A Teacher
Daryl Bem
Precognition as a testable retroactive effect
The transmission
Daryl J. Bem (born 10 June 1938) is an American social psychologist and professor emeritus at Cornell University. He took an undergraduate degree in physics at Reed College in 1960 and began a physics PhD at MIT before switching to social psychology, earning his doctorate from the University of Michigan in 1964.
He became one of the most respected experimentalists of his generation, best known as the originator of self-perception theory — the idea that people infer their own attitudes and emotions by observing their behaviour and its context, much as an outside observer would.
He joined Cornell in 1978 and retired in 2007. In 2011 Bem published “Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect” in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, reporting nine experiments — eight statistically significant — in which well-established psychological effects appeared to run backward in time, as if future events influenced present responses.
Coming from an eminent researcher in a top journal, the paper caused enormous controversy. Subsequent independent attempts largely failed to replicate the results, and the episode became a catalyst for psychology’s wider replication crisis and the open-science reforms (pre-registration, replication, scrutiny of flexible analysis) that followed.
The Atlas treats Bem’s experiments as a sincere and methodologically literate attempt to test an extraordinary claim — and as a textbook case of how science adjudicates one: the contested status of the precognition result is itself part of the honest record.
What they gave
Brought precognition into a mainstream journal, framing it as an ordinary empirical hypothesis testable with standard social-psychology paradigms run in reverse.
- Forced the question of statistical evidence, prompting hard debate about p-values, effect sizes, and what would count as proof of an anomalous effect.
- Inadvertently catalysed reform — the failed replications of “Feeling the Future” helped trigger the replication-crisis corrections that reshaped psychology after 2011.
- Bridged orthodox and fringe psychology, lending a respected name (and self-perception theory’s legacy) to the most disputed edge of the discipline.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: his own self-perception theory and the experimental toolkit of social psychology; the prior statistical-psi tradition (Rhine, ganzfeld telepathy work) whose methods he adapted.
- Influenced: the replication crisis and the open-science movement it spurred; ongoing methodological debate over how to evaluate claims of psi and other small, hard-to-replicate effects.
Revelations they taught
Essential Works
- Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect2011