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A SURVEY OF FREE-RESPONSE JUDGING PRACTICES
Julie Milton
Psychology Department
University of Edinburgh
7 George Square
Edinburgh EH8 9JZ
Scotland, U.K.
ABSTRACT
An idealised model of the free-response judging process is developed, and
its elements discussed in terms of judging practices in those free-response
studies published in full between 1964 and 1985. A wide variety of
occasionally conflicting judging practices was found, along with valuable
indications for further research in this important area.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: My thanks are due to Nancy Zingrone and Deborah Weiner for
allowing me to use a draft version of their free-response bibliography.
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While free-response methodology has been popular in ESP studies over
recent years, very little research has been directed to the important question
of how best to judge the correspondence between free-response material and the
target. However, many experimenters have commented on judging issues, or have
reported relevant analyses or data which, when brought together, may suggest
strengths and weaknesses in our judging practices, and promising directions
for future research.
With these aims in mind, I have examined various aspects of procedure
which might influence the success of judging, using as a database eighty-five
free-response studies in which statistical assessment of the results was
attempted and which were published in full between 1964 and 1987 inclusive, in
the Journal of Parapsychology, Journal of the American Society for Psychical
Research, Journal of the Society for Psychical Research, International Journal
of Parapsychology, and European Journal of Parapsychology. Space constraints
prevent me from presenting a summary table of these studies and their full
references, but these can be obtained from me on request. All of the papers
in these journals (whether experimental or not), and those appearing in
Research in Parapsychology during the same period, were searched for
commentary relevant to free-response judging, as well as other sources where
appropriate. The survey is in two sections. In the first section, a model of
an ideal judging process is presented, and its elements discussed in terms of
their importance in current judging practices. The second section addresses
the issues of whether percipients or independent judges are best suited to
perform the complex judging task, and what qualities a judge should have.
Finally, the findings of the review are discussed with their implications for
further research.
THE ELEMENTS OF JUDGING
The underlying structure of the judging process
In a free-response ESP experiment, the percipient's task is to observe
and report his or her thoughts, imagery, feelings and mental or physical
experiences, which might relate to a randomly selected target.
In
free-response studies, the targets used are generally fairly complex ( they may
be people, or geographical locations, objects, and so on). The targets may
have elements (such as colour, the presence or absence of people) which differ
in their salience for the percipient, and in their frequency of occurrence.
In addition, targets may be regarded as possessing various broad categories of
content (such as semantic content, or emotional content), each of which broad
categories may differ in their salience. The salience of both individual
elements and categories of content may differ from one percipient to another,
depending on individual differences.
Just as free-response targets are complex and varied, so too are the
mentations reported by percipients. Mentations may be in the form of imagery
in any sense modality, or merely abstract concepts; the may be vivid, bizarre,
fleeting, spontaneous, or have other distinguishing characteristics. Content
of various kinds may be present in them, with varying chance frequencies of
occurrence. Mentation items may relate in a variety of ways to the target
material, such as semantically or by association, and to a greater or lesser
degree. The type of correspondence may vary from percipient to percipient, or
from mentation to mentation, or both. Certain types of mentation, and certain
kinds of target-mentation correspondence may be more likely to carry psi
information than others.
The function of a free-response judge (in process-oriented research at
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probability that psi was responsible for any resemblance between the target
and the mentation (or inversely, the strength of the ESP component on a given
trial). In the complex situation described above, one way of looking at the
task of an ideal judge is that he or she should:
(i)
Assign some numerical value in proportion to the degree of
correspondence between a single mentation item and the target (and, in some
types of judging, to the controls) ;
(ii) increase this value (given a perfect match) in accordance with the
rarity of occurrence of the mentation item's content in the mentation of all
percipients in similar experimental conditions (or in the mentation of that
particular percipient on other trials, if such data is available) ;
(iii) increase this value (given a perfect match) in accordance with the
rarity
of occurrence of the mentation item's content in the entire
experimental target pool;
(iv) increase this value in accordance with the likelihood that the
mentation item, by virtue of its characteristics, is psi-related (e.g.,
whether it was bizarre, vivid, spontaneous, or whatever characteristics, if
any, are shown by research to mediate ESP)
(v) increase this value in accordance with the salience which the
content of the mentation has for the percipient (e.g. if research shows that
the presence of people in a target is highly salient to a percipient, then a
mentation item bearing on the presence or absence of people would be weighted
relatively heavily) ;
(vi) increase this value in accordance with the likelihood that the type
of correspondence (semantic, emotional, etc. ) between mentation item and
target carries psi-related information, if such differences in likelihood are
indicated by research.
