Discovery Lab Answers

Marilyn J. Schlitz, PhD is a social anthropologist and consciousness researcher whose experimental work spans distant intentionality, remote staring detection, distant healing intention, and — more recently — precognitive priming and worldview transformation. Her profile page is at esp-nexus.org/scientists/marilyn-j-schlitz/.

Before reading the quantitative picture below, two qualifications matter. First, the library’s share of the published literature on Schlitz’s work has not been measured, so what follows is a summary of what the ESP-Nexus library holds, not a settled account of the full field. Second, the evidence shows a genuinely mixed pattern — several null results sit alongside positive ones, and the directional disagreements are substantive, not marginal. Both the positive and null results are described below.

Experiments

Distant intentionality / remote staring — EDA studies. The earliest work retrieved is a 1992 study using Juilliard School music students as receivers, testing whether an undetected sender’s intention to stare could be detected via participants’ own reports. Schlitz then contributed to a 1997 meta-analysis pooling 30 electrodermal activity (EDA) distant-intentionality experiments. The same year she co-ran a direct replication with Richard Wiseman designed explicitly to test whether the experimenter’s identity — Schlitz as proponent, Wiseman as skeptic — affected outcomes. A second joint Schlitz–Wiseman experiment followed in 1999, again using EDA staring detection with a crossover design.

Distant healing intention (DHI). Schlitz contributed to laboratory and clinical research on whether a healer’s directed intention can produce measurable physiological or clinical change at a distance. A 2012 study examined collagen deposition across three groups as an objective surgical-wound outcome measure. She also co-authored a 2015 overview of the scientific evidence for distant healing intention therapies.

Retroactive (time-reversed) priming. A 2021 multi-site replication study — co-authored with Daryl J. Bem and a large international team — tested whether future emotional stimuli could retro-actively prime current reaction times. This was explicitly a replication of earlier Bem work, examining expectancy and belief as potential moderating variables.

Worldview transformation and community practice. Alongside the experimental program, Schlitz contributed to a 2014 study examining whether engagement in a community-based integral practice program enhances well-being, and her broader work on consciousness transformation and worldview change is reflected across multiple affiliated projects.

Methodology

EDA staring paradigm. The core protocol used in the 1997 and 1999 studies pairs a sender and a receiver in separate rooms. The receiver’s electrodermal activity is recorded continuously while the sender either stares at a camera-fed image of the receiver or does not, in a randomized sequence. Neither participant can communicate through ordinary means. The design controls for sensory leakage by physical separation. What made the Schlitz–Wiseman collaboration distinctive is that the same participants were run by two experimenters with opposing expectations — Schlitz (a proponent) and Wiseman (a skeptic) — under identical protocol conditions, allowing experimenter identity to be isolated as a variable.

1992 Juilliard study. This used a pool of 20 music students as receivers, a relatively small N drawn from a population hypothesized to be high in psi-conducive traits.

1997 meta-analysis. The pooling of 30 EDA distant-intentionality experiments represents a cumulative evidence synthesis rather than a single new trial.

2006 crossover design. The 2×2 crossover varied both who served as greeter (Schlitz or Wiseman) and who served as sender, yielding four conditions, with an ANOVA on the main effect of greeter identity.

2012 DHI / collagen study. This tested an objective biological marker — collagen deposition — as a clinical outcome across three groups (presumably healer, sham, and control conditions, though the retrieved excerpts do not fully specify), giving it a tighter endpoint than self-report measures.

2021 retroactive priming. The study used a pre-registered confirmatory analysis on reaction time to emotional stimuli, with log-transformed RT and a 2,500 ms window as the primary outcome. Secondary exploratory analyses examined belief in psi, personality traits (extraversion, sensation seeking), and language of testing as potential moderators. The authors explicitly acknowledge that expectancy was measured by self-report, a limitation they note for future work.

Data

The full quantitative picture across all retrieved studies is as follows. Note that these rows use different, non-comparable metrics — standardized effect sizes (Cohen’s h and Cohen’s d), a Pearson r, and p-values alone — and must not be pooled into a single overall figure.

Several patterns stand out. The 1992 study and the 30-experiment 1997 pooled analysis both show positive results with low p-values. In the 1997 and 1999 joint experiments, participants run by Schlitz produced results in the positive direction while participants run by Wiseman did not — but when the two experimenters’ groups were directly compared, neither the 1997 nor the 1999 comparison test reached significance (.17 and.44 respectively). The 2006 fully crossed design, which was designed specifically to disentangle experimenter-as-greeter from experimenter-as-sender, yielded null results across all four conditions, including those where Schlitz served as sender. The 2012 DHI / collagen study, the 2021 retroactive-priming pre-registered confirmatory analysis, and the 2006 ANOVA are all null. Eight of the thirteen result rows are null or below-chance in direction.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. No published critique of this work appears in the sources retrieved for this question.

What the experimental data show. The 1997 and 1999 data show that receivers run by Schlitz produced a signal in the positive direction (z = −2.02, p =.04 in 1997; ES = −0.33 at p =.05 in 1999) while receivers run by Wiseman did not (z = −0.44, p =.64; ES = −0.07, p =.72). However, the direct statistical comparison of the two groups’ detect-scores did not reach significance in either study (.17 in 1997,.44 in 1999). When the 2006 fully crossed design isolated the greeting and sending roles separately, all four conditions yielded null results, including the conditions where Schlitz acted as sender.

Analysis. The pattern across these three collaborations is specific: positive results appear when Schlitz runs participants, null results appear when Wiseman does, and the within-study comparison tests do not confirm a statistically significant difference between the two experimenters’ groups. The 2006 design was intended to settle the mechanism question; it returned nulls throughout, including under conditions that should have favored detection if the effect were real and experimenter-mediated. Whether the 1997 and 1999 positive results under Schlitz reflect a genuine anomaly, an unidentified procedural difference, or sampling variation remains a question the published record leaves open — the 2006 crossover data do not provide the positive replication that would be needed to distinguish among those possibilities.