Results of the first psi experiment
The following describes the results obtained from the first experiment.
If you have not yet taken the second experiment, please go to second psi experiment
First of all, the answer you’ve all waited for. The ring was in the fifth (rightmost) box. The result can be verified by hashing with SHA1 the following text and comparing it to the value of the hash string found in the experiment text:
Now, before diving into more detailed statistics, I’d like to present some general statements. I’ve received around 1500 answers to experiment 1. I’ve manually cleaned several answers where people stated that they used some very analytical skill, like which box was lower or by using reverse psychological bias, although I didn’t select the box by myself but randomly. That brought the number of legit answers to 1494. About 83% of people also stated their age.
As some people mentioned in the Mind-Energy.net website and in your remarks, the experiment was badly designed. I’ve made two large mistakes in the experiment design:
- The numbered boxes, positioned in row, created strong psychological bias towards some boxes. Although I mentioned that the box was selected randomly by rolling a dice, people still couldn’t loose that psychological bias. In fact, as you’ll see below, box 2 was selected by about 33% and box 4 by about 30% of participant, much above the expected 20%.
- The boxes were colorful and that distracted and created additional bias. I believe that this bias was less strong that the positional, but still people wrote me that colors interfered with their decision making process.
The total answers distribution and by gender are as in the following table:
As you can see the strong biases really disturb the ability to easily answer if there was any psi effect.
An interesting statistics that the research showed was the answer to the question of subjective level of psi abilities of the participants. These could select of the four choices: No abilities, Believe have some abilities, Believe have strong abilities or Know have strong abilities. The distribution of the answers to this question showed that 54% of men believed that had some level of ability against 63% of women. These numbers only represent the sampled population of experiment participant and might not be correct for another sample group. So, participating women were more likely to believe that they possess some kind of psi abilities. The total data table is below:
The age distribution of the participant who passed this information is as below:
Now, for a little deeper analysis. The table below displays the distribution of the answer results by the reported methods used. The form had 5 preset selections and an Other Method open field. The preset selections were Guess, Intuition, Visualization, Remote Viewing (RV) and Dowsing. Dowsing in my definition included finger scanning or running palm of the image, like I proposed doing in the experiment description. I moved several people who answered Other but wrote finger scanning and similar explanations into the Dowsing section. Most other Other Methods included people who did combinations of meditation and dowsing and other combined methods which I couldn't move to any specific one category.
The other table below it (Percentage of Total Average), shows how each method in each answer was relatively to the answer's total average percentage, seen on the rightmost answer. So, numbers around 100% are not interesting.
What interesting can be seen from these tables? That the advanced methods, like Visualization and Remote Viewing had much higher success rates relatively to other methods or not using any method at all.. Guessing was worse than using the intuition. Interestingly, Dowsing was much worse on correct answers. I believe that dowsing is very strongly influenced by the conscious thoughts. From personal experience I know that it's very hard to disconnect from your thoughts while dowsing for answers, especially with techniques like finger or palm scanning. Yet, dowsers were less affected by the general (positional) bias, as they also showed lower percentages for answers 2 and 4.
Similar statistics is interesting when comparing subjective levels of psi abilities as reported by the participants. The following two tables show the distribution of answers by subjective abilities. And below a similar table as above, about relative numbers to the total average for each method.
What can be seen from the tables. That people who reported that they know that they have strong abilities were about 40% better than average. People who selected that the believe that they have strong abilities were also less subjective to psychological bias but answered 1 much more than 5. So, although no final conclusion can be made, it seems that people who believe or know that they have some psi abilities are less prone to psychological biases and can actually answer better than the average masses.
You are invited to discuss the results on the Mind-Energy.net website at Results to Psi Experiment 1 published.
If you want to do your own analysis on the data, contact me using Contact Form.