Having thus arrived at a weighted measure of the correspondence between
each mentation item in a trial and the target (and controls if appropriate),
the measures may be summed across the trial or otherwise combined to yield the
ESP score for that trial. Although this procedure resembles an atomistic
judging procedure most closely in its structure, it can also be thought of as
an implicit or idealised basis for holistic or coded judging procedures. In
holistic judging, it is possible to think of the overall rating assigned to
items in the judging set as a sum of individual mentation ratings weighted as
appropriate. In coded judging, the decision of whether a given content
category was present or absent could be regarded as being made according to
the sum of weighted ratings of relevant mentation items. Further weightings
could then be assigned to each decision according to the known salience of the
content category and the rarity of that value of the code in the target pool.
The importance of elements of judging in the literature
Each of the six elements of judging in various
forms has received
occasional attention either implicitly or overtly in experimental and
theoretical papers, although very little direct or systematic research has
been done on this topic. Most opinion about how best to judge free-response
material seems to be based on anecdotal observations. While such observations
may be unreliable, they may also contain useful information about aspects of
judging which should be investigated empirically. This being so, each of the
six elements of judging is discussed in turn below in the context of
commentary and experimental results in the literature surveyed.
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(i) Assignment of a numerical value to correspondence
Ideally, the value assigned to the correspondence between a mentation
item and a target should reflect the correspondence in some objective (and
hence reliable) way.
16 studies reported in 10 papers in the database
surveyed used atomistic judging, but in no case was interjudge reliability
calculated for the allocation of such ratings. In eight of the studies, each
point on the rating scale was labelled for the use of the judges (e.g., 0 =
"no correspondence"), which practice might be expected to increase inter judge
reliability. The number of points on the rating scale ranged from two to
eleven, with a mean of 4.2, and it is possible that the scales at the low end
of the range may be too constrained to be sensitive, while those at the higher
end require judges to make more fine judgements than is appropriate, and so
may be insensitive in effect because they increase error variance. In this
latter case of large rating range, interjudge reliability may be reduced. The
same may be true of holistic rating scales, which ranged from 4 points to 101,
and which were clearly reported as being labelled in only 14 out of the 52
studies in which a holistic scale was used. The number of items in the
judging set may be a factor in determining the appropriate rating scale; in
the studies surveyed, set size ranged from 2 to 36 items. Any future research
which addresses the issue of the appropriate rating scale in this task could
most usefully do so in the context of active training of judges, with
feedback, in the use of such scales. Boerenkamp (1984) had considerable
success in training eight independent judges to rate each statement made by a
"psychic" about a missing person on a fully-labelled four-point scale of
likelihood that it would apply to anyone in the population. To test the
reliability of the judges' ratings, the judges were randomly assigned to two
groups of four, and the average ratings of each statements were correlated,
yielding correlations ranging from rs = +0.66 (36df, p<0.01) to rs = +0.93
(19df, p<0.01).
The training consisted of having
each judge rate
independently the first statement in the transcript, followed by a discussion
among the judges about the differences in their scoring. Then the second
statement was scored and discussed, and so on, allowing the judges to discover
why they differed from the group norm and to adjust their rating strategy
accordingly. Similar training in rating statements for the likelihood that
they were the product of deductive reasoning, also on a fully-labelled
four-point scale, yielded similarly respectable interjudge reliabilities,
ranging from rs = +0.66 (72df, p<0.01) to rs = +0.95 (20 df, p<0.01).
