Susanne Müller (1), Stefan Schmidt (1) & Harald Walach (2)
(1) Department of Evaluation Research in Complementary Medicine
Institute of Environmental Medicine and Hospital Epidemiology
University Hospital Freiburg, Germany
(2) University Northampton, School of Social Sciences and Samueli Institute, European Office
Findings in parapsychology suggest an effect of distant intentionality. Two laboratory set-ups explored this topic by measuring the effect of a distant intention on psychophysiological variables. The DMILS (direct mental interaction in living systems) experiments investigate the effect of various intentions on the electrodermal activity (EDA) of a remote subject. The "Remote Staring" experiments examine whether gazing by an observer (starer) covaries with the electrodermal activity of the person being observed (staree). In two meta-analyses (Schmidt, Schneider, Utts & Walach, 2004) it became obvious that the remote staring studies had a lower overall quality than the DMILS studies. While there are some high quality DMILS studies (score over 90%) the highest quality in Remote Staring studies is 71%. Thus there is a lack in studies with good methodology to assess the remote staring paradigm.
We conducted a remote staring study that intended to overcome methodological shortcomings of earlier studies Fifty participants were invited to take part as starees. After completing questionnaires on mindfulness, mood, personality and paranormal belief they rested in a comfortable position in front of a video camera while their EDA was continuously monitored. The experimenter also acted as the starer and either observed or did not observe the participant through a closed circuit television system according to a random schedule. EDA during stare and non-stare epochs was compared for significant differences.
In addition to this basic (replication) set-up two new hypotheses were tested. The participant had the possibility to press a button whenever s/he feels stared at. This added a conscious response variable without engaging into the disadvantages of the standard conscious guessing paradigm (guessing strategies, response bias etc). Furthermore the distraction of the starer's intention during non-stare epochs was varied. In one condition s/he was mentally occupied by a cognitive task, in the other s/he was just told not to stare (standard condition). We hypothesized that the distraction from the target in the standard condition was too weak to avoid an unwanted intentional effect in the staree.
Overall we did not find any staring effect at all, not in the EDA data and not in the "conscious" open response situation. Thus the experiment failed in demonstrating any Psi effect.