Citation

Previous survey evidence suggests that situational-enchantment is a mental state conducive for psi-related experiences. In this conceptual replication and exploration, we used a preregistered research design to examine hit rate on a mobile application (‘app’) test of putative psi that was administered after participant exposure to two competing conditions in counterbalanced order: (a) an ‘enchanted’ immersive tour in a ‘haunted’ house museum versus (b) a ‘disenchanted’ outdoor tent session with a video that allegedly debunked the paranormal. A convenience sample of 31 volunteers recruited via social media completed counter-balanced testing in both conditions and measures of transliminality and paranormal belief, which we converted to high and low (median split) measurements as co-variates of the hit rates on the psi test. Findings showed that high levels of both transliminality and paranormal belief, as well as the ‘haunted (enchanted)’ versus ‘skeptical (disenchanted)’ conditions significantly shifted overall hit rates and above-chance performance. In the majority of analyses these effects represented more than a 10% shift in both hit rate and tests against average psi guessing rate. We discuss these results as supporting an interactionist (environment–person) model of certain parapsychological phenomena.