I have run nine experiments with more than 1,000 participants that test whether people's responses can be influenced by events that happen after they respond. Each experiment time-reverses a well-established effect: for example, participants recall words better when they practise them after the recall test, and they approach erotic images and avoid negative ones before a random process decides where the image will appear. Across the nine experiments the mean effect size is d = 0.22, and all but one are statistically significant. I conclude that people can anticipate future events that could not be inferred, and I am submitting this to a leading social psychology journal.
Feynman
Even taken at face value, the nine results reject only pure chance, and only if the analyses were fixed and complete; they cannot separate backward causation from flexible analysis or artefact, and a same-procedure replication in the packet reports failure.
Each square is an objection. Larger means heavier. No lens challenged claim 02; that is not the same as holding.
01Events that happen after a response causally influence that response, so people can anticipate future events that could not be inferred.
02Nine experiments with more than 1,000 participants, each a time-reversed version of a well-established effect (better recall of words practised after the recall test; approaching erotic and avoiding negative images before a random process decides where they appear), gave a mean effect size of d = 0.22, with eight of the nine statistically significant.
03The later events (which words are practised, where each image appears) were set by a random process after each response, so participants had no normal way to infer them: no sensory cues, no predictable randomisation and no dependence of the target on the response.
04(Implicit) Hypotheses, outcome measures, analyses, exclusions and sample sizes were fixed before the data were seen, and every experiment and measure that was run is reported, so the significance tests keep their nominal false-positive rates.
05(Implicit) Eight significant results out of nine with a mean d = 0.22 are strong enough evidence to favour an effect that runs backwards in time over chance, analytic flexibility, selective reporting or artefact.
06(Implicit) The effects are reliable: independent laboratories running the same procedures with analysis plans fixed in advance would find effects of similar size.