Knowtex

the listserv for the Society for a Science of Clinical Psychology recently brought my attention to an interesting and highly important story: the saga of attempts by researchers to publish replication studies (particularly when such studies do not report results consistent with the original study).

Scientific research is difficult to do well, and people are flawed and biased. As Carl Sagan noted, science is not just an ideal abstraction, but is very much a human endeavor, and as such is messy and imperfect.

Bad news for Miss Cleo and other alleged clairvoyants: A new study has failed to find evidence that psychic ability is real.

In 2010, Daryl Bem of Cornell University published a paper which claimed subjects could recall certain words in an exercise better if they were then shown the words again - after they had handed in their test.

Chris French: Science progresses when repeat studies back or refute previous research, but getting 'replications' published can be a nightmare.

Recently, a spat of integrity issues has struck our top journal, JPSP. Daryl Bem published an article showing evidence for the existence of ESP, which has caused much consternation and embarrassment.

ONE of the great strengths of science is that it can fix its own mistakes. “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong,” the astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said. “That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.”

It was one of last year's most astonishing scientific stories: a leading psychology journal accepted a paper presenting evidence for precognition – an ability to perceive future events. What's more, mainstream psychologists had pored over a preprint of the paper and found no fatal flaw.

Despite critics, Prof. Emeritus Daryl Bem, psychology, believes in extrasensory perception in the form of premonition. ESP is made of four different phenomena: telepathy, remote viewing, precognition or premonition.

Ben Goldacre: Scientific journals can be as bad as newspapers in preferring eye-catching stories to negative findings