Beischel 2015 AIR 2 mediumship study, is it valid?

Hi all, I'm new around here. I am very interested in afterlife studies (a mixture of scared and curious) but I am also kinda skeptical about them. I have found much good evidence about NDEs, but I always thought of mediums as of scams or con artists as they were often debunked during the 1900' and also because I wouldn't expect someone claiming knowledge of the afterlife to ask for 200$+ for a seance. It just smells fishy.

But I came across a study made by doctor Beischel, as far as I know she is a pharmacologist, that is a followup of another study of her making in 2007. The results of both studies were much better than I expected, and so I was wondering if there was some flaw in her methods (although looking at her blinding procedure I don't get how mediums could be doing scams like cold or hot reading) or maybe f she wasn't an affordable researcher at all. 

What really stood out to me was that, during "experiment 2", more 5s (obvious fit) were scored than 1s (no fit). If a medium can't/isn't cold or hot reading, how are they getting obvious fits at all? I was baffled. Maybe they reduced the number of 1s to a minum giving vague statements? But it still doesn't explain the number of 5s/obvious fits.

Here is a link to were I found the study, thanks to all in advance and sorry if I misspelled something, english isn't my primary language. 
https://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen5009/Reso...el2015.pdf

[Ninshub]

and also because I wouldn't expect someone claiming knowledge of the afterlife to ask for 200$+ for a seance. It just smells fishy.

This isn't the main point of your post but my response to that aspect is people have to make a living. They're providing a service. They're not saints living out in the streets, they're people who have to pay their rent, mortgage, food, etc. etc. If you see a few people a week, or 5, or 10, or even 15-20, that's not an inordinate amount to ask. Some mediums also have to take time out before to go into a meditative state. If you were seeing a psychologist or a lawyer for an hour, etc. etc., you'd be paying in that range or more.

Sorry, this is a bit of an odd post I'm making here but someone I know personally had a reading with Sandra O'Hara, the medium that gave journalist Leslie Kean an extremely accurate account. Leslie Kean conducted her reading with Sandra, blind.

The reading she received (my friend) was so accurate that she refused to believe it and still maintains that it must have been obtained by some other method other than parapsychologically.

[Ninshub]

Raf, if you haven't seen it and are interested, Mishlove interviewed Beischel about her work fairly recently:




This also is a recent interview (January):

Edited away for being irrelevant

Hi all, I'm new around here. I am very interested in afterlife studies (a mixture of scared and curious) but I am also kinda skeptical about them. I have found much good evidence about NDEs, but I always thought of mediums as of scams or con artists as they were often debunked during the 1900' and also because I wouldn't expect someone claiming knowledge of the afterlife to ask for 200$+ for a seance. It just smells fishy.

But I came across a study made by doctor Beischel, as far as I know she is a pharmacologist, that is a followup of another study of her making in 2007. The results of both studies were much better than I expected, and so I was wondering if there was some flaw in her methods (although looking at her blinding procedure I don't get how mediums could be doing scams like cold or hot reading) or maybe f she wasn't an affordable researcher at all. 

What really stood out to me was that, during "experiment 2", more 5s (obvious fit) were scored than 1s (no fit). If a medium can't/isn't cold or hot reading, how are they getting obvious fits at all? I was baffled. Maybe they reduced the number of 1s to a minum giving vague statements? But it still doesn't explain the number of 5s/obvious fits.

Here is a link to were I found the study, thanks to all in advance and sorry if I misspelled something, english isn't my primary language. 
https://ecee.colorado.edu/~ecen5009/Reso...el2015.pdf

I really don't understand why they needed to give the mediums the first names of the "discarnates" they were meant to be contacting, and although they seem to have tried to reduce the consequences of that in some circumstances, there seems to be obvious scope for clues about the people to be obtained from their names (age being an obvious example).

Also, as discussed here, there were problems with the statistical analysis of earlier studies by Beischel, so that would need to be looked at carefully:
https://psiencequest.net/forums/thread-a...wartz-2007

Lots of interesting answers. Although there may have been some issues with statistical analysis, it's still really an interesting study.

The first name was given to "help the mediums focus", so it seems. She addresses the cold reading problem by pairing the names in the best possible way, I doubt cold reading on the name alone in such a situation would give that much information to the mediums.

It also remains strange how many "obvious fit" were scored. If mediumship was totally fake how is lucky guessing producing more than or two obvious fit scores?


Another thing that makes me wonder is that, if the mediums were total frauds, they probably wouldn't want to be tested at all. It happened in some cases, but these persons get tested without being paid so why do it? To get some advertising on the windbridge page? I mean, yeah, but honestly there are many better ways to get famous.