>[!citation] >Bem D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. *Journal of personality and social psychology*, 100(3), 407–425. https://doi.org/bn9nn6 >[!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. >[!note] Notes >Bem reported nine experiments (N ≈ 1,000) suggesting precognition effects (so-called retroactive influences on cognition and affect) with an average effect size of d ≈ 0.22. > >[[Alcock, 2011]] refuted the experimental methods. [[Wagenmakers et al., 2011]] reanalyzed Bem's data with a default Bayesian *t* test and showed that the evidence for psi is weak to nonexistent. [[Francis, 2012]] found evidence of publication bias. [[Schimmack, 2012]] found evidence of p-hacking. [[Ritchie et al., 2012]] and [[Galak, 2012]] both failed to replicate the findings. [[Frazier, 2013]] summarized the criticisms. > >[[Bem et al., 2016|Bem et al. (2016)]] subsequently published a meta-analysis of 90 experiments and claimed "decisive evidence" with an effect size of 0.09 with his own experiments included, and 0.06 without. > >[[Kekecs et al., 2023]] reproduced Bem's experiment 1 and found a no-greater than chance result (49.89% successful guesses vs. 53.07% for Bem). > >Bem was quoted in a [[Daryl Bem Proved ESP Is Real. Which Means Science Is Broken.|2017 Slate article]] saying: > >>[!quote] > >“I’m all for rigor,” he continued, “but I prefer other people do it. I see its importance—it’s fun for some people—but I don’t have the patience for it.” It’s been hard for him, he said, to move into a field where the data count for so much. “If you looked at all my past experiments, they were always rhetorical devices. I gathered data to show how my point would be made. I used data as a point of persuasion, and I never really worried about, ‘Will this replicate or will this not?’ ”