Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect
Daryl J. Bem
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 100, No. 3
Summary
The most-discussed experimental parapsychology paper of the past 20 years. Cornell social psychologist Daryl Bem ran 9 experiments with over 1,000 participants testing for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect — effectively time-reversing standard psychological paradigms so that responses preceded the stimuli. Mean effect size d=0.22 across all experiments. Published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the highest-impact psychology journals, it catalyzed the replication crisis debate and forced mainstream psychology to examine its own methodological standards.
Abstract
The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual's current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by time-reversing well-established psychological effects so that the individual's responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. The mean effect size (d) in psi performance across all 9 experiments was 0.22, and all but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.
Citation
Daryl J. Bem. (2011). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. Vol. 100. No. 3. DOI: 10.1037/a0021524
https://doi.org/10.1037/a0021524Related Papers
Parapsychology and Researching the UAP Experience
Eric Ouellet · 2025
The Mystery of Elusiveness
Bertrand Meheust · 2025
Consciousness and the double-slit interference pattern: Six experiments
Dean Radin et al. · 2012
On the Quantum Mechanics of Consciousness, with Application to Anomalous Phenomena
Robert G. Jahn et al. · 1986