Although no pretraining measures of reliability were taken, the assignment of
ratings of the likelihood that a statement would be true of a person on a
fully-labelled three-point scale by two untrained judges in a study by Tart
and Smith (1968), showed perfect agreement only 49% of the time. The
reliability of Boerenkamp's judges is relatively high compared to that
generally obtained in free-response judging, and this may be a useful method
for training the judges in the reliable assignment of ratings to
mentation-target correspondence.
Maren (1986) discusses the application of artificial intelligence (AI) to
give measures of the correspondence between target and mentation. However,
she stresses that the development of appropriate AI systems is at an early
stage. It seems that for the time being, the best bet for improving the
reliability of atomistic (and possibly holistic) ratings may be the training
of judges, with feedback, in the use of fully-labelled scales with a range
appropriate for the task.
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(ii) Weighting in accordance with the rarity of the mentation item's content
The probability of an exact match between a mentation item and an element
of the target is equal to the product of the probability that the mentation
item should occur on that trial out of all the others, and of the probability
that that target element should be present in that target out of all other
targets. This being so, the rarer the mentation item, the more weight it
should receive. Stanford's response-bias hypothesis (1967), coming from a
different angle, also suggests that rare responses should be relatively
heavily weighted.
Although a number of experimenters have instructed judges to attach more
weight to rare correspondences (e.g. Palmer, Khamashta, & Israelson, 1979;
Sargent, 1980), the calculation of frequencies of mentation occurrence has
been seldom. The exceptions are studies by Roll, 1971, Roll et al., 1973,
and Tart and Smith (1968). In these studies, statements made by a medium
about a number of people were weighted inversely according to the number of
people in the study about whom the medium made the same statement.
Further work attempting to calculate norms for free-response mentation
would need to take into account a number of factors. The setting may be
important; in the ganzfeld, for example, the white noise often elicits imagery
about waterfalls, beaches and aeroplanes. Some responses are common in
certain states of consciousness, for example, faces are a common feature of
hypnagogic imagery (Mavromatis, 1987). Presumably for this reason, Braud and
Braud (1974) and Braud, Wood and Braud (1975) instructed their percipient (who
later did the judging) to attempt to distinguish target-relevant impressions
from those induced by the state itself (in this case, conventional meditation
imagery).
As well as being dependent on the situation and state of consciousness of
the percipients, mentation content frequencies may also vary from percipient
to percipient; most experimenters will probably have come across percipients
who in repeated testing, always mention one or more specific images which
occur in each of their trials, while in contrast, Sargent, Bartlett and Moss
(1982) reported that experienced participants in their ganzfeld study adopted
the strategy of not bothering to report responses which they recognised as
habitual. Frequency norms may also vary according to the nature of the
target; percipients in a study in which geographical location is the target
may be more inclined to talk about trees than a percipient in a study in which
aspects of a person is the target.
(iii) Weighting in accordance with the rarity of the mentation item in target
pool
As stated in (ii) above, the probability of an exact match between a
mentation item and an element of the target decreases as the probability of
the occurrence of the mentation item in the target pool decreases. Therefore,
the rarer the mentation item in the target pool, the more heavily it should be
weighted.
Jahn, Dunne and Jahn (1980) calculated the a priori probabilities of all
values of their thirty binary descriptors in the entire target pool (i.e., the
probability that people were present, the probability that people were absent,
the probability that movement was present, etc. ) to facilitate the heavier
weighting of rarer target contents (or absence of content). In judging
involving a judging set, frequency of content is usually neither calculated
nor weighted.
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(iv) Mentation characteristics
Several experimenters have attempted a formal analysis of which mentation
categories, if any, tend to be psi-related. Sargent, Bartlett and Moss
(1982), Sargent, Moss and Bartlett (1981), and Sargent, Milton, Payne and
Bennet (1982) found that scoring on the basis of "bizarre" mentation was
significantly above chance, although scoring on the basis of bizarre imagery
was compared to the theoretical chance level, rather than to scoring on the
basis of other imagery.
