Sensing the sending of SMS messages: an automated test
Explore: The Journal of Science and Healing (2009) 5, 272-276
by Rupert Sheldrake, Perrott-Warrick Project with Leonidas Avraamides, and Matous Novák
Mobifi Ltd, London
ABSTRACT
Objective: To carry out automated experiments to test for telepathy in connection with text messages.
Method: Subjects, aged from 11 to 72, registered online with the names and mobile telephone numbers of 3 senders. A computer selected a sender at random, and asked him to send an SMS message to the subject via the computer. The computer then asked the subject to guess the sender’s name, and delivered the message after receiving the guess. A test consisted of 9 trials.
Interactions evaluated: The effects of subjects’ sex and age and the effects of delay on guesses.
Main outcome measure: The proportion of correct guesses of the sender’s name, compared with the 33.3% mean chance expectation.
Results: In 886 trials there were 336 hits (37.9%), significantly above the 33.3% chance level (p = .001). The hit rate in incomplete tests was 38.4% (p = .03) showing that optional stopping could not explain the positive results. Most tests were unsupervised, which left open the possibility of cheating, but high-scoring subjects were retested under filmed conditions, where no cheating was detected, with 19 hits in 43 trials (44.2%; p = 0.09).
Key words: SMS messages, telepathy, ESP, automated test, internet experiment.
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