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Plain English Summary
Can you tell who's about to message you? This study built an automated online test where 500 people each had four possible senders -- two real friends and two computer-generated fake ones. A computer secretly picked one sender per round, that person focused on the participant for 30 seconds, then the participant guessed who it was. Across 6,000 trials the guess rate landed at 26.7%, just above the 25% you'd expect from pure luck -- statistically significant, but a tiny effect. The strongest hits came from senders over 500 miles away, hinting distance doesn't weaken whatever is going on. Most strikingly, accuracy plummeted with practice: people started at a remarkable 45% and slid to just 15% by their fourth test, as if nervousness gradually smothered the ability. Filmed sessions confirmed nobody was cheating.
Actual Paper Abstract
In an automated online telepathy test, each participant had four senders, two actual and two virtual, generated by the computer. In a series of 12 30-sec. trials, the computer selected one of the senders at random and asked him to write a message to the subject. After 30 sec., the participant was asked to guess who had written a message. After the computer had recorded his guess, it sent him the message. In a total of 6,000 trials, there were 1,559 hits (26.7%), significantly above the chance expectation of 25%. In filmed tests, the hit rate was very similar. The hit rate with actual senders was higher than with virtual senders, but there was a strong guessing bias in favour of actual senders. When high-scoring subjects were retested, hit rates generally declined, but one subject repeatedly scored above chance.
Research Notes
Replicates and extends Sheldrake & Lambert (2007) with larger sample (6,000 vs. 1,980 trials) and faster 30-sec procedure. Much smaller effect size (d=0.03) than telephone/e-mail telepathy tests (d=0.46-0.50), suggesting rapid procedure requiring continuous sender attention dilutes effect. Demonstrates above-chance results in automated unsupervised setting with videotaped subset confirming no cheating. Decline with repeated testing illustrates 'elusiveness' problem: sensitivity appears inhibited by nervousness/self-consciousness. Distance-independent effect supports non-local nature of telepathy.
In an automated online telepathy test, each participant had four senders (two actual, two virtual). Computer selected one sender at random per trial; sender composed message for 30 sec, then participant guessed sender identity. In 6,000 trials across 500 tests, hit rate was 26.7%, significantly above 25% chance (p=0.002, d=0.03). Videotaped tests showed similar results (27.3%, p < 0.01). Hit rate with actual senders was 33.7% vs. 19.5% with virtual senders, but strong guessing bias toward actual senders (62.9% of guesses) eliminated this difference when corrected. Hit rates declined with repeated testing (45.2% → 35.2% → 24.4% → 15.5%). Highest hit rates occurred at distances > 500 miles. One exceptional subject (AF) maintained above-chance performance across multiple filmed tests.
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Beharee, Ashwin (2009). A Rapid Online Telepathy Test. Psychological Reports. https://doi.org/10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970
@article{sheldrake_2009_online_telepathy,
title = {A Rapid Online Telepathy Test},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Beharee, Ashwin},
year = {2009},
journal = {Psychological Reports},
doi = {10.2466/PR0.104.3.957-970},
}