Milton (1984) found significant psi-hitting on the
basis of "surprising" imagery and Milton
(1985)
found significantly
below-chance scoring on "fleeting" imagery according to the results of one of
two independent judges. A third study by Milton (1987) examining a wide range
of mentation categories found no significant results.
White, Krippner, Ullman and Honorton (1977) had one judge place mentation
items from dream transcripts into one or more of seventeen categories, and had
a second judge compare each item to the target for that night and mark it
"telepathy present" or "telepathy absent". Eight categories (listed as waking
imagery,
hypnagogic and hypnopompic imagery,
associations, colour,
communication, witness, specificity and elaboration) were associated with
target correspondences to a significant degree, the association with waking
imagery being a negative one (i.e. waking imagery seemed to be associated with
the target less often than chance). Seven categories (including anxiety,
experiment-related, hostility-misfortune, penetration of self-boundaries,
participation, vividness) yielded non-significant results, and there was
insufficient data to test two categories (sex and violence). However, since
it is not mentioned whether the mentation items were edited after being
categorised, it may be that these results reflect at least in part the judges'
expectations; he or she might have been more inclined to consider telepathy
present for a mentation item which fell into a category which he or she
expected to be successful.
In a study by Schouten and Merkestein (1985) percipients, already
familiar with the target pool, had to record striking experiences during the
day and later selected the day's target drawing from the pool on the basis of
these experiences. In order to reduce the amount of work involved in the
judging task, Merkestein selected for independent judging only those
experiences which fell into five specified categories. Only memories yielded
significant above-chance results (p=0.000 08), while spontaneous, unexpected
inner experiences, dreams and daydreams, experiences related to a topic which
the percipient had forgotten was in the target pool, and experiences related
to the mood of the day, were not significantly target-related.
In addition to direct experimentation, some experimenters have offered
anecdotal observations concerning what sort of mentation appears to be more
psi-related than others. Reporting on an informal research discussion among
apparently successful percipients and researchers, Schlitz (1984) notes that
many of the participants felt that imagery which was fleeting, novel, or
recurrent tended to be psi-related, and that nonvisual impressions, including
kinaesthetic, auditory and olfactory images, were of equal or greater
importance compared to visual imagery. Honorton and Harper (1974) observed
that memory images seemed to be successful in a ganzfeld study; Dunne and
Bisaha (1979) commented that logical inferences from an initial impression
were unhelpful. In a ganzfeld experiment by Palmer, Bogart, Jones and Tart
(1977), the scores of only one out of two independent judges yielded
significant displacement scoring, and among the differences reported by the
judges in their strategies was the inclination of the more "successful" judge
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to pay more attention to "images that were unique in the general context of
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ongoing train of thought" (p. 138).
Other experimenters have instructed judges to pay more attention to
particular mentation categories. Thus Sargent (1980) instructed judges to pay
more attention to mentations which the percipient reports as being novel,
striking, odd, unusual, unexpected or particularly clear, and to pay less
attention to mentations clearly linked with an immediate memory (thus not
conflicting with the comment of Honorton and Harper (1974) above, which
presumably relates mostly to long-term memories). The criteria for deciding
whether or not one of Honorton's (1975) binary content categories is present
in the mentation include "intensity" and persistence of content-related
mentation.
It can be seen that a number of experimenters feel that certain mentation
types may be more likely to be psi-related than others, although authors vary
in their choices, and few seem to have based their opinions on formal research
findings. This would seem to be another aspect of the judging process which
would benefit from systematic, direct research, with anecdotal observations as
a valuable starting point.
(v) Salient aspects of targets
In an ideal judging situation, those elements of the target material
which are most salient for the percipient should be more heavily weighted in
the judging than elements known not to be salient. For the purposes of this
discussion, 'salient' describes an element of the target about which the
percipient tends to give accurate information more often than chance. Thus if
percipients were very often correct about whether or not people were present
in a pictorial target, then mentation items dealing with the presence or
absence of people should be more heavily weighted than other mentation items.
