“An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning”

Last updated on: August 9, 2025 at 1:31 pm by Dan Peterson

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“An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning” 2025-08-09T13:31:22-06:00 Dan Peterson

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A stream at Thanksgiving Gardens, not far from where the 2025 FAIR Conference was held on Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday of this past week. (Wikimedia Commons public domain photograph)

Here’s another Deseret News report from the 2025 FAIR Conference: “‘This is a woman’s church’: Panel discusses lived experience of Latter-day Saint women: FAIR conference discussion explores how service, ministry and worship lift women”

The science library at the University of California at Irvine (Wikimedia Commons public domain image)

At the conclusion of my blog entry from yesterday, I passed on an invitation from Dr. Paul Smith to the pseudonymous occasional Peterson Obsession Board commenter “Physics Guy.” Dr. Smith indicated his openness to an exchange of emails on the topic of remote viewing and extrasensory perception, either public or private. I’m slightly disappointed but not even slightly surprised to report that “Physics Guy” has declined the invitation. Essentially, he says, the subject is beneath his notice. (Others on the board have joined helpfully in with ad hominem attacks and cheerful character assassination, not only against me [of course!], but accusing Dr. Smith of being a greedy con-artist, etc. and so forth.)

It’s entirely “Physics Guy’s” right, of course, to devote his time, energy, and attention to anything he chooses, or not to do so. That’s fine. While I’m thinking about the subject, though, I would like to pass on a link to an article that I meant to read some time back but then forgot about, but which has now risen again in my awareness and which I will now soon read.

Jessica Utts is a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, a professor emerita at the University of California, Irvine (where she chaired the Department of Statistics), and a past president (2016) of the American Statistical Association. She is also the author of, among other things, “An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning”:

Abstract: Research on psychic functioning, conducted over a two-decade period, is examined to determine whether the phenomenon has been scientifically established. A secondary question is whether it is useful for government purposes. The primary work examined in this report was government-sponsored research conducted at Stanford Research Institute (later known as SRI International) and at Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). Using the standards applied to any other area of science, it is concluded that psychic functioning has been well established. The statistical results of the studies examined are far beyond what is expected by chance. Arguments that these results could be due to methodological flaws in the experiments are soundly refuted. Effects of a magnitude similar to those found in government-sponsored reasearch at SRI and SAIC have been replicated at a number of laboratories around the world. Such consistency cannot be readily explained by claims of flaws or fraud. The magnitude of psychic functioning exhibited appears to be in the range between what social scientists call a small and a medium effect. It is thus reliable enough to be replicated in properly conducted experiments, with sufficient trials to achieve the long-run statistical results needed for replicability. A number of other patterns have been found, suggestive of how to conduct more productive experiments and to produce applied psychic functioning. For instance, it does not appear that a sender is needed. Precognition, in which the relevant information is known to no one until a future time, appears to work quite well. Recent experiments suggest that, if there is a psychic sense, it works much as our other five senses do, by detecting change. Physicists are currently grappling with an understanding of time, and it may be that a psychic sense scans the future for major change, much as our eyes scan the environment for visual change or our ears allow us to respond to sudden changes in sound. [Utts, J. (2018). An Assessment of the Evidence for Psychic Functioning. Journal of Parapsychology, 82, Suppl., 118-146. http://doi.org/10.30891/jopar.2018S.01.10]

In the meantime, though, here’s an interview with Professor Utts that some, at least, may find interesting: “ESP – Evaluating Statistics For Psychic Phenomena | Stats + Stories Episode 11 /October 29, 2014″ I share a few quotations from the transcript of that interview:

“It makes it very difficult for the science to get a fair hearing because most people frankly, are not interested in what the science has to say because they’ve already made up their mind. Almost everybody already has an opinion on whether or not this stuff is real and the people who are convinced it’s real are just as problematic as the people who are convinced there’s no way it can be real because neither side really wants to look at data; they think they already know the answer.”

“My bottom line is if we were to treat this area like we treat other areas of science, we would be totally convinced that psychic abilities are real. There’s so much evidence out there, the statistical evidence, we look at things that are called p-values, the p-values are so tiny here that if it’s only chance…suppose that there really is no such thing, the probability of getting the results that we’ve seen so far just by chance are astronomically small. So there really is a lot of strong statistical evidence. On the other hand, it’s obviously not a strong effect otherwise we would all know it existed, so it’s a weak effect, just like things like the effect of aspirin on preventing heart attacks is a weak effect, you don’t see that in everyday life, you can’t just see that by people walking around on the street. So it’s a weak effect, but it’s consistently statistically sound.”

“[L]et me differentiate between two types of people. A skeptic and what I’ll call a denier. A denier essentially has zero prior belief probability that this could be real, so let’s ignore them for now. Let’s just go with a true skeptic who has an open mind and will allow some possibility for this to be real.”

“[T]hat is, to me, one of the real scandals of science here because this, as I said, needs to be investigated scientifically and the deniers, mainly, not the skeptics, but the true deniers really do rely on ad hominem attacks and they try to ruin the reputations of people that get involved in this. There’s a Nobel Laureate in the UK who strongly believes this is real and has tried to do research on it and has run into all kinds of problems with his reputation being attacked and he’s a Nobel Laureate. So what young scientist is going to want to risk their reputation if that’s what’s happening to a Nobel Laureate, so to me that’s a huge disservice to science in general to do that kind of attack? We really ought to be allowed to investigate this without that kind of a stigma placed on it.”

Let me say, in conclusion, that I’m not firmly committed to a belief in extrasensory perception although, at the current moment, I’m inclined on the basis of empirical data to think it weak but, at least in some cases, real. Moreover, my religious faith doesn’t require the existence of psychic abilities and, if they were proven not to exist, my religious views would remain unaffected. I suspect that, if they do exist, they are natural abilities and not “supernatural” abilities — though I also think that, if they exist, they may say something very significant about the nature of mind and consciousness that is not only absolutely compatible with theistic religious faith but perhaps indirectly supportive of it in its general outlines.

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