A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests
📄 Original study ↗📌 Appears in:
Plain English Summary
Can people really sense who's calling before they pick up? Rupert Sheldrake and Tom Stedall built an automated phone system to find out. In three experiments where everyone stayed on a conference call together, guesses about who was "thinking" of the receiver barely beat coin-flip odds -- nothing exciting. But when they redesigned the test so callers and receivers went about their normal lives and got surprise calls at random times -- mimicking how phone telepathy supposedly works in real life -- hit rates jumped to 57%, a statistically significant result across 266 trials. Crucially, the success was spread across many participants, not driven by a few lucky (or sneaky) people, which helps rule out cheating or cherry-picking. The takeaway: the more a telepathy test resembles everyday life, the more likely it picks something up.
Actual Paper Abstract
Objective. To develop user-friendly automated telephone telepathy tests. Method. In one kind of test, three participants who knew each other were linked together continuously in a conference call format. In each trial, the receiver was selected at random. The other two participants were muted and one was selected at random as the caller and asked to think about the receiver before being connected to that person. The receiver was asked to identify who was on the line, and then the caller and receiver were linked up and could talk. In the second type of test, trials were spaced out over longer time periods and callers and receivers went about their normal lives in between trials. Results. In none of the "conference call" tests was the hit rate significantly different from the chance level of 50%. In the second type of test, with a total of 266 trials, the hit rate was 57% (p = .01). Conclusion. The failure of our "conference call" tests to show any significant telepathic effects could have been because all three participants were continuously engaged with the test, which may have confounded any telepathic influences. Tests in which non-callers were not engaged with the experiment gave better results. We suggest developing an intuition training application that would work along with people's regular calls and messages. Such an app could be more user-friendly and enable participants to practice their intuitive skills, as well as enabling talented participants to be identified for more rigorous testing.
Research Notes
Extends Sheldrake's telephone telepathy program with new automated methods. The null Exps 1–3 versus significant Exp 4 provide a within-program comparison suggesting ecological validity (separated trials) matters for detecting telephone telepathy effects. Pre-registered on OSF (2015). Feeds into Sheldrake (2025) meta-analysis.
Four automated telephone telepathy experiments compared conference-call and separated-trial formats using the Twilio platform. In Experiments 1–3, three participants remained connected in a conference call; a randomly chosen caller thought about the receiver, who guessed the caller's identity (2-choice, 50% chance). None showed significant effects: Exp 1: 51% (1,047 trials), Exp 2: 51% (231 trials), Exp 3: 52% (447 trials). Experiment 4 separated callers and receivers between trials, allowing normal activity between randomly timed calls. In 266 trials, the hit rate was 57% (p = .01, one-tailed binomial). The positive effect was distributed across participants (36 positive vs 17 negative tests, p = .006), ruling out optional stopping and minority-cheater explanations.
Links
Related Papers
Cites
- Experimental Tests for Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- Videotaped Experiments on Telephone Telepathy — Sheldrake, Rupert (2003)
- A Filmed Experiment on Telephone Telepathy with the Nolan Sisters — Sheldrake, Rupert (2004)
- Testing for Telepathy in Connection with E-mails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2005)
- An Automated Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2007)
- A Rapid Online Telepathy Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- An Automated Test for Telepathy in Connection with Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- Sensing the Sending of SMS Messages: An Automated Test — Sheldrake, Rupert (2009)
- Telepathy in Connection with Telephone Calls, Text Messages and Emails — Sheldrake, Rupert (2014)
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📋 Cite this paper
Sheldrake, Rupert, Stedall, Tom (2024). A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests. Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition. https://doi.org/10.31156/jaex.25250
@article{sheldrake_stedall_2024_automated_telephone,
title = {A Comparison of Four New Automated Telephone Telepathy Tests},
author = {Sheldrake, Rupert and Stedall, Tom},
year = {2024},
journal = {Journal of Anomalous Experience and Cognition},
doi = {10.31156/jaex.25250},
}