Before the Psi Work: Self-Perception and a Mainstream Career

Bem's standing before 2011 matters for understanding what happened afterwards, because the paper that made him notorious was not the work of an outsider. His self-perception theory, published in the 1960s, proposed that people often do not have privileged access to their own attitudes and instead infer them by observing their own behaviour, the same way an outside observer would, and it became one of the standard alternative explanations for findings previously attributed to cognitive dissonance. It is taught in undergraduate social psychology courses to this day. He held a chair at Cornell, published in the field's leading journals, and was known additionally as an unusually skilled writer about research method: his essay advising psychologists on how to write an empirical journal article was widely assigned to graduate students. That essay contains advice, about exploring a dataset thoroughly and building the paper around what proves interesting, which critics later cited against him as a description of exactly the flexible analysis that generates false positives. Whether that is a fair reading of the essay is disputed. What is not disputed is that when Feeling the Future appeared, it arrived with the full authority of a respected experimentalist inside the discipline, which is precisely why it could not be ignored.