You may remember Daryl Bem’s paper purporting to provide strong evidence for precognition, while hewing closely to the standard methodology at the time. The paper itself is a fascinating read, as are the many responses to it, and the entire crisis of confidence in peer-reviewed research that was partly triggered by the publication of Bem’s work.<\/p>\n
\nBut for most observers, at least the mainstream ones, the paper posed a very difficult dilemma. It was both methodologically sound and logically insane. Daryl Bem had seemed to prove that time can flow in two directions\u2014that ESP is real. If you bought into those results, you\u2019d be admitting that much of what you understood about the universe was wrong. If you rejected them, you\u2019d be admitting something almost as momentous: that the standard methods of psychology cannot be trusted, and that much of what gets published in the field\u2014and thus, much of what we think we understand about the mind\u2014could be total bunk.<\/p>\n
<\/div>\nIf one had to choose a single moment that set off the \u201creplication crisis\u201d in psychology\u2014an event that nudged the discipline into its present and <\/span>anarchic<\/a> <\/span>state, where even <\/span>textbook findings<\/a> <\/span>have been <\/span>cast in doubt<\/a>\u2014this might be it: the publication, in early 2011, of Daryl Bem\u2019s experiments on second sight.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n