Intelligence obviously isn't a pre-requisite for television presenters or journalists. Three times in the past week I have seen gullible television presenters express their amazement when Uri Geller has reproduced a drawing which they did before the show. And on each occasion they have admitted that Geller was with them when they did the drawing. Okay, so he 'turned his back' we are told. But why did he have to be there at all? Television hosts are either unaware that there are many ways in which a competent trickster could fool them, or they are themselves fools if they think that they have the expertise to prevent trickery. They have changed little since David Dimbleby was flim-flammed by Geller in the early seventies. Being the first of many dupes, Dimbleby had an excuse. All these years later there is none. As representatives of viewers and society they should have more integrity.
Journalists are perhaps even worse than television personalities. In most cases they have more time to research a claim and to set up a proper experiment. But do they bother? Not on your life! They even mess up mass telepathy experiments. But do the 'psychics' ever get the rough end of the foul-up? Lets have a quick look at several of these 'experiments' and see.
Matthew Manning was a fairly well known psychic in the mid-seventies. Long dead artists supposedly produced drawings through him even though he had no artistic ability of his own. This lack of artistic ability hadn't prevented him from being the co-winner of his school's art cup when he was about fifteen. Of course this revelation some years later did nothing to dampen the ardour of his supporters. But I will write more about Mr. Manning in a future column; for now let's look at the results of the mass telepathy test carried out by the 'Sunday Mirror' in the summer of 1977.
In the usual manner of a newspaper test readers were told that the psychic would be transmitting his thoughts at a pre-arranged time. In this case they were asked to guess which colour, three figure number, and drawing Manning was concentrating on. These turned out to be Green, 123, and a house. The 'Sunday Mirror' declared the experiment a success because from 2355 replies:
541 readers got the colour right instead of 471 expected by chance.
44 got the number correct against two or three expected by chance.
84 were right about the house.
The 'Sunday Mirror' apparently had the support of statistician Michael Haslam who said that readers had 'hit the jackpot'.
Before knowing details of the replies to the 'Sunday Mirror'/Manning experiment James Randi wrote to the newspaper from New Jersey outlining the result which population stereotypes suggest. The totals later revealed to us by the newspaper showed that Randi's figures were very close:
When I contacted statistician Michael Haslam I learned that he wasn't consulted until after the experiment when he had been given twenty minutes to produce some figures and make some comments. He had told the 'Sunday Mirror' that '123' hadn't been a good number to choose and they had subsequently taken his 'readers hit the jackpot' statement out of context. He was right about the choice of number being a bad one. Only a random number generator would choose '123' two or three times in 2355, but human beings do not choose numbers randomly. I do not have population stereotypes for three digit numbers, but the list for two digit numbers in Kamman and Marks's excellent 'The Psychology of the Psychic' shows a wide variation with a preponderance falling between 10 and 39. Numbers 21 to 24 for example had 18, 45, 34, and 9 respectively out of 350. Numbers 89 to 94 all had zero.
Even the 'Sunday Mirror' wasn't very impressed with the 84 successes for the house drawing which is far below 'The Psychology of the Psychic' figures which suggest that 315 people should have got that right.
In November 1978, the 'Daily Mirror' conducted 'The great Geller experiment' claiming that one out of 28 readers correctly guessed that Geller had transmitted a drawing of a tree. To bolster their results they quoted physicist John Hasted (famous for his metal bending experiments with Geller and others) who told them that the chances of guessing a sealed drawing correctly by pure luck is 1 in 150.
The 'Daily Mirror''s headline for the article giving the results of this experiment said 'Tree-mendous!'. And so it was; but not due - as they claim - to Geller's success, but for his failure. The population stereotype list suggests that one in 18 people should have been right. As for John Hasted's figure of one in 150, this is only true where the 'receiver' has a choice from 150 known drawings.
The next mass ESP experiment in my files comes from April 1984 when 'The Sun' played at parapsychology by doing an experiment with Doris Stokes in which she 'transmitted' three diagrams. These were: the sun, a house in silhouette and three wavy lines. According to 'The Sun' the result showed that 'Doris proves a point' and that their readers were 'Super Psychics'. They didn't release the total number of replies, mentioning just 'a huge response' out of which 'nearly one-third of those taking part picked up at least one of Doris's drawings. Paul Harris, Chief Statistician at National Opinion Polls is quoted as saying "Statistically the results are amazing'.
'The Sun' revealed so little about this experiment that I wrote to Paul Harris asking him some pertinent questions. In his reply he informed me that he had spoken with a reporter for about five minutes, expressing doubts about the claimed results. He was in no doubt however that he had been 'totally misquoted by the report appearing in the newspaper' and was recommending to the Professional Affairs Committee of the Institute of Statisticians (of which he was a member) that no help be given by the Institute to 'The Sun' in the future.
Without knowing what 'The Sun' considered a hit it is impossible to analyze their figures. It appears that in addition to the sun, a house and wavy lines they also accepted circles and cubes as hits. Kamman & Marks's list does not include wavy lines, but taking their figures for the other four designs alone we get a total of 30% which is close to 'The Sun''s 'nearly one-third.
'The Sun' returned to the parapsychology game in September 1987 claiming more success for Uri Geller. As reported by Lewis Jones in the September/October 1987 edition of 'The British and Irish Skeptic' the 'soaraway' 'Sun' claimed that 1 in 11 of the entries correctly guessed that Geller had drawn a sailboat. Population stereotypes listed in 'The Psychology of the Psychic' indicate that just under 1 in 18 people are likely to draw a boat. So, if 'The Sun' is to be believed, Geller did much better than chance in that instance. But, excuse me if I doubt 'The Sun’s figures; it's now part of my nature.