In a tweet on August 16, 2019, psychologist Richard Landers asked, “Who’s surprised that these paragraphs simply disappeared wholesale from Daryl Bem’s 2019 2ed revision of his chapter in Sternberg’s ‘Guide to Publishing in Psychology’?” The deleted parts basically amount to an endorsement of p-hacking and data massage, with Bem explicitly urging authors to “Go on a fishing expedition for something— anything—interesting.”
Bem is a name well known to thousands of undergraduates as a coauthor of the famous Hilgard’s Introduction to Psychology. But he is clearly in trouble, and so he should be. These omitted paragraphs are bad enough, but he has form. In a 2017 SKEPTICAL INQUIRER article, psychologist Stuart Vyse highlighted the dangers of p-hacking, the highly dubious practice of hunting around in one’s data until you find something “significant” (i.e., statisti cally significant, preferably with p below the 0.5 level). That dubious practice, he says, was once common but is now largely acknowledged as unacceptable (Vyse 2017). Only Bem still seems to think it’s okay, saying of his 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?’” (Engber 2017).
This latest scandal for psychology goes straight to my heart because of the harm Bem has done to parapsychology—and hence to the public’s beliefs about psychic phenomena. In decades of research Bem has claimed, again and again, that there is solid evidence for psi in the ganzfeld and, more recently, for “feeling the future.” This involves a type of experiment on premonition in which, it is claimed, emotional responses to im ages can be detected before the person sees them.