Research · 05
The ganzfeld database and the replication debate_
Three decades of meta-analysis, autoganzfeld reform and adversarial critique — the reference case for how a psi database should and should not be argued about.
- 1985 – 2018
- Honorton, Bem, Storm, Tressoldi and others
- Psychological Bulletin and successors
- Ganzfeld
- Meta-analysis
- Methodology
The arc
The original ganzfeld corpus attracted a methodological critique severe enough to produce a joint communiqué between proponents and sceptics specifying what an acceptable experiment would look like. The autoganzfeld studies that followed were built to that specification.
Subsequent meta-analyses continue to report a small positive effect; subsequent critiques continue to attribute it to selective reporting and heterogeneity. Both positions have survived thirty years of data.
Why it matters to us
The ganzfeld debate demonstrates that no amount of accumulated meta-analytic evidence resolves a question when the underlying studies are heterogeneous and pre-registration is retrofitted.
Our conclusion is procedural rather than substantive: a large, uniformly collected, pre-registered dataset from a single instrumented platform is worth more than a larger corpus assembled after the fact.
Reference: Storm, L., Tressoldi, P. E. & Di Risio, L. (2010). Meta-analysis of free-response studies, 1992–2008. Psychological Bulletin, 136(4), 471–485.
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