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Soal conducted these experiments during a four-year period beginning in 1935, during which time he examined the performance of 160 subjects on over 128,000 trials. The results of his efforts were tremendously disappointing: Absolutely no evidence for telepathy was obtained. Upon hearing these results, the parapsychological community was obviously disheartened.
The Soal-Goldney experiments stood as the cornerstone of the evidential foundation of ESP for the next twenty years. Skeptics were reduced to rather weak speculations about how Soal might have cheated.15 Gradually, however, more substantial reservations about this work emerged, and today it seems clear that Soal faked his data.
Numerous surveys have asked people to explain the origin of their belief in the paranormal, and all of them point to the importance of personal experience. Forty-one percent of the believers in a sample of Canadian undergraduates cited personal experience, or that of their friends and relatives, as the most important determinant of their belief,30 as did 51% of the believers in a sample of readers of the British journal New Scientist.31 Personal experience was also cited as the primary cause of belief by 71% of a sample of members of the Parapsychological Association.32
By pulling back a bit like this, we quickly see that although the probability of any one coincidence is indeed quite low, the probability of the union of all such coincidental events can be quite high. Our sense of astonishment when confronted by coincidence can thus be traced to our intuitive tendency to assess the likelihood of the intersection of the specific events that did occur, rather than the union of all similar outcomes that might have occurred.
Death, for example, is a very frequent topic of dreams, and so it is hardly surprising if one such dream should happen to correspond to a real-world fatality. That does not make a person’s premonitions of death terribly meaningful or informative, however. One is reminded here of economist Paul Samuelson’s crack that the stock market has accurately predicted nine of the last five recessions.
Francis Bacon noted this long ago when he said that “… all superstition is much the same whether it be that of astrology, dreams, omens, retributive judgment, or the like, … [in that] the deluded believers observe events which are fulfilled, but neglect or pass over their failure, though it be much more common.”36
People will always be tempted by the idea that everything that happens to them is controllable. Likewise, the tendency to impute structure and coherence to purely random patterns is wired deep into our cognitive machinery, and it is unlikely to ever be completely eliminated. The tendency to be more impressed by what has happened than by what has failed to happen, and the temptation to draw conclusions from what has occurred under present circumstances without comparing it to what would have occurred under alternative circumstances, seem to be similarly ingrained.
Perhaps the most general and most important mental habit to instill is an appreciation of the folly of trying to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence.
The most important mental habit - not to draw conclusions from incomplete and unrepresentative evidence.
A set of important mental habits we also need to develop are those that can help to overcome the drawbacks associated with one of our most remarkable skills—the facility with which we can explain a vast range of outcomes in terms of our pre-existing theories and beliefs.
To compensate, we need to develop the habit of employing one of several “consider the opposite” strategies. We can learn to ask ourselves, for example, “Suppose the exact opposite had occurred. Would I consider that outcome to be supportive of my belief as well?” Alternatively, we can ask, “How would someone who does not believe the way I do explain this result?”, or, more generally, “What alternative theory could account for it?” By asking these questions, we become aware that the link between evidence and belief is not so tight as it might first appear.
Exposure to the “probabilistic” sciences may be more effective than experience with the “deterministic” sciences in teaching people how to evaluate adequately the kind of messy, probabilistic phenomena that are often encountered in everyday life. Probabilistic sciences are those such as psychology and economics that deal mainly with phenomena that are not perfectly predictable, and with causes that are generally neither necessary nor sufficient.
Understanding the probabilistic sciences is particularly effective.
It appears that the probabilistic sciences of psychology and medicine teach their students to apply statistical and methodological rules to both scientific and everyday-life problems, whereas the nonprobabilistic science of chemistry and the nonscientific discipline of the law do not affect their students in these respects (p. 438)…. the luxury of not being confronted with messy problems that contain substantial uncertainty and a tangled web of causes means that chemistry does not teach some rules that are relevant to everyday life (p. 441).
