Discovery Lab Answers

Glenn Hartelius, PhD is a transpersonal psychologist whose research spans editorial scholarship, empirical methodology, and — more recently — direct participation in parapsychology experiments. His ESP-Nexus profile is at Glenn Hartelius, PhD.

Experiments

The most directly parapsychological work the ESP-Nexus page documents is Hartelius’s participation in a 2021 international collaborative study — two preregistered replication experiments of a time-reversed (psi) priming task originally developed by Daryl Bem. The protocol tested whether response times to incongruent stimuli would be longer than to congruent stimuli even when the prime had not yet appeared at the time participants made their responses. Hartelius was one member of an international team; the ESP-Nexus page does not name the other collaborators individually in the retrieved text.

Beyond that experiment, his published work engages parapsychology primarily at the level of methodology and scientific foundations — evaluating how the field should be studied rather than running perception or psychokinesis trials himself. The sources retrieved for this question include his editorial and theoretical writing in the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies ^{[1][2][3][5][6]} and a co-authored paper with Michael Da on ontological frameworks for consciousness research ^[4], none of which report psi experiment data directly.

Methodology

The 2021 Bem-replication studies were preregistered, which is the methodological detail the ESP-Nexus page specifically flags. Preregistration means the confirmatory hypothesis — that incongruent-prime response times would exceed congruent-prime response times — was locked before data collection, distinguishing it from exploratory analyses run afterward.

In his broader methodological writing, Hartelius has argued for what the ESP-Nexus page describes as “participatory empiricism” — a framework that does not require metaphysical foundationalism to study consciousness and exceptional human capacities ^[4]. He has also drawn on quantum physics as a model for evidence-driven skepticism in psychology, arguing that plausibility judgments should follow sound evidence rather than cultural priors. His editorial work at the International Journal of Transpersonal Studies has pushed for methodological diversity and empirical rigor as institutional standards for the field ^[1].

Data

The retrieved sources do not contain the numerical outcomes of the 2021 replication experiments. The ESP-Nexus page reports the directional result: the preregistered confirmatory hypothesis was not supported in Experiment 1. The page notes that exploratory analyses indicated effects among participants who completed the experiment — but the retrieved text does not provide the specific statistics for those exploratory results, and reporting a number not present in the sources would go beyond what can be verified here. For the figures, the primary publication would need to be consulted directly.

No quantitative data from any other psi experiment by Hartelius appear in the sources retrieved for this question.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question — including the ESP-Nexus page and the numbered primary sources — do not include published criticism directed specifically at Hartelius’s experimental work. The one experimental result described (the null confirmatory outcome in Experiment 1 of the 2021 Bem replication) is itself a failure to replicate the target effect, which is the relevant data point on that question. Independent replication of any exploratory positive signals from that study has not been documented in the retrieved sources.

For a fuller treatment of Hartelius’s work across transpersonal psychology, the spoke page Transpersonal Psychology: Empirical Research and Scientific Foundations covers his methodological and editorial scholarship in more depth.