motivations require investigation.

Susan Blackmore is something of a lioness in skeptical circles, a prize not only because she writes with grace and wit but because of her compelling autobiography. Dear Susan, it seems, was once one of
them
—a paranormalist. She has claimed she wanted to be a “famous parapsychologist.” And in her essay, “The Elusive Open Mind: Ten Years of Negative Research in Parapsychology,” she writes convincingly of her frustrating inability to demonstrate a psi effect. By her own account, her failed experiments convinced her that the skeptics were right: psi is the ghost in the machine—and no, ghosts don't exist either.

That really is a compelling autobiography. But her tale is not without its problems. For starters, researcher Rick E. Berger went looking through Blackmore's work and found the ten years of research she claimed in her article was actually conducted in just two or three years. Further, when her entire body of research was taken into account, she had found a demonstrable psi effect, with odds against chance of 20,000 to 1. Berger found that Blackmore had thrown out her own positive studies, ostensibly for shoddy methodology, but kept her negative results even when they demonstrated the same control problems.

To be clear, Berger and Blackmore both contend her work was so poorly designed as to be worthless in drawing a conclusion about the existence of psi (Blackmore differs with him on several of his other criticisms, too). But I do think we gain great psychological insight into the believer/skeptic dynamic by considering just what in hell Blackmore must have been thinking all these years. Why would she disregard her own positive results? Why wouldn't she simply improve her controls and keep working?

There may be a clue in her desire to be “famous.” I met no stars in Seattle. I was one of a small handful of people in attendance without a direct professional connection to the field. Many of the presentations were attended by just two dozen people. By contrast, Randi's annual Amazing Meeting, the kind of skeptic's fest at which Blackmore is a regular, draws a huge crowd of bloggers, writers, and podcasters—and their fans. The July 2010 Amazing Meeting drew more than one thousand people, roughly ten times the number that attended the Parapsychological Association's tepid fête. The woman who wanted to be a famous parapsychologist may simply have found the going too hard, the prospects of becoming famous too remote. In a 1995
Skeptical Inquirer
article she states, “I am skeptical because believing in psi does not get me anywhere.” She goes on to argue that believing in psi doesn't help her understand the universe or other mysteries, but I wonder: cognitive psychologists operate on the premise that the behaviors we engage in, the beliefs we hold, all provide some kind of payoff—be it financial, physical, or emotional. From this point of view, Blackmore's famous conversion to skepticism may simply have offered her the payoffs she desired. Skepticism got her to where she wanted to be.