The remote staring paradigm was developed in part by William Braud and colleagues, whose work on electrodermal correlates of distant attention provided the methodological template Schlitz later employed. Schlitz’s own entry into the paradigm came through collaboration with Stephen LaBerge, producing two early studies that reported significant EDA elevations during covert observation.¹² These results stood in contrast to contemporaneous null findings by Richard Wiseman and colleagues, setting the stage for the collaborative experimenter-effect studies that would become the most discussed work in this area. The divergence between Schlitz’s positive results and Wiseman’s null results was not a matter of one study versus another conducted years apart, it was a synchronous divergence observed within the same experimental sessions, making conventional explanations based on procedural drift or equipment differences difficult to sustain.³

The primary artifact concern in remote staring research is sensory leakage, the possibility that participants detect being watched through conventional sensory channels (sound, vibration, peripheral vision, or subtle cues from the experimenter’s movement). The video-mediated design addresses direct visual and auditory leakage by placing observer and participant in separate rooms with no acoustic or visual connection other than the one-way video feed. The participant cannot see the monitor in the experimenter’s room and receives no feedback about epoch timing. This design eliminates direct sensory contact as an explanation for EDA differences, though it does not fully address the possibility that experimenter behavior during session setup or participant greeting could differentially prime participants, a concern that became central to the tacit-knowledge investigation.⁶ Demand characteristics, participants consciously trying to perform, are partially mitigated by the fact that EDA is not under voluntary control, though participant expectation could still influence baseline arousal levels. The randomization of epoch order by computer addresses optional stopping and order effects, eliminating experimenter discretion over when stare periods occur.³

Schlitz and LaBerge reported that participants showed significantly elevated skin conductance during covert observation periods compared to non-observation periods across two conceptual replications of the autonomic staring-detection paradigm.² A subsequent study described as a replication also reported significant results in the same direction.¹ The pool references do not provide full sample sizes, effect sizes, or p-values for these early studies in extractable form; the structured-data layer reflects this as not-disclosed. What is established from the pool is that these results were statistically significant and that they stood in contrast to Wiseman’s contemporaneous null findings, a divergence that motivated the joint experimental program.

The first Wiseman-Schlitz joint study involved participants connected to EDA recording equipment in a single location. Each session consisted of thirty-two thirty-second periods, half randomly allocated to stare and half to non-stare. Schlitz and Wiseman each ran separate participants under these identical conditions. Schlitz’s participants were significantly more activated during stare than non-stare conditions. Wiseman’s participants showed no significant difference between conditions. The simultaneous, same-location design rules out equipment differences, procedural drift over time, and participant-pool differences as explanations for the divergence. The residual explanatory candidates are: (a) subtle behavioral differences in how the two experimenters interacted with participants before and during sessions; (b) experimenter psi, the possibility that Schlitz’s own psi ability influenced her participants’ EDA; or (c) some combination of both.³

A formal replication of the joint study was subsequently conducted and reported.⁴ The replication reproduced the same pattern: Schlitz obtained statistically significant EDA differences between stare and non-stare conditions; Wiseman did not. The consistency of this pattern across two joint studies, each controlling for the procedural variables that typically explain divergent results between independent labs, is the substantive finding. It is not that the overall results were mixed or inconclusive; the finding is that the same protocol, run by two experimenters simultaneously, produced systematically different outcomes as a function of who was running it. The proposed mechanism, whether experimenter psi, experimenter behavior, or participant-experimenter rapport, remains contested and unresolved in the pool literature.

A subsequent research brief by Watt, Schlitz, Wiseman, and Radin extended the paradigm to four experimenters differing in their orientation toward psi claims, testing whether the Schlitz-Wiseman divergence would generalize beyond the specific pairing of one proponent and one skeptic. The pool entry for this study is a research brief without a full extract; specific effect sizes, sample sizes, and p-values are not available in the pool in extractable form and are therefore not reported here. The study’s significance is structural: it represents an attempt to move from a two-experimenter case study to a more systematic test of whether experimenter belief orientation predicts outcome direction across a broader range of researchers.^[5]

The Watt interviews, conducted at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in Petaluma, California in August 2001, were video-recorded and subsequently published in edited transcript form.⁶ Schlitz described her pre-session preparation: “I usually pray actually. I usually pause and ask the Divine that the highest purpose be revealed through the experiment. And then I just try to breathe and be calm.” She also described her participant interactions as deliberately unscripted, emphasizing the importance of developing rapport. Wiseman’s approach was more standardized. The interviews make explicit that the two experimenters differed not only in their beliefs about psi but in their entire orientation toward the experimental session, including their relationship to the participant and their own intentional state during the staring epochs. These differences are consistent with the hypothesis that experimenter behavior, rather than experimenter psi per se, mediates the outcome divergence. However, the interviews are qualitative and retrospective; they establish plausibility, not causation. The specific behavioral variables identified, rapport-building, centering, intentional focus during stare epochs, have not been independently manipulated in a controlled study to confirm their causal role.

The pool literature identifies several competing interpretations of the Schlitz-Wiseman divergence.⁶³ First, subtle behavioral differences in experimenter-participant interaction could prime differential arousal states in participants, producing EDA differences that are artifacts of social psychology rather than psi. Second, experimenter psi, the hypothesis that Schlitz’s own anomalous influence on her participants’ physiology drives the effect, would explain the data but requires accepting the psi hypothesis at the outset. Third, participant selection bias could operate if Schlitz and Wiseman differentially attracted or retained participants with different baseline EDA reactivity, though the simultaneous same-pool design substantially mitigates this. Fourth, demand characteristics could operate if Schlitz’s participants were more motivated to perform, though EDA is not under voluntary control. The tacit-knowledge interviews partially address the behavioral-difference hypothesis by making the differences explicit, but they do not resolve which, if any, of these mechanisms is operative. Schlitz’s own framing, as reported in the interviews, emphasizes the importance of intentionality and rapport as genuine facilitators of psi, the researcher’s preferred interpretation, while acknowledging that behavioral differences cannot be ruled out as a sufficient explanation.

Cells marked “not-disclosed” reflect genuine absence from the source paper (typical of pre-2015 parapsychology corpus where preregistration + stopping rules were not standard methodological practice). Per the ESP-Nexus honesty mandate, the gap is surfaced rather than filled with inference.