Psychic Twitter fails to impress

Prof Richard Wiseman

Though he’s not a believer in paranormal phenomena, Prof Richard Wiseman has probably done more than any other modern parapsychologist to popularise the subject. His latest enterprise is a mass “remote viewing” experiment on Twitter, the social messaging service. He has just announced the results and they show that all four trials were misses.

Which is all very entertaining and apparently “scientific” – New Scientist magazine teamed up with him on the experiment – but I’m sure I’m not alone in questioning whether the experiment had any value, apart from boosting the already high profile of Prof Wiseman, who’s also an amateur magician whose speciality is debunking Victorian dark-room seances.

I’m going to leave it to others to criticise the protocol of this experiment, in which over 1,000 people from various parts of the world participated, but I will make just a couple of observations.

First, was this really a “remote viewing” experiment? It did involve Richard visiting a randomly-chosen site and concentrating on it for half an hour, during which time participants were invited to post their “psychic” impressions on Twitter. Then a photo of the target alongside four others was posted to his website and visitors were invited to choose which one they believed he had visited, regardless of whether that choice coincided with their earlier feelings.

If this were a “remote viewing” experiment, I would have expected it to be more about the surroundings in which he found himself, perhaps even pinpointing the location, rather than being about images that represented only part of that landscape.

For example, for fun I took part in one of the trials (though I readily acknowledge that I don’t lay claim to having any psychic powers) and my Tweet records an impression I had of the Tower of London. It was no surprise to me to find that none of the pictures on that particular trial related to the famous London landmark. But supposing Richard had been sitting nearby. Would my Tweet have been counted as a “hit”? The experimental design and judging, it seems to me, were far too loose.

After analysing the results of four trials, and finding that the majority choice in each case was not the target, Richard declared: “So the study didn’t support the existence of remote viewing, and suggested that those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and a target.”

This led to the Press Association putting out a story under the headline: “Twitter experiment debunks myth” which claimed 7,000 took part, whereas Richard puts the figure at more than 1,000 – hey, that’s how myths develop!

But the media and everyone else (including Richard) ought to realise that experiments of this nature would only produce positive results if at least one-fifth of the population were blessed with psychic abilities and were able to “tune in” to a remote location. I don’t know of any parapsychologist who would make such a claim. Psychic experiments that produce positive results are usually conducted with individuals who show a special aptitude and they are very much in the minority.

In other words, it was an experiments designed to reinforce Prof Richard Wiseman’s well-known scepticism.

It could be that among those taking part were some people who do have the ability (this is just speculation, of course) but their results would be swamped by the mass of negative results from others. Yet I’m not aware of any attempt by Richard Wiseman to search for such individuals from within his data and conduct further tests.

What is certain is that the experiment has generated enough publicity for Richard to be looking for other Twitter opportunities to add to his high profile exploits. What is equally certain is that it has not told us anything about remote viewing that we didn’t already know.

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