Roll et all (1973) applied such a weighting to mentation categories
according to their content, made by a sensitive, and meant to apply to various
people. The content categories were those of physical description, health,
vocation/education, family, love life, future, wants, interests, needs,
personal characteristics, and other, and mentation items of half the data
were weighted in accordance with the success of mentation items in those
content categories in the other half of the data.
The content categories used by Roll et al were presumably chosen since
most of the sensitive's mentation could conveniently be coded in terms of
them, rather than because each of these categories was believed to be highly
salient; indeed, the study was partly one of salience. However, in studies
where mentation and targets are coded in terms of content categories (e.g.
Honorton, 1975; Jahn, Dunne and Jahn, 1980), content categories seem to be
chosen not for their salience but for similar pragmatic reasons of allowing a
fairly full description of the mentation report. Further research identifying
salient content categories, to allow them to be weighted appropriately or used
as the basis of coding systems, would be useful.
(vi) Correspondence types
A number of authors have discussed ways in which mentations have appeared
to relate to targets in their studies, and some authors instruct their judges
to watch out for some of these correspondences. Those mentioned have included
literal, formal (shape), sensory (colour, material), symbolic/metaphorical,
associational, emotional and functional correspondences, and it has been
suggested that these correspondences may relate to either parts of or the
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target, or to the whole, or both. However, authors differ, and sometimes
conflict, in the importance they attach to these correspondence types. Some
authors only take into account one or two types of correspondence, while
others deal with most of them but weight heavily certain types which other
authors feel are unimportant.
For example, Sargent,
Bartlett and Moss (1982) in their judging
instructions
attach
most
importance to direct
(presumably literal)
correspondences, and then consider formal, associative, symbolic, and
mood/emotive correspondences in order of decreasing importance (a similar
order of importance is reflected in Sargent's (1982) judging instructions).
These instructions conflict with the opinions of several other researchers,
such as Dunne and Bisaha (1979) who consider that correspondences of shape,
colour, size, and relation to other shapes, and metaphorical correspondences
are more likely (and presumably more important) than literal correspondences.
Similarly, Targ and Puthoff (1978) feel that correspondences of shape, form,
colour and material are likely to be more accurate than correspondences of
function or name; Schlitz and Haight (1984) instructed their judges to expect
correspondences of shape or association rather than literal correspondences;
Gelade and Harvie (1975) commented that accurate descriptions were rare, and
that metaphorical and symbolic correspondences were more frequent; Hearne
(1986) instructed independent judges to look particularly for symbolic
correspondences, and Stanford (1979) used artists as judges on the basis of
comments by other researchers indicating that meaning was often distorted in
mentation but hat the form of the target was often described correctly. Other
researchers, while instructing their judges about the types of possible
correspondence have either urged their judges to give equal weight to all
types, or have given instructions in which no type of correspondence was made
to seem more important than any other (Moriarty and Murphy, 1967; Musso and
Granero, 1973; Palmer, Khamashta and Israelson, 1979; Palmer, Bogart, Jones
and Tart, 1977; and Wood, Kirk and Braud, 1977).
These differences among authors could be due to a number of different
factors. Firstly, the type of correspondence thought to be most important in
judging may relate to the percipient's mode of response, which tends to vary
from study to study. Those experimenters who encourage their percipients to
make drawings of their imagery have more opportunity to note correspondences
(real or spurious) of form than meaning, while the reverse applies to those
who encourage their percipients to make verbal responses. This may account
for Sargent's preference of meaning over form in his ganzfeld studies in which
percipients make mostly verbal responses, in contrast to the preference of
form over meaning in the studies of, for example, Moriarty and Murphy (1967)
and Musso and Granero (1973) which were both picture drawing studies.
A second factor in differences among authors may relate to individual
differences between authors themselves, or between the percipients in those
authors' studies. Hearne (1986) emphasised symbolic correspondences in his
instructions to judges because the single percipient in that study seemed to
have obtained such correspondences in earlier testing.
