Some experiments on the paranormal cognition of drawings, with special reference to personality and attitudinal variables

Abstract

The four studies reported in this dissertation were all investigations of the conditions influencing the occurrence of 'general extrasensory perception* (GESP) between pairs of persons. All studies employed the drawing-reproduction tech¬ nique, in which a person designated as 'agent' concentrates upon a line-drawing depicting some randomly-chosen object, while simultaneously a sensorially-isolated 'percipient' attempts to guess the content of this 'target-drawing' and is required to respond by making a drawing of his or her mental impressions. A single test consisted of ten such picture-guessing trials, three minutes each trial, with no concurrent feedback to the percipient.The drawing-technique is almost a century old, and accordingly a review of the more important milestones in the history of its use is given. This thesis also makes a number of contributions both to the methods for objectively quantifying degree of target-response resemblance, and to the techniques for determining statistical significance.The four experiments collectively enable the drawing of four conclusions: (l) contrary to popular belief, the existence of a close emotional relationship between agent and percipient is neither necessary nor sufficient for the occurrence of GESP; (2) group-performance over the ten-trial ESP-test tends to fluctuate rather unpredictably, although there was some evidence that it conforms to a U-shaped or a linear trend; (3) the scores on an 11-item 'Sheep-Goat Scale' (designed to measure belief in, and experience of, cognitive psi) gave some significantly positive correlations with GESP-scoring, provided that agent and percipient were not in a mutually close relationship with each other; the claim to have experienced at least one instance of telepathy was the most significant predictor of GESP, thus retrospectively providing some validation for the truth of such claims; and (4) th^ Sheep-Goat Scale-scores of the agents were more strongly related to GESP-scoring than were those of the percipients, prompting an analogy with goal-oriented psychokinesis; it is suggested that this phenomenon can be subsumed under a mere general 'goal-accomplishment' principle, called by the author "psychopraxia"