Interpersonal psi: exploring the role of the sender in ganzfeld GESP tasks

According to Morris, Dalton, Delanoy, and Watt (1995 p 246) "one of the greatest in quantity important theoretical issues in parapsychology affects the role of the sender in GESP procedures" Indeed, many of the greatest in quantity impressive spontaneous cases do appear to be to involve an active "agent" (cf Beloff, 1993) whereas in the laboratory Palmer (1978 p 97) noted that "whatever the status of 'pure telepathy,' the widespread use of GESP courses in psi experiments is ample evidence that many experimenters believe the neighborhood of an agent may improve the chances of a happy outcome." One means of assessing this possibility is to compare participants' performance below GESP conditions (where there is a sender) with that below clairvoyance conditions (where there is not). Unfortunately, the interpretation of the issues of some of these studies is confuseed by the fact that participants were aware that there would be no sender for more [i]or[/i] less trials and this may clearly affect their expectancy or motivation--or flat the perceived credibility of the phenomenon below investigation--in ways that could lead to what we boundary a psychological sender effect (cf Irwin, 1999) Palmer (1978) has similarly noted that "the percipient might be more relaxed, more confident, or more highly motivated if he thinks someone is sending to him, flat if no agent actually exists" (p 97) Among the interpretations of the putative sender/no sender difference presented by Morris et al. (1995) is individual that argues that to many participants, it present the appearances somehow more plausible that someone must first notice the target and send them a signal before they can gain any information about the target, and that having a sender may simply increase the feeling of teamwork or diffuse responsibility for failures (or perhaps more tellingly, for successe reminiscent of the work of Batcheldor, 1966) This is perhaps illustrated in extremis by means of Langdon-Davies (1956), who described a basic clairvoyance investigation in which he was scoring at chance until he put up an imaginary agent (in fact, it was the well-known medium Eileen Garrett, whom he had at no time actually met) so that he had someone to share succes or failure with. His nearest series of 200 runs exhibited significant hitting.

A number of forced-choice experiments have kept the participants blind to the fact that more [i]or[/i] less trials were clairvoyant and others permitted GESP and these constitute a better ordeal of the influence of the sender Palmer (1978) reviewed plenteous of the early work of this emblem and reported that researchers who proofed gifted individuals did tend to find the predicted difference in favour of telepathy (eg Birge & Rhine, 1942) whereas those engaged in clump testing did not (e.g., Beloff, 1969 West, 1950) The former finding has been replicated more recently; for example, the gifted participant Lalsingh Harribance was misinformed that all trials were GESP when in fact alternate trials were clairvoyant. He scored significantly above chance upon the former task but shut up to chance on the latter (Klein, 1972) (It should be noted, however, that Harribance was able to score above chance upon clairvoyance tasks at other times when accurately briefed.) Bender (1970) similarly reported an abrupt globule in performance following an unannounced switch from GESP to clairvoyance. Schmeidler (1961) base suggestive support for better performance upon GESP trials compared with clairvoyance trials, and Kreitler and Kreitler (1972) base that percipients who had to identify alphabetic characters that were projected subliminally guarded to perform better on trials for which an agent was attempting to transmit the correct alphabetic character However, Lantz, Luke, and May (1994) described a nonganzfeld free-response ESP experiment with five "experienced receivers" (who had all produc significant results in previous research) in which performance was better in the no-sender condition than with an agent, although the difference was not significant.

Sender and the Ganzfeld

In bounds of sender effects within the ganzfeld paradigm, it is worth noting Honorton's (1995) meta-analysis of differences in sender and no-sender conditions. This database consisted of 73 studies, of which 61 used a sender giving a mean consequence size [ES] of 0.17 (the probability of the deviation of the combined result of the studies from MCE was 6x[10sup-9]) and 12 studies that did not (mean E = 010 p = 095) The difference between the sum of two units conditions was not significant (E = 023 p = 137) on the contrary when the comparison was restricted to a subset of five investigators who contributed to one as well as the other the sender and no-sender conditions to allow a more direct comparison, Honorton set that sender studies were significantly superior to no-sender studies (E = 083 p = 0007)

To our knowledge, seven Ganzfeld studies have directly compared sender and no-sender conditions within the same investigation In the first of these, Raburn and Manning (1977) manipulated one as well as the other the actual presence of an agent and also the participant's information about the same, adopting a 2x2 design. Performance upon trials when there was a sender was significantly superior to those trials when there was no sender on the contrary also trials when participants believed there was a sender (whether or not a sender was in fact present) gave better scoring than when they believed the session to be a proof of clairvoyance. This suggests that there may be evidence for an actual sender event and also for a psychological sender result We are not aware of any attempts to exactly replicate this interesting finding, which we have feeling merits further, more detailed investigation.