Ullman (1966),
discussing work on field dependence by Witkin (1965), suggested that the type
of correspondence in each percipient's mentation might reflect whether the
percipient is field dependent, with field dependent percipients yielding
symbolic correspondences. In addition, in a study with both types of
correspondence, the types of correspondence noted by the experimenter may
depend in part on whether he or she is field dependent. The use of differed
types of target material, may also result in different kinds of
correspondence; for example, abstract art prints may yield correspondences of
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form and sensory qualities, while pictorial representations of archetypes
(such as
those
correspondences.
used
by Gertz,
1983).
may
tend
to yield symbolic
PERCIPIENT JUDGES VERSUS INDEPENDENT JUDGES
So far, I have discussed the steps to be taken in an idealised judging
process. A related issue is that of who is most likely to be suited to such a
complex task. Most discussion in the literature on this issue has centred on
the relative merits of percipients as judges of their own material, and of
independent judges. The fact that at least one independent judge was used in
58.2% of the 98 studies in the database in which the use of an independent
judge would have been appropriate may indicate a preference for independent
judges.
Several reasons have been put forward for why independent judges should
be preferred. First, the use of independent judges should give a uniformity
of judging criteria across trials which may be lacking when percipients judge,
resulting in reduced error variance with independent judges (Palmer, Bogart,
Jones and Tart, 1977). Second, it should be easier to select or train a few
good independent judges than to select numerous experimental participants who
will be both good percipients and good judges (Palmer, Bogart, Jones and Tart,
1977). Third, the use of percipients as judges is likely to confound their
ESP performance with their judging ability, such that relationships between
their ESP score and other variables may be partly with their judging ability
rather than their ESP; for example, a correlation between extraversion and the
ESP measure may be due the extravert percipients judging more carefully to
please the experimenter and hence increasing their ESP score (Stanford 1978,
1984). Fourth, the use of independent judges means that the percipient need
only be shown the target at the end of the trial, which some experimenters
feel may reduce the risk of precognitive displacement (Palmer, Bogart, Jones
and Tart, 1977; Irwin, 1982). Fifth, independent judges are less likely to be
ego-involved in the trial's outcome than the percipients since it is not their
personal chance to demonstrate ESP in from of others, and may therefore be
less likely to use such strategies as "going for broke" (i.e. artificially
increasing the correspondence rating of a picture once they are sure it is the
target, to make it look like a "better" hit) (Stanford and Sargent, 1983) or
of deliberately avoiding giving points to a target which is a personal
favorite (Sargent, 1980), although Stanford (1984) suggests avoiding telling
independent judges that they are assessing ESP data in order to reduce the
temptation for them also to "go for broke". Sixth, experienced independent
judges may be more familiar with norms for free- response mentation and may be
able to identify and hence weight appropriately mentation items which are
unusual better than naive percipients. In a study by Sargent, Bartlett and
Moss (1982), an independent judge who separated naive percipients' mentations
into unusual and common mentations, obtained less of a scoring difference
between the two than did the percipients who also categorised their own
mentation.
However, the judge also obtained lower scoring than the
percipients in both categories, indicating that the judge may have been
handicapped in the judging task (for example, by the percipients' inability to
describe their imagery).
For reasons similar to those for avoiding percipient judging, several
experimenters have explicitly recommended combining scores from several
independent judges to dilute the effect of idiosyncrasies of each judge, such
as the ability to only detect certain types of correspondence (Stanford, 1984)
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or personal preferences for certain targets or mentation items which might
influence the judge unduly (Targ and Targ, 1986). Some experimenters have
judges working in consensus (e.g. Targ and Targ, 1986; Jahn, Dunne and Jahn,
1980), presumably for these reasons. Indeed, of those 57 studies in which at
least one independent judge was used, only 20 used only one judge; the number
used ranged from one to eight. However, the advantages of independent judges,
multiple or otherwise, depends upon them being good judges, whether naturally,
as a result of training, or due to the provision of full and appropriate
instructions (Stanford, 1984).
