Citation

Previous research in parapsychology has not been particularly persuasive, in large part due to a lack of replicability of significant findings. To address these concerns and better understand which factors may be associated with stronger and more consistent effect sizes, all forced-choice precognition experiments analysing individual differences (e.g., personality traits) were aggregated to determine which factors might reliably predict psi performance. Overall, 55 studies published between 1945 and 2016, including 35 individual difference measures, were subject to meta-analysis. Six individual difference measures, namely, luck belief (the belief that luck is primarily controllable), perceptual defensiveness, openness to experience, belief in psi, extraversion, and time belief as dynamic, were found to significantly correlate with psi performance. Given the particularly straightforward nature of forced-choice precognition experiments, a promising future  avenue would be to explore these factors in confirmatory studies. It is hoped that researchers can model their future experiments off these findings in conjunction with preregistration techniques, to ultimately create a more systematic and robust database.