Citation

The study reported here is a replication of a previous postal study examining the possibility of true precognition. The previous study (Steinkamp, 2000) revealed chance results for true precognition but significant results for the clairvoyance condition. However, a similar study in the laboratory (Steinkamp, 2001) yielded almost significant results for true precognition. The replication study reported here tried to emulate the conditions in the laboratory but in the setting of a postal study. For instance, this time participants were given a relaxation tape to help them get in the right frame of mind for the experiment and they were not sent their target pool until after they had submitted their mentation reports. Results from the study were at chance. There was no obvious indication that participants’ putative lack of motivation might have influenced the outcome. Also, participants who reported having had psychic experiences did not perform any better than those claiming no such experience. It appears that either postal experiments are not suitable for eliciting evidence for true precognition, or, if true precognition is possible, it can occur only with a much shorter precognitive interval titan these experiments have allowed¹.