Discovery Lab Answers

Rick E. Berger, PhD published “A Critical Examination of the Spinelli Dissertation Data” in the Journal of the Society for Psychical Research in 1989. The study arose directly from his concurrent forensic audit of Susan Blackmore’s psi experiment database — while reconstructing what Blackmore’s work had drawn on, Berger went back to the original dissertation reports of Ernesto Spinelli’s ESP experiments with children.

Before the findings: the sources retrieved for this question cover three studies in the ESP-Nexus library associated with Berger, and the library’s share of the broader published literature on his work has not been measured. What follows reflects what the library holds, not a settled account of the field.

Experiments

Berger’s 1989 Spinelli audit was a forensic examination of the primary data underlying Spinelli’s dissertation research on ESP in children — studies that had been widely cited, including by Blackmore, as among the stronger positive findings in the field. The impetus was Berger’s finding, during the Blackmore audit, that Blackmore’s own children’s ESP experiments were described as drawing heavily on Spinelli’s work and using similar tasks and age groups. To evaluate that claim properly, Berger obtained and examined Spinelli’s original research reports directly.

Methodology

The audit was documentary and statistical rather than experimental. Berger obtained Spinelli’s original dissertation materials and subjected the reported data tables to forensic scrutiny — examining response-distribution matrices, checking internal consistency across tables, and assessing whether the reported patterns were statistically plausible. The approach follows the same forensic logic he applied to the Blackmore database: comparing what primary source documents actually show against what was reported in the secondary literature.

Data

The structured evidence for this specific 1989 Spinelli audit paper does not include a standalone statistics row in the ESP-Nexus library’s current holdings — the evidence table covers Berger (1989) in the context of a decline-over-time comparison test (Pearson r = −0.8, p = .056, k = 6, direction: below chance/psi-missing), which reflects the decline-in-ESP-scoring analysis rather than the Spinelli forensic findings specifically. The Spinelli audit’s own figures are carried in the source text rather than in a structured evidence row, and the retrieved excerpt does not reproduce the full data tables in a form that would allow me to quote specific cell values without risk of misattribution from OCR damage.

What the source text of does establish clearly is the thrust of the findings: the response-distribution matrix in Spinelli’s data was so close to uniform — so statistically improbable in its regularity — that Berger characterized the obtained results as “almost too good to be true.” Unexplained errors in the data tables compounded the concern. The audit raised serious questions about the integrity of results that had been treated as landmark positive evidence.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. Susan Blackmore (1984) had previously published her own critique of the Spinelli evidence — “ESP in Young Children: A Critique of the Spinelli Evidence,” JSPR, 52, 311–315 — raising methodological concerns from a skeptical direction. Blackmore’s position, as Berger documents, was that Spinelli’s results did not hold up. Berger’s audit arrived at a structurally different concern: not that the results were merely statistically weak, but that the data patterns were implausibly regular, pointing toward problems with the data themselves rather than with the experimental design alone.

What the experimental data show. Berger’s examination found a response-distribution matrix whose uniformity carried a vanishingly small probability of arising by chance, and errors in the data tables that were not adequately explained. His concurrent Blackmore audit documented that Blackmore’s own children’s ESP experiments — explicitly modeled on Spinelli’s — showed signs of declining scores over time within the database, a pattern consistent with the decline-effect analysis reported separately.

Analysis. Blackmore (1984) and Berger (1989) both published critical examinations of the Spinelli evidence, but their critiques operate at different levels: Blackmore’s addresses experimental methodology, while Berger’s addresses the statistical plausibility of the reported data distributions. Berger explicitly situates his Spinelli audit as a byproduct of the Blackmore database work, and the two papers together — and — form a linked forensic record. Independent replication of Berger’s forensic analysis of the Spinelli data by other researchers has not been documented in the sources retrieved for this question.

For the broader context of Berger’s forensic audit work, the ESP-Nexus page Forensic Critique of Psi Datasets covers both the Blackmore and Spinelli audits together, and his full profile is at Rick E. Berger.