Hi Tipsters,
For anyone interested in this issue, I sent Bem the following email message:
I just became aware of your paper on precognitive habituation. I'm wondering
whether you ever ran a very simple control condition for these experiments:
Having subjects close their eyes just as they make their target selection. In
this way, they will be prevented from viewing the subliminally presented
exposures and thus cannot be affected by these pictures reaching back into
the past to affect their selection.
This seems to me to be a quite easy and important thing to check out (unless
someone wants to claim that people don't actually have to SEE the "primes"
to be affected by them, but if that's the argument, then anything goes). My
guess is, though, is that you'll still get the effect, which will suggest that a
combination of the randomization algorithm coupled with people's biases to
choose one particular kind of target over another, can account for it.
He promptly and courteousy replied that he had not run this control condition, but
that he didn't believe anything about the randomization process coupled with
subjects' biases could account for the effects, for several reasons:
1) Subjects choose between two pictures of the same type, matched for valence,
content, arousal, etc., and these pictures are randomly scattered into different
positions on-screen.
2) People show greater-than-chance selection of primed negative pictures but
less-than-chance selection of primed erotic pictures, with these picture types
being randomly presented from trial to trial.
These seem to me to be pretty compelling arguments, but the effects are so
small (it would be great to see an actual effect size reported) that my gut just isn't
going to be satisfied until I see a control condition like the one I suggested
above.
Any other thoughts/suggestions?
-Mike
***********************************************
Michael J. Kane
Department of Psychology
P.O. Box 26170
University of North Carolina at Greensboro
Greensboro, NC 27402-6170
Phone: 336.256.1022
Fax: 336.334.5066
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