Psi Phenomena
Precognition
Extrasensory Perception
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Precognition is the claimed ability to know about a future event before it happens through some channel other than inference or normal expectation. Spontaneous premonition cases were collected by the Society for Psychical Research from its earliest years alongside crisis-apparition reports, and Rhine's Duke laboratory later tested it formally by having subjects guess the order of a card deck before it was shuffled. The claim resurfaced dramatically in 2011 when psychologist Daryl Bem published nine experiments in a mainstream peer-reviewed psychology journal reporting that ordinary cognitive effects could run backward in time. Multiple pre-registered attempts to replicate Bem's central finding failed, and the episode became one of the founding case studies of the replication crisis in psychology, cited as often for what it revealed about research methods as for what it claimed about precognition itself.
Facts
Debunked
Key ExperimentBem's "Feeling the Future," nine experiments reporting that stimuli presented after a response could apparently influence that response. 3 Daryl Bem published Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, presenting nine experiments in which standard psychological paradigms were run with their causal time order reversed. The paper passed the journal's standard peer review process, using conventional statistical methods accepted in psychology at the time, but subsequent independent, pre-registered attempts to replicate its experiments, most prominently Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French's three attempts published the following year, found no effect. The method that distinguishes the original result from the replications is analytic: critics identified that the flexibility available in how the original nine experiments were analysed and reported, common practice in psychology at the time, was capable of producing apparent significant results even with no real underlying effect. Because the paper's failure under pre-registered replication became one of the triggering cases for the wider psychology replication crisis, Feeling the Future is treated as a landmark case in that crisis rather than as established evidence for precognition. Replication StatusThree pre-registered direct replications by Ritchie, Wiseman, and French found no effect; the original journal declined to publish the null replications without external review. 1 Daryl Bem, at Cornell University, published nine precognition experiments in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 2011, reversing the time order of standard priming, habituation and recall paradigms so the causally relevant event occurred after the response it was said to influence. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French ran three independent, pre-registered attempts to replicate one of Bem's nine experiments using his own published procedure, and all three were null. The method on both sides is controlled psychological experiment using the identical published protocol, so the replication attempts tested Bem's own procedure directly. Because the failure occurred in pre-registered replications specifically designed to close the analytic-flexibility concerns raised against the original paper, the case is widely cited as a catalyst for the wider reform of psychological research methods, pre-registration and multi-lab replication, that followed it, and the replication status is recorded as debunked on the direct replication evidence. Position Profile
Principal CriticStuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Christopher French ran three pre-registered replication attempts of Bem's retroactive-recall experiment; all three were null. 1 Terminology
Term CoinedAdopted as a technical term by SPR writers from the 1890s and carried into Rhine's Duke card-guessing vocabulary in the 1930s. 2 Research
Principal ResearcherDaryl J. Bem, Cornell University, published nine precognition experiments in 2011 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 3 Learn More
Premonitions, Prophecy, and the Case for Foreknowledge
Foreknowledge of disaster is one of the oldest claims in the record, from oracles and prophetic dreams in antiquity to the premonition cases the Society for Psychical Research began collecting in the 1880s alongside its crisis-apparition casework: a dream of a shipwreck the night before news arrived, a sudden dread that kept a traveller off a train that later crashed. These spontaneous cases share the evidentiary weakness of all retrospective anecdote, they are remembered and reported selectively after the fact, and the SPR's own investigators were aware of this even as they catalogued the reports.
Precognition entered the laboratory with Rhine's Duke program in the 1930s, which added a temporal twist to the card-guessing method: subjects guessed a deck's order before it was shuffled, so that any hit could not be explained even by clairvoyant perception of a fixed, already-existing sequence. The claim stayed a minor thread of parapsychology for decades until 2011, when Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem published "Feeling the Future" in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reporting nine experiments in which participants' responses appeared to be influenced by stimuli they had not yet been shown, results Bem framed as ordinary psychological effects simply running in reverse.
A Landmark Failure to Replicate
Bem's 2011 paper passed normal peer review at a mainstream, high-prestige psychology journal, which is what made its aftermath so consequential. Independent researchers immediately tried to reproduce the results. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, and Christopher French ran three pre-registered, direct replications of one of Bem's nine experiments, "retroactive facilitation of recall," and found no effect in any of the three; when they submitted the null results to the journal that had published Bem's original paper, it was rejected without external review, a decision that drew its own criticism. Other laboratories attempting related replications reported similarly null results.
Statisticians identified specific methodological weaknesses in the original study, including flexible stopping rules and multiple comparisons, that could produce apparently significant results without any real effect. Because Bem's paper had cleared ordinary peer review at a top journal using then-standard practices, its failure to replicate became a central exhibit in psychology's broader replication crisis, prompting journals and researchers across the field, not just parapsychology, to adopt pre-registration and stricter statistical standards. Precognition research continues in small pockets of parapsychology, but no version of Bem's effect has been confirmed by a result the wider field accepts as independent and reliable.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Parapsychology is the research programme that investigates this claimed phenomenon using controlled experimental methods. The relation records that parapsychology studies this claim, not that the claim itself is established.
Related To
Studied By
The 2011 experiments tested whether future events could influence present responses. The experiments tested precognition directly and are correctly linked to it. Independent replications failed and the claim is not accepted.
The nine experiments tested whether a future event could influence a present response. The study tested precognition directly and is correctly linked to it. Independent replications failed and the claim is not accepted.
Sources
1. Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect
Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French, PLoS ONE, Vol. 7, 2012
2. Extra-Sensory Perception
3. Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect
Daryl J. Bem, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 100, 2011
An Evaluation of Remote Viewing: Research and Applications
American Institutes for Research, American Institutes for Research, 1995View the Source Early Studies in Parapsychology at Duke
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