structural:scholar_edition, stylistic:style_transfer
Psychokinesis on random number generators

The advent of powerful and inexpensive electronic and computer technologies has allowed the development of fully automated experiments studying possible interactions between mind and matter. In the most common experiment of this type, a random number generator (RNG), based on electronic or radioactive noise, produces a data stream that is recorded and analyzed by computer software. A subject attempts to mentally alter the distribution of the random numbers, usually in an experimental design that is functionally equivalent to getting more "heads" than "tails" while flipping a coin. In the RNG experiment, design flexibility can be combined with rigorous controls while collecting a large amount of data quickly. This technique has been used both to test individuals for psychokinesis and to test the possible influence on RNGs of large groups of people.

Major meta-analyses of the RNG database have been published every few years since appearing in the journal Foundations of Physics in 1986. PEAR founder Robert G. Jahn and his colleague Brenda Dunne say that the experiments produced "a very small effect" not significant enough to be observed over a brief experiment but over a large number of trials resulted in a tiny statistical deviation from chance. According to Massimo Pigliucci, the results from PEAR can be explained without invoking the paranormal because of two problems with the experiment: "the difficulty of designing machines capable of generating truly random events and the fact that statistical "significance" is not at all a good measure of the importance or genuineness of a phenomenon." Pigluicci has written that the statistical analysis used by the Jahn and the PEAR group relied on a quantity called a " p-value ", but a problem with p-values is that if the sample size (number of trials) is very large, like the PEAR tests, then one is guaranteed to find artificially low p-values indicating a statistically significant result even though nothing was occurring other than small biases in the experimental apparatus.

Two German independent scientific groups have failed to replicate the PEAR results. Pigliucci has written this was "yet another indication that the simplest hypothesis is likely to be true: there was nothing to replicate." The most recent meta-analysis on psychokinesis was published in Psychological Bulletin, along with several critical commentaries. It analyzed the results of 380 studies; the authors reported an overall positive effect size that was statistically significant but very small relative to the sample size and could, in principle, be explained by publication bias.