Discovery Lab Answers

Irvin L. Child, PhD

Irvin L. Child, PhD was a Yale University psychologist who brought mainstream academic methods to parapsychology — both by running free-response psi experiments of his own and by re-examining how the field’s most contested body of work, the Maimonides dream-telepathy studies, had been reported and reviewed ^[1]. ESP-Nexus profiles him at Irvin L. Child, PhD.

Experiments

The sources retrieved for this question document two distinct strands of Child’s work.

• The Maimonides dream-telepathy re-examination (1985). In Psychology and Anomalous Observations: The Question of ESP in Dreams, published in American Psychologist, Child reviewed the Maimonides dream-telepathy program of Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner, Charles Honorton and colleagues, together with the systematic replications and a set of smaller follow-up studies ^[1]. His argument in that paper was as much about how psychologists had written about the research — he charged that critical reviews by Alcock, Marks and Kammann, and Romm gave “false accounts” of the Maimonides work — as about the underlying data ^[1].
• Free-response psi-missing experiments (with Ariel Levi). In Psi-Missing in Free-Response Settings, published in the Journal of the American Society for Psychical Research, Child and Ariel Levi examined systematic below-chance scoring in free-response (rather than card-guessing) settings, using ganzfeld-style sessions run within a parapsychology course ^[2][3].
• A simplified dream-telepathy study. Child, together with H. Kanthamani and V. M. Sweeney, reported “A simplified experiment in dream telepathy” (Research in Parapsychology 1976), cited within the 1985 paper as one of several minor studies reporting positive results ^[1].

Child was also part of a collaborative methodological effort: the 1993 Journal of Parapsychology paper on distinguishing demonstration research from hypothesis-testing research, co-authored by Jessica M. Utts alongside Krippner, Braud, Child, Palmer, Rao, Schlitz and White, argued that meta-analysis and demonstration research serve different scientific functions.

Methodology

Child’s methodological posture was to apply the ordinary evidentiary standards of academic psychology to psi claims — in both directions, holding critics to the same standard as proponents.

• In the 1985 paper, his method was documentary and analytic: he compared what the published skeptical reviews asserted against what the primary Maimonides reports actually contained, and he distinguished the “more ambitious” Maimonides experiments and the three systematic replications from the “minor studies” that were not replications but reported encouraging results ^[1]. He was explicit about a threat to validity in the replication data — nonindependence of judgments — flagging that certain series reached significance only “if nonindependence of judgments does not seriously interfere” ^[1].
• In the Child–Levi free-response work, the design used ganzfeld-style sessions embedded in a parapsychology course, with percipients rating a target and non-targets against their imagery ^[2][3]. The analysis compared mean similarity ratings for targets versus non-targets, and the authors were careful about what inferences the data licensed — repeatedly noting where a comparison “would have” a given p-value “if a statistical test were appropriate,” but declining to treat it as such because “we do not have all the information necessary for making a proper comparison” ^[2][3]. They also considered and addressed possible artifactual explanations, noting for one striking session that the projector “was not brought into the percipient’s room until after the imagery report had been recorded,” foreclosing a sensory-leakage explanation ^[2].

Data

The retrieved excerpts carry figures from two sources. These come from OCR-scanned primary text; where a surrounding sentence is intact the attribution is given below, and the damaged tabular material from the 1985 paper is not reported as settled figures.

In the Child–Levi work, the headline pattern is psi-missing: percipients rated the actual targets as less similar to their imagery than the non-targets — eight of fourteen ranked the true target last and none ranked it first ^[2][3]. The authors stressed this was not an isolated set of observations, noting that other procedures run in the same course had produced “insignificant or less significant outcomes” ^[3] — so the record they present is mixed, not uniformly striking.

The 1985 American Psychologist paper reproduces a large table of z-scores and t-values from the Maimonides series (e.g. the two William Erwin dreamer series recomputed to z = 2.53 and t = 4.93, and the two precognitive series yielding ts of 2.81 and 2.27, “with p values slightly above and below .05, respectively”) ^[1]. Much of that table is OCR-damaged in the retrieved text, with condition labels and figures interleaved, so beyond those sentences where the attribution is unambiguous the individual cell values should be read from the source rather than quoted here ^[1].

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. The 1985 paper is itself Child’s response to named skeptics: he wrote that Alcock (1981), Marks and Kammann (1980), and Romm (1977) gave “false accounts” of the Maimonides experiments, and that psychologists’ book-length critical reviews of parapsychology “do not use the scientific standards of discourse prevalent in psychology” ^[1]. The strongest version of the skeptics’ case — as Child engaged it — was that the Maimonides dream-telepathy results did not warrant serious attention within psychology.

What the experimental data show. Child’s counter rested on the primary reports: the Maimonides series and its systematic replications, whose recomputed statistics he tabulated (the Erwin series at z = 2.53 and t = 4.93; the precognitive series at ts of 2.81 and 2.27) ^[1]. He did not present these as unqualified, flagging the nonindependence-of-judgments problem that conditions whether certain series reach significance ^[1].

Analysis. Child (1985) published in American Psychologist a point-by-point challenge to how Alcock, Marks and Kammann, and Romm had characterized the Maimonides record; the retrieved sources include his account of that exchange but not the skeptics’ own subsequent replies, so what those authors published in response is not represented in the material retrieved here.

For the fuller record, see Irvin L. Child, PhD.