The need to know what makes good judges and good judging has been
stressed in the literature (Honorton and Stump, 1969; Sargent, 1980, 1981).
Only two studies in those surveyed set out to compare the judging skills of
judges of varying backgrounds.
Roney-Dougal
(1987) found
that
a
psychotherapist independent judge with considerable experience in and
knowledge of subliminal perception research scored most highly above chance
(mean Z = +0.187, n.s. ), while a "naive" poet scored slightly above chance
(mean Z = +0.127, n.s.). A third judge who was a 'trained "psychic"' scored
significantly below chance (mean Z = - 0.16, t = 2.155, p = 0.04). This result
is difficult to interpret, since we cannot know whether the percipients were
"really" scoring above or below chance.
In a hypnotic dream study reported as a conference abstract, Keeling
(1972) found that only a group of ten clinical psychology graduate students
who judged the percipients' data obtained significantly above-chance scoring
(p=0.018, one-tailed), while a group of ten undergraduates in an introductory
psychology class, and a group of twenty middle-aged students in a YMCA course
on the occult acting as judges yielded non-significant results. However, the
results of the three groups were not strictly comparable, since the occult
students . judged different
data from the other
two groups, and the
undergraduate psychology students did the judging in a different order from
the other two groups.
Given the differences in scoring between the judges in these two studies,
the judges' background and experience would seem to be an important variable
in any free-response study. However, it was made clear in only 10 out of 57
studies using independent judges that the judge had experience relevant to
judging (in areas of psychology, the visual or literary arts, etc. which deal
specifically with the transformation of subconscious information, or previous
experience of free-response judging).
No studies concerning the training of judges seem to have been made.
However, the finding that Palmer, Bogart, Jones and Tart (1977) that a judge
with experience of the ganzfeld gave significant evidence of displacement in a
ganzfeld study while a second judge with no ganzfeld experience did not, might
suggest that experience of the experimental procedure used in a study might
usefully be included in any judge's training. Results from a study by Maher
(1987), in which judges' scores increased with repeated judging of the same
material presented in a different format each time, may suggest that simple
repeated exposure to the judging task, or increasing familiarity with the
judging material, may improve scoring.
The effect of instructions upon judges has similarly been a neglected
topic, although Palmer, Khamashta and Israelson were led to compare the
results of judging with and without instructions when they observed that
uninstructed percipient judges scored below chance (Mean Z = - 0.34), while two
independent judges with full instructions scored above chance (mean Z =
+0.37), the difference being significant (Wilcoxon T = 15, CR = - 3.36,
p<0.001, two-tailed). They had two more judges judge the data without
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instructions, yielding a mean Z-score of +0,29, and concluded that the lack of
judging instructions in this case probably did not cause the difference
between the results of the percipients and the original two independent
judges. However, the two uninstructed judges had taken part in a discussion
of the judging of free-response material in Palmer's graduate class in
parapsychology some months earlier, and so were
not entirely naive.
Instructions were reported as being given to judges without judging experience
or knowledge of unconscious processes in only 12 out of 47 studies in which
such judges were used. Further research is clearly needed on this topic.
The only reason against using independent judges has been that only the
percipients themselves can have full knowledge of what their imagery really
was and would be able to recognise personal symbolism (e.g. Palmer, 1986).
This problem might also result in confounding the percipient's ability or
inclination to fully report their imagery with their ESP performance if
independent judging were used, possibly resulting in misleading relationships
with other variables (Stanford, 1984). A number of experimenters have
explored the importance of asking percipients for more information about their
mentation after the end of the free-response period, by comparing the
performance of independent judges provided with transcripts of the initial
mentation reports, and with
the initial transcripts plus additional
information provided by the percipients.
Stanford (1984) has suggested training percipients in the reporting of
imagery, while Palmer, Bogart, Jones and Tart . (1977) suggest having an
experimenter who is blind to the identity of the target, review the
percipient's experience with him or her immediately after the response period
and add to the transcript possibly relevant information (such as a full
description of certain images, or the unusual qualities of images,
phenomenological characteristics, and so on). Along these lines, it may also
be advisable to offer percipients the opportunity to draw imagery which may
have been difficult to describe verbally, or vice-versa, depending on the
task.
