Shermer’s first point is that research was gathered by a web page and so is invalid. However, Sheldrake doesn’t only collect data from web pages. The Sheldrake I’ve read refers to actual controlled experiments which he explains, discusses his approaches in detail, including possible alternate explanations, and gives statistical data for.
Then Shermer asserts: “Second, psychologists dismiss anecdotal accounts of this sense to a reverse self-fulfilling effect: a person suspects being stared at and turns to check; such head movement catches the eyes of would-be starers, who then turn to look at the staree, who thereby confirms the feeling of being stared at.” But again, if Shermer had actually read Sheldrake, he’d find that he discusses actual studies which statistically (not just anecdotally) show that people who are asked to say whether they feel like they are being watched, with neither the asker nor the askee having any way of knowing whether it’s true (random sequence, and in some experiments even via closed circuit TV), and the results showed that there is an actual measurable influence, which varies by person.
Shermer’s third debunk attempt cites two failed attempts to reproduce the results. Ok cool, that would seem to suggest that either the observation thing is wrong, or that there was something that had it not occur – I’d love to see someone not biased seriously study the difference to see what’s going on, and from reading Sheldrake’s attitude in his books, I think he would too.
The fourth and fifth points are assertions about confirmation bias, which Sheldrake is aware of and discusses. He also discusses cases where several skeptics have tried to reproduce his experiments and did get very similar results. Given the nature of the experiments, and examples of placebo effect studies where doctors who believe they’re giving actual drugs have better results giving placebos to patients, it implies to me that the “being watched” tests may tend not to work if the experimenters are disbelieving enough – either by a field effect or by a more meme-like effect. Which, moving on to page 2, is what Shermer says Sheldrake’s reply was:
“Sheldrake responds that skeptics dampen the morphic field, whereas believers enhance it. Of Wiseman, he remarked: “Perhaps his negative expectations consciously or unconsciously influenced the way he looked at the subjects.”
Perhaps, but wouldn’t that mean that this claim is ultimately nonfalsifiable? If both positive and negative results are interpreted as supporting a theory, how can we test its validity? Skepticism is the default position because the burden of proof is on the believer, not the skeptic. ”
Well, not really, though it may make it more difficult, and more likely that traditional material scientists will give up because their tradition is to think only in terms of physical things. The negative results may be showing something interesting and useful about why some people seem to sense being watched, and others don’t (which Sheldrake had already reported). Subjectively, it makes sense to me, as I’m sure that if I were in the mindset that there’s no way I can really know when I’m being watched or not, that I’d just give random responses to whether I felt that way or not.
Shermer’s characterization of Sheldrake seems grossly unfair to me, having read Sheldrake and seen his consciousness of scientific objections, his attention to scientific detail, his preference for mundane explanations, and his data. His experiments take great effort to avoid any possibility of results from mundane sense observations, or from pattern recognition, or from subconscious tips from observers (he takes pains to be certain the observers in contact with subjects do not know the information the subject shows an ability to sense, and when there is that possibility, he acknowledges it and often runs another experiment and compares the two sets of data to see if there was such an effect).
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