Citation

Permutation-based methods have received some attention in the parapsychological literature. However, their potential for analyzing confusion matrices associated with ESP experiments has been relatively untapped. This paper presents permutation tests applied to confusion data in parapsychology. Some tests examine agreement of two or more matrices with no regard to inherent internal patterns within the matrices, whereas others test for the presence of more sophisticated structures. Other possible methods for extracting structures from one or more confusion matrices seriation, cluster analysis, and scaling—are also described in this paper. The range of possibilities for permutation-based analyses applied to confusion in psi is limited only by the quantitative analyst’s imagination. The methods presented in this paper are demonstrated using data gleaned from the parapsychological literature.