Sondow (1979) found that independent judging by two experienced judges of
the initial transcripts only from participants in a ganzfeld study yielded
scoring exactly at chance (15 direct hits in 60 trials), while judging with
the addition of the percipients' personal associations to the mentation gave
significantly above-chance scoring (23 hits, Z=2.39, p<0.02). Each judge
judged half of the initial transcripts only, and half of the transcripts with
associations, so that no judge judged the same trial with and without
associations.
However, the percipients' judging yielded even higher scoring
(30 hits in 60 trials) .
In a dream study by Krippner, Honorton and Ullman (1972), independent
judges judged first the initial mentation transcript alone, and then the
transcript plus the results of an interview in which the percipient gave
details of what mood accompanied the dream, what thoughts or memories it
brought to mind, what elements of the dream made. no sense in terms of the
dreamer's personal life, and what the main them of the night's dreams had
been. On the initial transcripts alone, the judges obtained two hits out of
eight trials (with a one in eight chance of success). With the addition of
the details of the interview, the judges obtained five hits, a result which
was significantly above chance (p=0.0012, one-tailed). The percipient did not
do any judging in this study, so no comparison with his scores can be made.
A similar procedure was used in a study by Ullman, Krippner and Feldstein
(1966). In the interview, the percipient was asked what the dream reminded
him or her of, what if anything seemed to be trying to intrude on the dream,
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and whether there was anything in the dream which was different from the
percipient's dreams, such as colour, feeling the dream to be real, or private
symbolism. On the basis of the initial transcripts alone, the three judges
(whose judging experience, if any, was not reported) scored significantly
above chance (F=8.30, `p<0.01); with the addition of the interview material,
scoring was even higher (F=18.14, p<0.001). The percipient judging yielded
non-significant results with the initial transcript alone, and results above
chance at the p<0.05 level (F=4.41) with the addition of the interview
material.
On the basis of these results, it seems that further elaboration by
percipients on their initial mentation reports adds useful information, since
scores with such elaboration were higher than those without in all three
studies discussed above. However, while the percipients still managed to
score at a higher level than the experienced judges in Sondow's study even
when the judges were provided with their associations, Ullman, Krippner and
Feldstein found that their (possibly inexperienced) independent judges scored
higher than the percipient judges both with and without associations. This
apparent conflict of findings may be in part due to the extra information
which Ullman et al. elicited from their percipients during the interview.
Clearly, more research needs to be directed to this question.
DISCUSSION
The most striking feature about judging practices in the literature
surveyed is their variety, and
in
some
aspects of judging, their
contradiction. The level of description of aspects of judging is generally
very brief, and it may be that judging practices are much more similar from
laboratory to laboratory than appears in print. Similarly, the 4% of studies
using independent judges which involved giving the judges full instructions
concerning various types of transformation types along with detailed examples,
may be an underestimate, since more experimenters may have given their judges
equally full instructions without reporting it. However, either a lack of
instructions or a lack of reporting them might imply a lack of importance
being attached to the judging process within the field. Since judging is
logically a crucial part of any free-response study, both more attention to
judging and its reporting is surely merited.
Delanoy (1987) has listed
information about judging which should ideally be listed in any free-response
study.
Although little direct research has been done on the judging process, the
studies
surveyed indicated many potentially profitable lines of research.
The training of judges (real training with feedback, rather than merely
repeated exposure to the judging task) has apparently not be explored, and may
be a valuable research strategy in this area.
Awareness of individual
differences, methods of responding (verbal, pictorial, etc. ), setting and
target type are among the many variables which need to be considered in
further research on judging, as well as aspects of procedure such as the use
of rating scales with appropriate ranges and judging sets of an appropriate
size for the task. We clearly need to know more about all aspects of judging
as part of our efforts to improve the reliability and effectiveness of
free-response experimentation in general.
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