‘Twitter’ as a new research tool: A mass participation test of remote viewing

The social networking site ‘Twitter’ was used to conduct a mass
participation remote viewing ESP study. The easy accessibility of
Twitter made it possible to recruit and engage a large number of
participants, and to give them almost immediate feedback. A majority
voting technique was used to combine participants’ calls, to avoid
stacking effects and to detect any group-level psi effect. For each trial an
experimenter visited the target location. Blind judging was conducted
with photographs of the target location and four decoy locations. Over
five thousand responses were gathered over five trials. The first trial
employed a non-blind judging procedure to test the hypothesis that
believers would be especially likely to exhibit confirmation bias. As
predicted, a significant relationship was found between belief in
psychic ability and level of perceived correspondence between the
participants’ impressions and the target location. The following four
trials used blind judging. On each trial the group failed to identify the
correct target. There was no significant relationship between belief in
psychic ability and choice of target on any of the trials. Participants
reporting a strong belief in psychic ability identified the correct target
on one trial (exact binomial p = .41). Those participants who reported
that they believed they were psychic and were confident of their
response failed to identify the correct target on any trial.