Feeling the Future, and What Followed

In March 2011 the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, one of the most selective journals in the field, published a paper by the Cornell psychologist Daryl Bem. Across nine experiments with more than a thousand participants, it reported that people’s responses were subtly influenced by events that had not yet happened.

In one study, participants recalled more words from a list when they were later asked to practise some of those words. The practice seemed to help their memory backwards in time.

Taking the claim seriously

Bem was a respected researcher, and his methods were the field’s standard methods. That was the uncomfortable point. The journal published alongside his paper a critique by Eric-Jan Wagenmakers and colleagues. They argued that the usual statistics, applied flexibly, can find “evidence” for almost anything. Re-analysed with Bayesian methods, the evidence for precognition was weak.

The replications

Then came direct tests. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French ran three exact replications of the memory experiment and found nothing. Jeff Galak and colleagues ran seven experiments with over 3,000 participants and found an effect indistinguishable from zero.

One study can surprise us. Only replication can convince us.

The real legacy

Precognition did not survive testing. But the episode left a mark. If ordinary practice could produce nine “successful” studies of something almost certainly false, how many ordinary findings were false too?

That question fed directly into psychology’s replication crisis. In 2015 the Open Science Collaboration attempted to replicate 100 published studies, and well under half produced significant results again. Pre-registration, larger samples and open data, now standard good practice, owe part of their momentum to an experiment about feeling the future.

For readers interested in psychic claims, this is the stance we take throughout this publication. Test the claim fairly, at its strongest. Then follow the evidence, including when it says no.

Questions readers ask

Has precognition been scientifically proven?

No. The best-known positive results, Bem's 2011 studies, did not hold up in independent and pre-registered replications.

Why does psi research matter if the effects don't replicate?

Because it tests research methods. If standard practice can produce 'significant' evidence for an implausible effect, that practice needs fixing, and psi research helped show this.

References

Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425.

Wagenmakers, E.-J., Wetzels, R., Borsboom, D., & van der Maas, H. L. J. (2011). Why psychologists must change the way they analyze their data: The case of psi. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 426–432.

Ritchie, S. J., Wiseman, R., & French, C. C. (2012). Failing the future: Three unsuccessful attempts to replicate Bem's ‘retroactive facilitation of recall’ effect. PLoS ONE, 7(3), e33423.

Galak, J., LeBoeuf, R. A., Nelson, L. D., & Simmons, J. P. (2012). Correcting the past: Failures to replicate psi. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 103(6), 933–948.

Open Science Collaboration. (2015). Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science. Science, 349(6251), aac4716.

Written with AI assistance. Reviewed and edited by The Editors on 13 November 2026; references checked against the original sources. Our editorial standards.