Divinity Atlas
Three Disputed Facts, One Career, One Experiment That Would Not Replicate
Daryl Bem carries three facts marked debated or debunked in this atlas, the single most internally contested entries a figure of his kind holds. Read individually rather than counted, the three are not one dispute restated but three connected episodes of the same career turn: a mainstream reputation, an earlier parapsychology claim that did not survive scrutiny either, and the paper that made his name synonymous with a result nobody else could reproduce.
A Mainstream Career, and an Earlier Claim
Daryl Bem is a Cornell social psychologist whose mainstream reputation rests on self-perception theory. In 1994 he co-authored with Charles Honorton a Psychological Bulletin paper presenting the autoganzfeld results, a parapsychology claim, to a mainstream audience; that paper was answered in the same journal by Milton and Wiseman in 1999, who found no effect across thirty later studies. The dispute this atlas records over that key experiment is not new, and it predates the paper that made him famous by seventeen years.
The Paper That Would Not Replicate
In 2011 Bem published Feeling the Future in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, nine experiments reporting a retroactive influence effect. The paper is real and was peer reviewed, and the dispute over its findings is live: Ritchie, Wiseman and French reported three failed direct replications in 2012 and Galak and colleagues seven more, and this atlas marks the original nine-experiment claim as debunked on that record. Bem and collaborators answered in 2015 with a meta-analysis reporting a small positive effect across a wider set of studies, which critics attribute to publication bias rather than a genuine effect; that meta-analytic counter-claim remains disputed rather than accepted. One scientist, one early claim that did not hold and one later claim that made the same pattern famous a second time.
Where To Read More
- Daryl BemParapsychology & Psychical ResearchThe single subject of this essay; three facts tracing one career turn rather than one dispute restated