Discovery Lab Answers

Rick E. Berger, PhD is an experimental social psychologist and anomalous cognition researcher who is both a parapsychology scientist profiled on ESP-Nexus and — as its publisher and system architect — the person who built this site. His research spans automated ganzfeld methodology, forensic auditing of psi datasets, and geophysical correlates of ESP effect sizes.

Before the study-by-study detail: the structured evidence below covers three studies currently in the ESP-Nexus library. The library’s share of the published literature on Berger’s work has not been measured, so what follows is a summary of what the library holds, not a settled account of his full output.

Experiments

Berger’s experimental and analytical work falls into three distinct lines.

Automated ganzfeld research. Berger designed and built the autoganzfeld system at the Psychophysical Research Laboratories (PRL) in Princeton — a hardware-and-software platform that brought target selection, stimulus delivery, blind judging, and data logging under computer control. The landmark publication reporting the PRL autoganzfeld series was Honorton, Berger, Varvoglis, Quant, Derr, Hansen, Schechter, and Ferrari (1990), which presented eleven experiments conducted with that system and compared results against a meta-analysis of earlier manual ganzfeld studies.

A later forensic examination of the PRL autoganzfeld target and target-set distributions was published jointly by Bierman, Broughton, and Berger (1998), revisiting whether the random target-selection procedure produced sequential dependencies in the resulting target sequences.

Forensic audits of psi datasets. Rather than only running new experiments, Berger went back to primary source materials to evaluate existing claims. His 1989 audit of Susan Blackmore’s ESP experiment corpus examined her published studies against original data to assess her claim of consistent “no ESP”. In the same year he published a separate critical examination of Ernesto Spinelli’s dissertation data on ESP in young children.

Geophysical correlates of psi effect sizes. Working with Michael A. Persinger, Berger (1991) analyzed standardized effect sizes from ESP experiments published across six decades (1882 onward) and tested whether annual geomagnetic activity correlated with those effect sizes.

Methodology

Autoganzfeld design. The autoganzfeld system Berger built was explicitly engineered to close the procedural gaps that critics of the manual ganzfeld had identified: single-experimenter sessions with that experimenter remaining target-blind throughout, computer-controlled target selection and presentation, automated blind judging by the receiver, and computer-logged data with no human hand at the recording stage. The introduction of computer-accessed videotape also enabled dynamic (film-clip) targets alongside static images.

Forensic audit standard. Berger’s forensic methodology was bidirectional: he applied the same scrutiny to datasets claimed as evidence for psi and to datasets claimed as evidence against it. His Blackmore audit involved obtaining original unpublished dissertation data and pre-publication reports and comparing them with what appeared in the published literature. His Spinelli audit followed a similar approach, examining the original dissertation against published accounts.

Geophysical correlation design. The Berger and Persinger (1991) study calculated standardized relative effect sizes for experiments across the six-decade range, then ran lag/lead analyses (−3 to +3 years) to determine which geomagnetic year was the dominant source of variance.

Data

The three studies in the ESP-Nexus library for Berger represent different, non-comparable metrics, so they cannot be pooled into a single summary figure. The evidence table below carries the specific values; the pattern across it is not uniformly positive.

Two points the evidence table requires surfacing honestly: reported directions disagree across the three studies — one result is below chance (psi-missing), one is near the conventional significance threshold (p = .056), and one is a statistically significant positive correlation. The negative effect-size values in the Pearson r rows reflect the direction of the geomagnetic correlation (lower geomagnetic activity correlates with higher psi effect size), not a contradiction in sign with the “positive” direction label — but the Berger (1989) forensic result showing decline over time in ESP scoring is a genuine null-to-below-chance finding, not a positive one.

Skeptical critiques

What critics argue. Within Berger’s own 1989 forensic audit of Blackmore, he documents that skeptics applying what he terms the “dirty test tube” standard — associated with Hyman (1985) — treat methodological flaws in a study as sufficient grounds to dismiss positive results, regardless of the direction or magnitude of the flaw. Berger’s audit applied this standard symmetrically and found that Blackmore’s negative (“no ESP”) database contained the same categories of flaw that skeptics routinely used to disqualify positive results: selective invocation of methodological problems depending on the direction of outcomes, issues with demand characteristics, and faulty operationalization of dependent measures.

What the experimental data show. Berger’s audit concluded that the discrepancies between Blackmore’s unpublished dissertation data and published reports were pervasive enough that no conclusions — for or against psi — could be drawn from that corpus as a whole. The Spinelli audit reached a parallel conclusion: results from the dissertation were, in Berger’s assessment, “almost too good to be true,” with the original data not supporting the published claims.

Analysis. Berger’s forensic work positions the critique as methodological rather than directional: the problem he identifies is asymmetric scrutiny applied to the same evidentiary standard depending on whether a result is positive or negative. His 1989 Blackmore paper documents Hyman (1985) as an instance of the “dirty test tube” framing. What the retrieved sources do not show is a published reply by Blackmore or Spinelli responding point-by-point to Berger’s specific documentary findings — independent assessment of whether his forensic reconstruction of the datasets was itself accurate has not appeared in the sources retrieved for this question.

For the full picture of Berger’s work, including his role as the engineer of the autoganzfeld system, see his profile at Rick E. Berger and the spoke pages on forensic critique of psi datasets and the autoganzfeld system.