A Statistician Reading the Psi Literature

Utts came to the subject from statistics rather than from parapsychology, and her contribution has been to apply the ordinary machinery of meta-analysis to a body of work that had usually been assessed by whether the assessor found the conclusion plausible. Her argument in the 1995 review commissioned by the American Institutes for Research was narrow and worth stating precisely. She did not claim to have shown that information travels without a sensory channel. She claimed that the accumulated remote viewing trials showed an effect size that was small, consistent across laboratories, and larger than the effect sizes routinely accepted as established in other areas of applied research, and that the pattern was not what a file-drawer artefact produces. Her professional standing in her own discipline is independent of the controversy: she has taught and written on statistical literacy for non-specialists, held chairs at the University of California at Davis and at Irvine, and was elected president of the American Statistical Association. That combination is part of why her 1995 report was difficult for the field to dismiss and equally difficult for it to accept. It also explains why the argument about her report has been conducted almost entirely in the language of effect sizes and meta-analytic method rather than in the older language of credible witnesses, which is a change in how this whole subject is disputed and not only a change in who is disputing it.