Jessica Utts

Utts came to the subject from statistics rather than from parapsychology, and her contribution has been to apply the ordinary machinery of meta-analysis to a body of work that had usually been assessed by whether the assessor found the conclusion plausible. Her argument in the 1995 review commissioned by the American Institutes for Research was narrow and worth stating precisely. She did not claim to have shown that information travels without a sensory channel. She claimed that the accumulated remote viewing trials showed an effect size that was small, consistent across laboratories, and larger than the effect sizes routinely accepted as established in other areas of applied research, and that the pattern was not what a file-drawer artefact produces. Her professional standing in her own discipline is independent of the controversy: she has taught and written on statistical literacy for non-specialists, held chairs at the University of California at Davis and at Irvine, and was elected president of the American Statistical Association. That combination is part of why her 1995 report was difficult for the field to dismiss and equally difficult for it to accept. It also explains why the argument about her report has been conducted almost entirely in the language of effect sizes and meta-analytic method rather than in the older language of credible witnesses, which is a change in how this whole subject is disputed and not only a change in who is disputing it.

The 1995 evaluation is the cleanest illustration in the whole subject of how far honest people can diverge on identical material, and it survives because both reports were published rather than merged. Utts and Ray Hyman were given the same body of remote viewing trials from the government programme. Utts concluded that psychic functioning had been established by the data, that the effect had been replicated at independent laboratories, and that further work should move from proving existence to understanding mechanism.

Hyman concluded that the effects were statistically real but that the studies shared design features which could produce exactly such effects without any anomalous transfer of information, and that a consistent artefact is indistinguishable from a consistent phenomenon until someone varies the design. Both later published their reports in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, and each wrote a short response to the other. Neither changed position. The disagreement is not about arithmetic, on which they largely agree, but about what unexplained regularity in data licenses you to conclude, and that is a question about inference rather than about statistics. Readers should note that Utts is a living person with a continuing academic career, and that this article describes her published positions and nothing else.