Qualifies· moderateMPI-E016
Bierman 2016: QRP simulation explains much — not all — of a flagship psi effect
- what the source states
- Simulating questionable research practices at empirically observed frequencies against the ganzfeld meta-analytic database, the authors conclude "that QRPs are capable of explaining about 60% of the effect size reported in the GF meta-analysis," that the reported significance "is likely inflated by QRPs, though results are still significant (p = 0.003) with QRPs," and that a good fit with no anomalous effect required unrealistic QRP parameter values.
- what we infer
- Cuts both ways, and is filed that way: it quantifies how far QRPs really go (a long way), and it documents that in the best-studied neighboring database they did not, under this model, cover the whole distance. Applying either lesson to the much smaller matrix corpus is an extrapolation.
- limitations
- Ganzfeld telepathy data, not matrix experiments; QRP frequencies were borrowed from psychology surveys under an untested assumption of comparability.