Twitter Test

In “the first scientific experiment conducted via Twitter,” participants tweeted from their minds’ eyes to guess the location of psychologist and test administrator Richard Wiseman. The results were very conclusive- The twitterers guessed zero out of four locations correctly, meaning that those 1,000 participants are, supposidely, not adept at remote viewing. But before remote viewing can be dismissed, it’s important to understand Wiseman’s methodology: “On each day I travelled to a randomly selected location and asked everyone to send tweets describing their thoughts about the location. In the judging phase, participants were presented with five photographs, one showing the location and four decoys, and asked to select the target. The photograph that received the most votes was taken as the group’s decision.” The groups were also asked to “rate their belief in the paranormal and the degree to which their thoughts matched the target.”

Interestingly, when he analyzed skeptics and believers separately the results were the same, which led him to conclude that “those who believe in the paranormal are good at finding illusory correspondences between their thoughts and the target.” In other words, believers looked for similarities between their thoughts and the correct location. Wiseman, himself a twitterer, magician, and author as well as psychologist, suggests that “perhaps it’s the ability to see these illusory correspondences that makes people believe in the paranormal.” Although the results may be disheartening for “believers,” this and future experiments may help clarify Twitter's role in the noosphere.

image: "Tweet" by prettywar-stl on Flickr via Creative Commons licensing.