The humorous Sheep Goat Effect

[Outsider]

Just because you don't believe in psi doesn't mean psi doesn't exist, it just means you'll trip over yourself trying to prove its nonexistence. But thank you for reading, and have a nice day!

Psi missing is one of the most startling discoveries of modern parapsychology. At times, certain individuals persist in giving the wrong answers in psi tests. The accumulation of systematically wrong answers can be so flagrant that it suggests something quite different than a mere lack of psi abilities: it is as if people use psi to consistently avoid the target, unconsciously "sabotaging" their own results!

A number of different psychodynamics could conceivably lead to psi missing, but one of the most solidly established is quite simple: belief. In 1942, Gertrude Schmeidler, professor of psychology at City University of New York, set up a questionnaire to explore students' beliefs about psi. She used the term "sheep" to refer to those who were confident about the reality of psi and "goats" for those who doubted its existence or its pertinence in the context of the test. After the questionnaire, she gave the students a classic psi test with ESP cards in which they tried to guess sequences of target- cards. Then Schmeidler compared the results of the psi test and those of the questionnaire. The remarkable conclusion was that the "sheep" had a significant deviation above chance, while "goats" were significantly below it.

This difference between believers and disbelievers, known as the "sheep-goat effect," has been confirmed by many other researchers. A meta-analysis by Lawrence (1992), covering 73 experiments by 37 different researchers, clearly confirms that subjects who believe in psi obtain, on the average, higher results than those who do not believe in it.

We all tend to select information which confirms our beliefs and avoid that which seems not to fit with them. Selective perception undoubtedly plays a role in our interpretation of apparently paranormal experiences. Skeptics are justified in stating that those who believe firmly in psi will tend to see its occurrence everywhere, even to the point of confusing their own interpretations with the actual events. On the other hand, disbelievers will also tend toward the complementary fallacy, always finding some so-called "rational" explanation for a psi experience, even when it happens to them. But the sheep-goat effect suggests that the differences run deeper than mere interpretation: one's attitudes toward psi affects the likelihood that such phenomena will occur in the first place. The more an individual harbors a reductionistic view of the world, the less chance such phenomena will emerge (let alone be witnessed by them); the more one is interested in interconnectedness, and open to psi experiences, the more likely the world will "respond" by creating such experiences.

[Seeker]

Outsider,
What a great post.

I'm glad you shared this. I always knew that selective perception mattered when it came to experiencing or noticing Psi, but I did not know there were studies done, like the "sheep-goat effect,".

Like you indicated, what is more amazing is how "one's attitudes toward psi affects the likelihood that such phenomena will occur in the first place."

This is a 2-fold system, if you are a believer that psi does not exist then you will experience it less, on top of that you would be less likely to notice it or accept it as psi.


I find this last statement VERY intriguing:
"The more one is interested in interconnectedness, and open to psi experiences, the more likely the world will "respond" by creating such experiences."

What do you think they mean by "the world". If you ask a mystic they would not call it the world, they'd call it the Realm.

what are your thoughts on this?

[Outsider]

I always knew that selective perception mattered when it came to experiencing or noticing Psi, but I did not know there were studies done, like the "sheep-goat effect."

Actually, I assumed you'd heard of it yourself - after all, the sheep-goat effect is one of the classic findings of parapsychology, having been discovered early on and, despite being a very weak effect, it has been replicated again and again and again. Here's a more scientific treatment of the subject:

Two meta-analyses of studies which have looked for correlations between performance on a psi task and different personality traits will be discussed here. One of these involved studies which looked for a relationship between a person's opinion of psi and their own psi abilities with their psi test performance. Research examining what has come to be known as the sheep/goat effect, supported the hypothesis that in experimental psi tests those with positive attitudes (``sheep'') tend to score above chance, and those with negative attitudes (``goats'') below chance.

Lawrence conducted a meta-analysis of the 73 published studies examining the sheep/goat effect. These studies were conducted by 37 principal investigators, and involved over 4,500 subjects who completed over 685,000 trials. The overall effect size per trial is small (r = 0.029), but highly significant over these studies which involved a large number of procedural manipulations and potential modifying variables. The combined Stouffer z = 8.17, p = 1.33 x 10^-16. Using seven different measure of study quality, Lawrence found that effect size did not covary with study quality. A file-drawer estimate (Rosenthal's ``fail-safe N'') revealed that 1726 unreported studies with null results (i.e., 23 unreported studies for each of the 73 reported ones) would be required to reduce the significance of the database to chance expectancy.

What this p-value means is that we know with 99.9999999999999867% accuracy that the sheep-goat effect really does exist. (Literally, the p-value yields the chance for an effect of this size or greater occurring purely by chance, so when p = 1.33 x 10^-16, the chance for the sheep-goat effect being a mere random result is 0.0000000000000133%.) Results like these call into question the intellectual honesty of anyone who rejects the existence of psi.

Like you indicated, what is more amazing is how "one's attitudes toward psi affects the likelihood that such phenomena will occur in the first place."

This is a 2-fold system, if you are a believer that psi does not exist then you will experience it less, on top of that you would be less likely to notice it or accept it as psi.

Unfortunately, this statement is going beyond the available data, or at least the data available to me. So far as I know, the sheep-goat effect is simply a tendency for sheep to score better than goats, with extreme goats typically scoring below chance. This does not necessarily mean that goats are less likely to experience premonitions or other parapsychological phenomena; it only means that when asked to call upon parapsychological sources of information, they do worse than they would by chance.

This is part of a larger problem: whether people can successfully gain paranormal insight from the interpretation of visions, dreams, or sudden hunches is extremely difficult to test scientifically. Even if a large enough pool of subjects would be willing to take part in a study lasting a period of years, recording their experiences and predictions, it would be incredibly difficult for a researcher to interpret the chance for any given prediction to come true, and even more difficult to convince others that this chance was accurately assigned. Thus, the claim that "The more one is interested in interconnectedness, and open to psi experiences, the more likely the world will 'respond' by creating such experiences" is unsubstantiated. We may safely infer that psi allows us to gather information in an unexplained manner, but whether there is anything meaningful behind paranormal experiences is not easy to demonstrate or disprove.

[Outsider]

(Moderator: Please edit previous post - I don't have access)

[admin]

(Moderator: Please edit previous post - I don't have access)

I'm working on it. Give me a sec..

From now on, you should have about 10 hrs to edit any reply, unless there are replies beneath it (i.e. someone had already responded to it.)

[admin]

Fixed