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aesthetic criteria, subjects consistently selected certain
instances and avoided other ones; whereas one would expect
each Instance of a particular element to be chosen about an
equal number of times - specifically 106/16, or 6.625 times-
there were instances which had been chosen just once or
twice, and others chosen 15 or even 20 times !.
By comparison to the conflicts Induced by the scanning task,
the timing task was effortless and entertaining. Given that
all subjects went through both conditions, it is possible
that the significant timing-task result simply reflects a
preferential effect: this condition may have fared better
because subjects perceived it as less frustrating. Alter-
natively, Insofar as subjects had little control over their
selections during the timing-task, and just had to press the
button when they felt the time was "right", they were less
prone to counter-productive psychological sets (e.g., trying
too hard) and more apt to adopt a passive, "goal-oriented"
approach. The study's results may be seen as analogous to
those of RNG-PK studies suggesting the superiority of goal -
oriented over process-oriented strategies (Morris, Nanko and
Phillips, 1979; Levi, 1979), or of hidden RNG-PK tasks over
explicit ones (Berger, 1988; PRL, 1984; Varvoglis, 1989).
It should be noted, though, that the specific distribution
of scores in the timing task does not lend Itself to any
simple interpretations . It is not clear why hitting should
manifest at a level at which it is least rewarding, and at
which psi-information is least useful. Similarly, it is not
clear why the trend toward missing (most apparent in the
overall results) should manifest at the pair-level, at which
psi-information was quite precise, and a hit, presumably,
quite rewarding.
CONCLUSION
It is obvious that this study's results, though significant,
are not particularly encouraging for psychic criminology
applications. The overall patterning of experimental scores
seems to have been due to a combination of hitting and
missing, with the most conspicuous hitting occurring at too
low an informational level to be especially useful.
On the other hand, it should be stressed that the task was
as removed from real psychic criminology as could be -
involving repeated trials, "normal" subjects, and fictional
faces, rather than a single trial by a "psychic" attempting
to describe a dangerous criminal. Also, Insofar
as
the
procedures encouraged subjects to focus upon facial-features
rather than upon the face as a whole, our tasks may have
been simply too elementaristic to fairly assess the utility
of faces as psi targets.
Be that as It may, we are looking to shift our approach with
Visages. Leaving aside psychic criminology, for now, we are
preparing to recast the program as a PK-oriented task
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block subjects' receptivity to psi Information would render
them effective PK agents. Next time, rather than asking
participants to fight their feelings and preferences and
response biases, we're going to tell them to go for it, and
(try to) have it their way ...
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