Mediumship Accuracy: A Quantitative and Qualitative Study with a Triple-Blind Protocol — Tressoldi et al.
Blinding (or blind) protocols are fundamental in medical and social sciences. They are used to eliminate potential biases when evaluating a theoretical model—for example, when assessing the effectiveness of a treatment compared with a placebo (an improvement in a condition resulting simply from the belief that such an improvement will occur).
In so-called parapsychology, whose purpose is generally focused on investigating mental effects that appear to extend beyond ordinary physical abilities, blinding procedures are important in order to prevent information from being conveyed through conventional channels and to minimize biased interpretations that might either confirm or refute a hypothesis. Let us consider a hypothetical case in which a person is able to read your mind. A double-blind procedure could work as follows: you think of a particular food, while the person attempting to read your mind has no access to you. You draw the food you were thinking of, while at the same time the person attempting to read your mind also makes a drawing. 同时, five additional individuals serve as controls—in this example, five people who are not attempting to read your mind each draw a randomly selected food. The drawings are then compared by another person who does not know which drawing was produced by the experimental participant and which drawings were produced by the controls. This evaluator determines which drawing most closely resembles the one you made. Only afterward is the identity of the person who produced each drawing revealed. If the proposed mind-reading effect exists, the person attempting to read your mind would be expected to have produced a drawing with a greater degree of similarity to yours than those produced by the control participants. This would constitute a double-blind procedure.
The article we present today reports a successful replication of several studies on mediumship conducted under a triple-blind protocol. For this purpose, 36 participants provided nine channelers or mediums with the names of 38 deceased individuals. Each medium produced two separate lists concerning two deceased individuals of the same gender: one corresponding to the person requested by the participant, and another corresponding to a randomly selected deceased person unknown to the individual requesting the reading. Both lists were then evaluated by a third person who rated the information according to four categories—completely false, mostly false, mostly true, and completely true—and assigned a score reflecting how accurately the information matched the personality of the deceased individual whose name had originally been provided. In two out of every three cases, the list containing information purportedly corresponding to the deceased person was selected as the accurate one. 此外, overall, readings concerning the intended deceased individuals produced 29.5% more correct responses than the control readings. As an interesting anecdote—or perhaps not—all nine mediums were women.
As the authors of the article explain, some theorists suggest that these results might potentially be explained by telepathy alone. Although it is not entirely clear whether a triple-blind protocol can completely rule out telepathy, it is also true that studies of telepathy or precognition have not produced results of this magnitude with the same degree of replication and consistency. The study therefore suggests that the nine mediums may, in fact, have established contact with deceased individuals.
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