The Operator Question, and Life After the Laboratory

The claim that individual operators differed reliably from one another sat at the centre of both PEAR's case and the case against it. If the deviations were a genuine effect of intention, one would expect people to vary in it, as they vary in every other human capacity, and Dunne argued that the observed spread of operator signatures was exactly what a real psychological variable looks like.

Critics, including the analysis prepared for the National Research Council review in 1988, made the opposite reading: an aggregate result carried by a handful of high-scoring participants out of many is the classic appearance of chance variation combined with the freedom to analyse subgroups, and the laboratory's failure to pre-specify which operators and which conditions would be tested made the two possibilities impossible to separate after the fact. Dunne's response, that the effect was too small and too dependent on individual engagement to survive a rigidly prescribed protocol, is the same defence offered across parapsychology and carries the same weakness, since it predicts that better controls will always weaken the result. When Princeton closed the laboratory in 2007 she became president of the International Consciousness Research Laboratories, which continues to publish work in this vein outside a university setting.